THE SEASON OF COMPANY LASTED A WEEK

After three sets of company in a week or so, I’m almost overwhelmed with information to process. This is the real cost of guests I haven’t seen for many years or haven’t ever seen before. They were generous about taking me out to dinner, paying for the gas to drive around looking at things, paying for the gas to get here at all, enduring the strangeness of a small high prairie town with its undependable weather and interesting but inexplicable inhabitants. Some enjoyed my geology and history lectures more than others.

Part of being a writer is digesting experience, though it is a mistake to digest so much that one is digesting one’s own “stomach” rather than this other “nourishment” offered by the world and events. So this is the real contribution of company, though it is dangerous for them, and dangerous for the relationships themselves. What might be seen that was always safely hidden before? What panic, what affection, what new decisions about, well, how to live.

The first set was my cousin and her husband from Santa Ana. They are just a bit older than me and far more conventional -- or so I think. Maybe they aren’t at all. The husband is computer-literate and a source of those right-wing Fox/Beck jokes that another friend sends me. I just forward them all on to the other one -- pass the crackers. Now and then I zap them -- just too nasty. What I discovered is that this husband is aware, that he often has his tongue in his cheek, that he is more worldly than I thought. He has just beaten back a virulent cancer that kills most, with the help of chemotherapy and a Kindle. These guys read their way through life.

His wife, my cousin, brought me a stack of magazines. You saw my review of “Selvedge.” The interest in fabrics, sewing, design, goes back into our mothers and beyond them to our grandmother-in-common, homesteading on the prairie with limited resources, endlessly remodeling the clothing on hand, not just patching: redesigning. There is no need to patch for my cousin. They have done well in life, made it to retirement in a lovely home with a stoop-free garden of raised beds for healthy meals.

This couple raised four boys together, the oldest of which is fifty. I simply cannot comprehend this. In my mind they are barely in high school. They say that raising boys keeps the older folks aware, challenged, and informed. One of them is a chef at Big Sky. One is a spectacular photographer. All are lively, hard-driving, informed men who take their father off once a year for “male-bonding” on a deep-sea fishing boat.

The second batch was the daughter of another cousin and her computer-matched boyfriend. My two cousins, both on my father’s side, made very different choices in life, much more mainstream than me, so it is interesting that their children have stepped away from the conventions and risk losing all prosperity. These youngsters are nearly thirty, still living at home, use the computer as extensions of themselves, and live what I might call “scrutinized lives” esp. when it comes to food and gizmos. This young woman is also a gifted photographer. She had not known about the photos by the son of the other cousin. We are all geographically separated, unlike my two cousins and I who were often together at family events.

The third batch was not related to me at all. Mike Burgwin is the best boss I ever had and guided me back to life in a time when I really wouldn’t have cared much if I’d died -- an attitude that made me usefully brave as an ACO. (Animal Control Officer.) Burgwin, at eighty, had a blast of a birthday party and is following it up with a tour of his friends around the West. Lorna, my age, was just getting acquainted with some of us. Burgwin, a big man in several senses, was as full of mischief and intelligence as ever, but some of the surprises of a risky life had not been happy ones and he’s processing quite a lot of experience -- which may be part of the trip. He and I told one wild story after another while Lorna kibitzed. Mike also had four sons, the oldest of which is sixty and yearning to write even if it means life on the streets.

The first guests rented a motel room in town. The second ones stayed in my “bunkhouse.” The third splurged at the Stone School Inn Bed and Breakfast which turned out to be a major success, esp. the breakfasts! I went over for coffee -- can’t eat special Montana pancakes and other treats anymore, but they could. Yogurt, fruit, a table side fireplace, plenty of banter. It was terrific.

I’m not used to company and I’m not used to thinking of others. We only came to grief once. My young company insisted on washing the dishes, though I asked them not to. They were raised in the suburbs with all the amenities and their mothers taught them to help the hostess, but washing dishes in a household with no dishwasher is different and I have many small techniques: separating kinds of dishes, for instance, “cat kosher” so I never eat from their bowls; dishcloths that are changed every second or third day and then washed in laundry; air-drying rather than wiping dishes dry; using bleach for some kinds of dishes and for some of the flatware but not all. I ignored the first night they snuck around behind me to wash the dishes anyway. The second night I came down hard and it was apparent that they were NOT used to anyone rebuking them so loudly and definitely. Good thing it was late in the visit. We had stumbled into a whole different set of terms.

One of the reasons I like to wash the dishes after the company has gone, even if it’s only to bed, is that it gives me a chance to relive the evening. I call it “replaying the tapes” in my head while I go through the small routine. The main insight of all three visits was how much difference there is between generations, between cousins who made different choices, between different educations and contexts. There’s no point in saying one is better than the other, but it’s clear that we should be wary and forgiving.

