Time passing. Time captured. For what little it’s worth.
But all our life’s times are worth something.
And I’m thinking of one captured moment in a life in which even uneventful moments should count. :
A restless, idle, solitary Sunday afternoon; my age (just an estimate) thirteen, circa 1960; home alone (where was everybody?), feeling as if I should be somewhere, doing something, anything; too young to be so idle, so bored, so anxious, moving around the house, but mostly just staying in my own room that had been my sister’s room until she was married and moved out in June, 1959. This therefore was probably early spring of 1960. Or maybe not.
I’m ust guessing, of course. it could have been 1961, 62, even 63. And I could have been 14,15,16…It all runs together, and that detail is lost.
But it must have been early spring, based on the little thing that happened that made it memorable. The ground was bare, the sun was shining. It wasn’t cold, barely even a little chilly — which is why what was to happen was so unusual, which is also what makes us remember things in an otherwise ordinary day.
I’m not sure why I turned the TV on, or why I didn’t turn it off if I wasn’t interested in what was on, which I wasn’t.
This I remember: Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman were in Paris. War was threatening. The movie, from 1948, was called Arch of Triumph, after the Paris monument. That’s a good a name for a movie or a monument, nes pas? Or a novel. The movie, I now know, was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who also wrote All Quiet On The Western Front
All was quiet — too quiet — on my adolescent front that Sunday afternoon.
But, upon reflection, this might be one of those early instances, beyond childhood and at the edge of adulthood, when one suddenly knows enough to be anxious and disatisfaction with their idleness, because there was a life to be lived, and, like it or not, responsibilities to be assumed.
Reality.
I know that, for a sustained period, for no reason, I just sat looking out the window — out over the backyard, over neighbors’ rooftops and, between the houses, at the empty supermarket parking lot. (It was closed Sundays in those days.) There were some trees here and there, leaves probably just appearing.
Then, suddenly…..
large snowflakes began swirling in the briefly darkened sunlight. It was the thinnest, briefest of snow squalls — over almost instantly without leaving a white trace anywhere on the ground. It came on like a mid-Sunday, early spring revery, perhaps unforecasted, perhaps confined to my neighborhood, perhaps even just to my backyard, just for my vision. But it was real; probably the fleeting product of a small, drifting cloud; a very localized meteorlogical anomaly.
Did anyone else — anyone in my neighborhood or anyone else anywhere see it?
And had that squall not happened, I’d have never remembered that otherwise undistinghished afternoon, that moment in that empty, languid Sunday in that empty house where I’d lived all my short life to that point.
And, for what it was worth, I feel certain I never would have recalled what movie was playing on television.
Just before or just after the squall, I became aware that the movie was reaching its sad denoument.
Pre-World War II Paris is crowded with illegal refugees, trying to evade deportation. Charles Boyer is one Dr. Ravic, practicing medicine illegally under a false name, helping other refugees. He saves Joan Madou, played by Ingrid Bergman, from committing suicide after the sudden death of her lover. She and Ravid (Boyer), of course, become lovers, but as the movie ends, he is being deported. Ingrid as Madou must say a sad goodbye.
Charles Boyer is waiting in the deportation line with his friend, Boris, who predicts they’ll both spend time in a concentration camp but bids him an affectionate farewell. They both promise to meet at the famous bar called Fouquet’s after the war...
One could only hope so.
Drama, Romance, Make-Believe , always bracketed by Reality….and Time.
In the last shot of the film, the camera travels through Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Arch of Triumph. )May we all triumph over life.
And because snowflakes fell in sunlight one very idle, ordinary early spring Sunday afternoon sixty-five years ago –an ordinary moment during the running of an otherwise ordinary and forgettable movie (which flopped at 1948 box offices) was made memorable. Preserved for what little it was worth…. in Time.
19 Cent Notebook 