Twelve us ended up at the movies together on Saturday night — my husband, my four kids, and six extra kids. I’m using the term “kids” loosely here: they are mostly young adults. My husband loves to gather a whole gang for a movie. He'd been looking forward to the event all week. I’d promised not to make snarky comments during the movie, but everyone knew that I wouldn’t keep that promise.
“The whole theater would be quiet,” Boy in Black said afterwards, “And then I’d hear you laughing aloud. At parts that weren’t supposed to be funny.”
Well, yeah. When a character comes through with a cheesy line that is totally expected, the melodrama makes me laugh. I can’t help it.
My daughter summed up the movie in a single line: “The boy who can’t use his weapon until he’s a man.” I kept thinking that the actor who played Thor should have been at least a little bit attractive: the love plot made no sense at, especially since the character was supposed to be an arrogant, stubborn jerk for the whole first half of the movie. I can’t even imagine why a smart beautiful astrophysicist would fall for someone like him.
Back home, the young men argued with me about my characterization of Thor. “No, really, most women find him attractive,” they kept saying. I rolled my eyes.
“Believe it or no, real life women prefer smart sensitive guys like you,” I told them. When asked who my celebrity crushes are, I always say Dana Carvey and Jim Parsons. You can’t beat a guy who makes you laugh.
In the midst of the argument, Boy in Black grabbed our box of candles and began lighting them. “It’s after midnight,” he said. “And it’s Mother’s Day.”
Usually, I’m the one who begins a candle ceremony; my kids know how much I like to just sit in a dimly lit room and listen to everyone talk. “It’s the tangents and the jokes and the bonding and all that,” Boy in Black explained to Blue-eyed Ultimate Player, who hadn’t been to our house for a candle ceremony before. “It doesn’t really matter what you say.”
He was right, of course. It was a nice way to end the night, all of us clustered in the living room, sitting practically on each other’s laps, and laughing at the jokes and stories that got told as each person in the circle took a turn.