DRIVING THE NETFLIX COMPUTER CRAZY

There’s a computer at Neflix somewhere that’s going crazy, I hope. I’m trying to make it do that. The Netflix solution to marketing, like the Amazon solution, is to get all the products into categories, then get all the customers into categories and then match them up. Their major failure with me so far has been telling me which DVD’s were most often ordered in Great Falls, in hopes that I’ll order them, too, since because I live here I must be like them. But I look at the titles with horror -- I have never seen those movies and never intend to in the future.

The other bust has been trying to make me award stars to movies according to whether I liked them or not. I refuse to do this, even when they set it up so that I can’t progress through the movie ordering system without designating a star. I don’t do it because my opinion of a movie is not based on “liking” it and I think a value judgement of anything that is just one dimension is unfair, untrue and unuseful. When I failed to pick a star for a used book, the book dealer his/her self sent me a wounded email claiming I was ruining his/her life, because it affected his ability to sell books.

For a long time I was ordering BBC murder mysteries. There are endless numbers of them and my “default” choices are generally MI-5 these days, which they couldn’t call “Spooks” (It's Brit name) because in the USA that word doesn’t mean ghosts. It means roughly the same thing as “shovels.” Blacks. One learns a lot while ordering movies and even more if the DVD has international explanations included.

Then I got tired of that and went to costume dramas, the big sprawling epics of history, which led the computer to believe I might want to watch musicals, but I didn’t. Then I fell into Brit Indie movies, largely produced by FilmFour which is the government BBC channel #4, designated for alternative “serious” stuff, like social comment.

So the red envelopes I threw in the mail this morning included “John Trudell,” which is an American “serious” documentary. You could tell because heavyweight liberals like Robert Redford and Chris Christopherson had a lot to say. Trudell is actually one of the most appealing AIM leaders. I had not known that his house was burned down with his family inside, probably arson, and quite possibly the FBI. Consider PUSH, WACO, and lately the NA artifact bust that was so violent that one elderly man’s toes were broken. At least he wasn’t burned alive. Trudell sank into immense sadness, far beyond depression, and then resurfaced -- a poet. It’s hard not to admire him, even like him.

The other two films were BBC. “Pierrepoint” is the story of the last “King’s” executioner, a hangman whose father and uncle had also filled that post. Excellently cast, beautifully filmed, it is a horrifying subject that is really about how decency and care should shape something basically barbaric into something at least bearable.

The executioner, played by Timothy Spall, was a real person and events really happened. Spall, well-known as a character actor, brilliantly channels compassion and civility. “I will take care of you,” he tells the condemned and he means it. Some of the most powerful moments come AFTER the hanging, when he carefully washes the body, puts a shroud on it, and lays it gently in a coffin. This was not the shameful debacle of hanging Hussein. When at Nurenberg, there are so many bodies that they run out of coffins, he is outraged. His wife takes an economic point of view: she is determined to remain a proper wife, but even she is not much interested in his physical needs. He’s no prince, but he has a good job.

“This Is England” features another protagonist of dubious charm, this one a little boy with Oppositional Defiance Disorder (if you’ll allow such syndromes) brought on by the death of his father in the Falklands. The movie gives the story an impressive historical frame with newsreels and still photos, both from Maggie Thatcher’s era in England and the shadow events of WWII that somehow get entangled in immigration and welfare. The boy, mocked and bullied whereever he goes, is picked up as a sort of mascot by a gang of skinheads, the whole bunch of them infected with ODD. They love to smash and vandalize. Then a new leader arrives from prison and things get entirely out of hand. It’s not the most charming movie, but it does tell a vivid story that anyone ought to understand. I have NEVER heard the F word so many times, not even in “Platoon,” though they pronounce it "fokking."

We seem to be in a time when we’ve not been able to throw off the past, even as we enter into the dystopic situations of our own times and of the predicted future. Over and over the themes are conformity, prosperity and authority. Forget about cars that can fly and the cure for cancer. These issues are where the action is. But I can only bear these polemics for so long -- then I need a different kind of movie.

Some people would be best served by movies categorized according to how many explosions they have or how many sex/love scenes. Maybe a lot of people would rather watch movies about animals. I have a kind of penchant for movies that are nothing but long conversations, like “My Dinner with Andre.” There aren’t many of those around. My cousin loves haute couture and often recommends movies about Paris designers. I wanted to see “Aria” but it has become mysteriously unavailable.

My newest addition to my Netflix list, which I’m told I will have to wait a long time to see, is “Battlestar Galactica.” I do like sci-fi, but I didn’t get interested in Battlestar until yesterday’s NPR story about how the sound track for this show, which was meant NOT to be like the John Williams orchestra score for Star War. It took on such a powerful influence -- I guess using sort of “earth music” or “space music” more like Paul Winter -- that it actually began suggesting the plot. This I’ve gotta see! That’s what MY life needs -- a better sound track! Luckily, I have a lot of Paul Winter CD’s. Prokiofiev will do in a pinch.