I watched the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with my daughters a couple weeks ago. I was pretty excited when it appeared on Netflix, because it was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. The girls liked the movie and I was pleasantly surprised that it was just as fun to watch as an adult as it had been to watch as a kid. (Sometimes when you are an adult, the movies you loved as child fall flat when you re-watch them with your own children.) While I enjoyed watching the movie, in a way it made me sad. It reminded me of my brother Joe.
When we were kids, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was one of the movies we used to watch often. We had many of the lines memorized, and Joe had a special talent for not only memorizing entire scenes from movies, but also doing really good impressions of the characters. He did this often, and one summer we combined our talents with our chores.
We had a vegetable garden, and in the summer when the green beans were growing like crazy, one of our chores was to go out, following the vines which grew over almost the entire back of the chain-length fence in the backyard, and pick the green beans that were ripe. One of the things that Joe and I did when we picked green beans was quote lines from movies to entertain ourselves. And Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a movie where we had entire scenes memorized. So when I was watching the film with my girls, many lines brought back a flood of memories, not just of the line and how funny we thought it was as kids, but also of my brother's voice quoting the line and imitating every character's voice and intonation, of sunny days in our backyard in the Arizona desert, of chores we did as kids and the things we would do for fun. I loved the memories, and it hurt a little when I remembered that I had nobody to share them with.
What I wanted to do after I watched the movie was call or text Joe, and reminisce about how much fun we had quoting movies and picking green beans together when we were kids (even though at the time it wasn't fun, because it was, after all, doing chores). I wanted to quote some of the lines that we thought were the funniest and talk about how it was a movie that hadn't lost its charm, at least to me, over the years.
After Joe died, one of my friends was telling me that she had heard the idea that every relationship we have with others forms part of our identity. The experiences and relationships we have with people are relationships that we do not share aspects of with everyone, so when someone dies, a part of you dies too, because you don't have that particular relationship with anyone else in your life. This made a lot of sense to me. I think it explains some of the loneliness that comes with death. I remember when Joe died that what I wanted more than anything was to be with my parents and youngest brother, and yet even while their presence comforted me, I still felt so lonely. I think that loneliness was me saying goodbye to Joe and missing him, but I think I was also facing the reality that part of me, our shared history and relationship, was now gone from the land of the living.
So I guess the point of this post is just to say that I miss Joe, and I miss the fun we had together. And maybe the point is also the realization that this movie now has a special place in my heart, because when I watch it, it's more than entertainment. When I watch it, I feel like it's giving me back a little piece of my brother and our childhood when we were best friends and used to quote movies together for fun.
