This is just a list of all the movies I have watched of late with my dad back to when I started logging movies on letterboxd in early May of 2015.
Some months before that time, I came to stay with him and my mom after he had an injury and then through a succession of diagnoses, hospitalizations, surgeries, & recoveries. Around May came smoother sailings and more autonomy for him and free time for me, but it was obvious that unassisted living wasn't really an option for them anymore, so I stayed on.
When he isn't a cable news zombie or reading a paperback western, and if we aren't sick of each other from all the time we spend together…
This is just a list of all the movies I have watched of late with my dad back to when I started logging movies on letterboxd in early May of 2015.
Some months before that time, I came to stay with him and my mom after he had an injury and then through a succession of diagnoses, hospitalizations, surgeries, & recoveries. Around May came smoother sailings and more autonomy for him and free time for me, but it was obvious that unassisted living wasn't really an option for them anymore, so I stayed on.
When he isn't a cable news zombie or reading a paperback western, and if we aren't sick of each other from all the time we spend together otherwise, I'll throw some movie suggestions at him. We watched almost solely westerns when I first got here while he was off his feet because I knew we both like them, but we're finding more far reaching intersections in what we both enjoy lately, despite my perceptions of our being a half-century apart in age (he just turned 79) and of polar opposite politics, all part and parcel of learning more of who he is as an actual person beyond dadness.
Sometimes it's hard for me to separate the new cares and exigencies attendant to his aging & caregiving from what is really just my own general ageism, something which I've become more conscious of. I think it's easy to think of the elderly as unavailable (or worse, ill-equipped) to new experiences or challenging ideas, and my notion of what he might not be interested in seeing is not always very accurate. When we saw The Witch (because he liked the pioneer supernatural trappings of Eyes of Fire around Halloween), the manager came up to us after the movie to nervously ask my dad, "Was the movie, OK? Or was it too...?" We're in the bible belt, so maybe he'd been fretting all week, but I tend to think he asked it because my dad was on oxygen and pushing a walker. I might have had the same hesitancy about how the movie "fit" my dad not a year ago, but we were excitedly talking about The Witch the whole way home. But trying not to confine my dad into safer, traveled boredoms does sometimes steer into the kinds of movies my old dad just isn't inclined to really "get" or be all up into, too.
Making this list should be some incentive to probe dad more about the movies we watch together and come up with new directions & suggestions.