Thirty years since I saw Ghost on the road with my mom

I didn't expect to write another remembrance of my mom today, or at least, I had a different kind of remembrance that I thought I'd write rather than this one, which will now probably come tomorrow.

In fact, after I finished writing yesterday's post, I almost went back to edit it to include the story I'm about to relate. In the end, I decided just to leave it as is.

But then Saturday night, after my wife and I watched a show together and were heading toward our separate entertainment options for the night, I hopped on our streaming service Stan, not knowing what I was going to watch. I decided to jump into the Trending Movies section, and there it was, trending for no particular reason I can think of: Ghost.

It seemed like a sure sign that there was one more film story about my mom that was left to be told.

I ended up watching Ghost, just as I did back in the summer of 1990 with my mom. That first viewing came on a road trip to see colleges. I had thought that we took the trip during the academic year, and maybe we did. But the movie came out on July 13th of that year. So either our trip was actually in the summer, or the movie was such a hit that it stayed until theaters until September or October. I guess at that time, I might not yet have been seeking out as a matter of course those hit movies that remained in theaters for four or five months.

We lived in the Boston area, but there were a handful of schools I wanted to visit in New York, in Pennsylvania, and as far away as Kenyon College in Ohio. We took a road trip that lasted five or six days. I'd say we split the driving, but I would have only just gotten my license within the past six months, possibly even less depending on when the trip actually was. So in reality, she probably did most if not all of it.

There were some funny stories from that trip. One involved a tour at, I believe, The Rochester Institute of Technology, which was always an unlikely fit for me as I intended to be an English major. We sat in on a slide show before going on the tour, but I had to go #2 in the middle of the slide show. I guess I didn't know how close it was to the end, so I kind of took my sweet time on the toilet as I am sometimes wont to do. When I emerged, I realized everyone had been waiting for me so they could start the tour proper -- God, it might have been ten minutes they were waiting. Embarrassing as hell, but my mom and I were soon laughing about it. We joked that we should make sure we ask, on every future college tour, if they had bathrooms. (Weirdly, this story came up organically when talking to my wife on Saturday night, in a context completely unrelated to Ghost -- my son had had a similar thing happen when we were visiting friends earlier in the day.)

Then there was the incident on our way home, when we stopped in Western Mass for the afternoon. I had been working on a scrap book and photo album from our most recent visit to the island conference center off the coast of New Hampshire, Star Island, that was so near and dear to my heart. Wanting to spend some more time on it, I sequestered myself in a small room on the second floor of a historic library in the town where we stopped. The librarians forgot I was there and closed the library at 5 o'clock without knowing I was still inside. When I tried to leave and stepped outside the room, it triggered an alarm. The police came and everything.

But the story I want to recount today has no funny details, no Seinfeldian moments of embarrassment or misunderstanding. It was simply our chosen evening activity on one of the nights of the trip. We were in another small town, I think it was in New York, and there was a movie theater in the town. I can't remember if we had choices or if it was just one of those single-screen theaters that have since pretty much disappeared from the landscape, even before COVID but especially now. Ghost was either our only option or one of just a couple, and we went to the 9 o'clock show.

Simply put, I thought it might have been just about the greatest movie I'd ever seen.

I think there was something symbolic about the effect Ghost had on me. It was one of the first movies I remember being really moved by. I think I cried at a couple different junctures -- probably the same junctures that teared me up on Saturday night -- which would have also been a first or a near first for me. It may have been the first time that a romance touched me the way this one did.

The symbolic thing about it was that on this trip, I was planning my future. I was figuring out where I might spend the next four years of my life, after finishing my senior year that is. As it turned out, I ended up in Maine for college, but I didn't know that at the time. At the time, this was a preview of my young adulthood, and my mature emotional response to Ghost was there to usher me into it.

I don't think it's possible my mom loved Ghost as much as I did, but I do think it was a big win for her too. I remember her specifically mentioning the part at the end where the receding shape of Patrick Swayze's Sam Wheat begins intermingling with the other beings of white light, standing in a welcoming line, until he is indistinguishable from them.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but I believe in the wonder of the unknown enough to think that my mom could have had a similar experience to Sam Wheat this past Monday.

Although this might have just been a one-off nice memory for me and my mom, it ended up being something larger than that in the long-term effect on the way I watch movies. And I'm not just talking about the part of me that grew up while watching that movie, the part that, in some way, start to grapple with mortality.

No, I think our Ghost viewing became a standard that I keep trying to attain to this day. Since that day, I go out of my way to see a movie when I'm out of town, when I'm on vacation, when I'm on a business trip. There's something about seeing a movie away from home that makes you remember the experience. And I think I'm still chasing the high of that night my mom and I saw Ghost, in a small town in New York, probably at a single-screen theater, in August -- yes, August it was -- of 1990.

That was 30 years ago. And 30 years is an important number for my mom and me. My mom was almost exactly 30 years older than I am, as she was born in October of 1943 and I was born in October of 1973. Our birthdays are only a week apart.

Gone are the days that I'm 30 years younger than my mom. She's no longer aging while I continue to do so. I've already gotten closer to her age by almost a week. One day, if I'm lucky, I will surpass her 76+ years.

So she was the age I am now when she saw Ghost with me. It's kind of profound to think about. She got a bit of a head start on me in the parenting department, as she had a 16-year-old when she was 46, and my oldest turns ten in August. Who knows, maybe his birthday on August 25th was the same day we saw Ghost.

Which makes for another interesting coincidence. The last time I saw part of Ghost -- which would have been my sixth or seventh viewing, had it been completed -- was when we were in the hospital in 2010, in August, waiting to be discharged. In other words, 20 years after August of 1990. It was the movie we were halfway through on the hospital TV when the doctor finally signed on the dotted line.

The reason we were there?

The birth of that very same son who turns ten in August.

Circle of life, I tell ya.

I don't really believe in signs, but stumbling across Ghost on Stan on Saturday night may have been one.

The universe delivers you what you need, especially when you're mourning. And on Saturday night, I needed to see Sam Wheat become indistinguishable from those other beings of white light.