In “Choosing Life.” I told you that everything I learned, I learned from the movies.  As a young girl, I would watch ‘old movies’ after my folks went to bed.  By ‘old movies’ I mean movies from the 40’s and 50’s.  They were made before special effects and gruesome violence, so they depended on good stories, interesting characters, and happy endings.  I remember one movie about a young woman who wanted to marry a rich man.  She went to a resort.  When she sat down in the restaurant for dinner, her place setting contained several knives, forks, and spoons.  The waiter saw her confusion and told her to start at the outside and work her way in.  Growing up, my family was poor.  We had one knife, one fork, and one spoon at each setting, all on the same side.  Years later, at college, I was invited to dinner by a wealthy classmate’s family.  When I looked at my place setting, there was silverware everywhere.  I just started at the outside and worked my way in, just like I knew what I was doing,.

My favorite movies are probably your old movies.  If you take every western you ever saw and roll it up into one, you have “Silverado.”  It has everything: shootouts, cattle barons vs settlers, saloons and saloon girls, wagon trains, wagon train robbers, claim jumpers, and corrupt sheriffs.  The action never stops.  It is filled with interesting characters, good and bad and in between.  The scenery is outstanding.  And, interspersed throughout is good old fashioned humor.

Jack Nicholson plays a man with obsessive/compulsive disorder in “As Good As It Gets.”  Every time that movie is on TV, I have to watch it.  The character development is phenomenal.  There is one scene where Jack is leaving his psychiatrist’s office.  He pauses in the middle of the waiting room, full of patients, and says, “What if this is as good as it gets?”   Brilliant.  The patients are stunned.  He leaves.  So many of us are looking for perfection, usually from somebody else.  We are looking for the people to hurt us to say they are sorry.  We are looking for Prince (or Princess) Charming to make our lives perfect.  But here we are in the real world, in a real life.  We have to stop thinking and talking about our problems.  Sometimes there are no solutions, no matter how many times we go over it.  The only place we find perfection is with God.  It took a lifetime, but the everyday repetitive monotony of life has become a safe haven, a comfortable place, and a place to find joy and peace.  This really is as good as it gets.