Week in Seven Words #578

This covers the week of 2/14/21 - 2/20/21.

ache

We used to sit in this room with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the lamplight on the red couch.

belly

They don't have sleds, but they do have bellies, so they slide down the hill head first, eyes squinting against the dazzle of sunlight on snow.

glimpses

Beyond the dense branches there's light, white and faintly purple.

moved

The silence of snow falling. At the bus stop, he says a brief prayer.

perching

She's gained access to the roof, and from there, she feeds birds.

unbroken

The fact that I have a good night's sleep is worth commenting on. I don't take it for granted.

wobble

Without his job, his days have turned to jello.

Week in Seven Words #553

This covers the week of 8/23/20 - 8/29/20.

derange

The man moves like a jumping electric wire. He's tormented to the roots of himself. Staggering up and down the street, he raves about how the industry used to want differences but now wants sameness. Homogeneity in opinions, looks, and creative ideas. I don't know which industry he's talking about. His description fits more than one. In his creased suit, and with his briefcase swinging and shuddering, he belongs to no workplace now.

layers

I've walked down this street a bunch of times without knowing that its name alludes to three activists from the Civil Rights Movement who were killed while helping register black voters in the South.

resting

I stay in bed later than usual, grateful for several hours of uninterrupted sleep.

solidarity

An old man whispers to the young man working at the pharmacy, "You're at this job to land rich widows." When the young man splutters, the old one says, "No shame in that."

splashing

Sparrows in an ecstasy of puddles.

sprinkle

Rain nips at us at the end of our walk, a drizzle after all the breathless warnings about a major storm.

trapped

She chides me for eating too much chocolate. Then she offers me chocolate.

Three movies about people with precarious lives in the US

Title: Ballast (2008)
Director: Lance Hammer
Language: English
Rating: Not rated

At the start of the movie, a man has committed suicide off-screen. The people he leaves behind include his identical twin, Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.). The movie takes its time revealing who everyone is. The suicide disturbs their already difficult lives and stirs up emotions that could overwhelm them. In the course of the movie, they redefine their lives in some ways and draw together to keep from succumbing to despair and poverty. Sometimes, they seem like the only three people in their world (if one died, only the other two would notice - though at one point there's also a kind neighbor, played by Johnny McPhail, whose intervention saves a life).

The two others are Marlee (Tarra Riggs) and her teenaged son, James (JimMyron Ross). James is a misdirected kid. The adults in his life have serious hardships of their own, so that in spite of good intentions they don't always offer him the guidance he needs, though they try. The school he goes to seems to give him only opportunities to be preyed on. His life is closed-off and lonely, though the filmmakers thread some hope into it, in his changing relationship to a gun: a gun he first uses to express anger and a show of control, then uses as possible self-protection, until he does something with it to attempt to prevent further death.

Where the characters live, in the Mississippi Delta, the landscape is muddy and gray in the winter (sometimes it's startling, like when birds in a noisy mass burst into the sky). The characters cling to the lifelines they can find, including a gas station and convenience store that's been abandoned and might serve as their livelihood and a second chance of sorts. Maybe these characters would be worse off, more lonely and directionless, if they were apart from each other.

As the movie ended, I wondered what would happen to James. His mother wants to save him from violent kids, but can she protect him from the demons inside, the impulses of self-destruction? What's his place in the world, living with despondent, angry adults? There's a shot at the end of the movie of a man in the front passenger seat of a car, and for a second I thought it was James, but no - the movie has remained in the present. James is in the backseat. But this could be his future, traveling through the same ruts in a muddy landscape.