missing Andrew, and a milestone

While we were eating hamburgers on the picnic table, C. volunteered that he had "kind of" missed Andrew.

Then Ed and I said we had kind of missed Andrew, too.

We all missed Andrew. Jimmy was up half the night last night, almost certainly because Andrew wasn't here. Plus earlier in the evening Ed and I had gone off to the movies alone, without leaving an adult in the house, for the first time ever. For Jimmy, that was too much.

But we did it. C. turns 13 in August; he's old enough to stay with his fully grown autistic brother for 3 hours.

On the other hand, I figured he wouldn't make it through the evening without calling us, & he didn't. In the middle of the movie's final scene, Ed's cel phone buzzed.

It was C., wanting to know "where we were."

We're at the movies.

Where we told you we'd be.

fyi: if you're looking for a movie to see on the first occasion of your child serving as babysitter for a younger sibling (or for an older, disabled sibling), Live Free or Die Hard is the one. It's a sweet film, an action movie that has pretty much nothing to do with the action movie genre. What it really is, is a film about Erik Erikson's 7th stage of psychodevelopment in a post 9-11 world disguised as an action movie. The title could have been, Don't Worry, the Kids Will Be Alright.

In the movie the guy from the Apple commercial plays the guy from the Apple commercial, and Bruce Willis plays the Windows guy.

The bad guy is the least menacing bad guy in any action film ever (message: our kids aren't actually facing Armageddon) and Bruce Willis gets his daughter and the Apple guy straightened out and on the right path with only a couple of non-hairraising close calls.

The U.S. government is sometimes bumbling, but not evil; the FBI and the police could use a weekend respite care program for the entire country but they're not going to get one, so that's fine, too.

It's a coming of middle age movie for the baby boom generation. Wonderful reaction shot from Willis when the villain wipes out his 401K with a couple of strokes on the keyboard: in that moment the baby boomers turn into the tough old goats no one imagined they would be. When the villain offers to restore John McCain's 401 if he shoots the Apple guy, you see the first glimmer of a collective idea that maybe the Woodstock generation was onto something after all. Willis' manic laugh when he shreds one of the Parkour acrobats (whom he calls "hamster boy") in some kind of human-sized, meat-grinder-thingie made the whole theater burst out laughing, too. Live free; let the bad guys die hard.

Manic bust-ups aside, the movie's grownups are generally stressed and their patience is shot, but they are on their game. If they have to stay on their game 'til they drop, they'll do it.

But that's probably not the way things will go, because the skills our kids have picked up from 20 years of Xbox will save the world. Watching Live Free, you almost believe it.^*

A sweet movie, and a happy ending.

.........................

Transformers is great, too. While I'm on the subject.

respite
missing Andrew
Pick Your Poison: Fists or Fireballs
CareTrak


^*see: final scene of movie trailer