I had been noticing lately that the ads for ‘Shanghai Knights’ made me feel blue, and I didn’t really realize why. Then, tonight, I was reading a review and I remembered.
When I took my Dad to see either Attack of the Clones or Fellowship of the Ring (I can’t remember which, but it was one of those two) there was a trailer for that movie, and he commented that it looked like a good movie. This made me sad at the time as my Dad didn’t like dumb action/comedies before he started losing his mind to Alzheimers. He died a few months after, and I hadn’t put together why ads for that movie until tonight - and then I started crying and still haven’t stopped completely.
Not sure why it’s bothering me this much…I think it may have something to do with the symmetry of me taking him to those two movies, considering he took me to both the Bakshi Lord of the Rings and the first Star Wars when I was a little kid, and that combined with his somewhat childlike behavior stuck with me, I guess.
Well, I need to dry up before I leave my cubicle, my shift is over.
Anybody else have weird things that make them sad?
Those really cheesy polyester flowered blouses from the 70’s. My Gramma used to wear them all the time. The only memories I have of her when she actually remembered me were when she was wearing those blouses.
Like your dad, we lost her to Alzheimers. She ‘survived’ for 13 years after she was confined to a nursing home. I still have one of her blouses, I used to wear it all the time, but now I can’t bring myself to.
Reading a certain passage makes me sad for they arent in my life. But it also reminds me that I am not what others think no matter how many times they say it. Your dad story struck a chord with me, I hope you feel better.
Seeing a business closing down. Boarded up windows and all.
on hot summer days when the clouds cover the sun and suddenly the world seems a tad bit darker and colder. for some reason my stomach drops and it makes me feel sad… even for only a split second
Our daughter died five years ago. The other night I got emotional about something that reminded me of her. There is no telling what is going to bring back those memories. Personally, it isn’t a bad thing, since I’d hate to forget her.
Live lobsters sitting forlornly in the tank at grocery stores for some reason depress me. Kind of odd since I’m far from a vegetarian, but still.
I always get kind of sad when I see a developmentally disabled person working at the grocery store or a fast food place or whatever. They’re always assigned the jobs that no one wants, and do them without complaining. Seems like they’re kind of being taken advantage of.
Big old houses that have run down and been boarded up.
It makes me sad to think of the people who build those wonderful houses with hopes and dreams many many years ago and raised their children and basically lived their lives there.
I just wonder what those people would think or say if they could see their houses today the way they are.
damaged stuffed animals/stuffed animals that are thrown away.
I guess this probably goes back to the fact that I had a stuffed animal which I had lost when I was 5 which left me seriously distraught (you cannot fathom how much that little inadimate object meant to me)
I have this unnerving tendency to visualize things like stuffed animals as alive and being discarded. Yeah, the Velveteen Rabbit really choked me up as a kid
Anything that someone clearly worked hard at to make into something nice that gets ruined/wasted for no good reason.
Wow, that was vague, but I can’t think of any specific examples at the moment.
Also, when I was a little kid, I listened to “Love Is a Song that Never Ends” from “Bambi” several times over and over and eventually I got weepy. Same for “Baby Mine” from “Dumbo,” but I think that’s a little more logical.
I have NO idea why this particular image would do it, but ever since I was a small child, seeing or thinking of an old man eating candy by himself is heartbreaking to me.
Chocolate chip brownies. You mix the ingredients as you would to make choco chip cookies, but instead of dropping spoonfuls you put all the batter in the pan and smooth it out.
When I was a kid my uncle/surrogate father made them for me all the time. If I came over unexpectedly he would say “why don’t we make some chocolate chip brownies”. He died in 1982 and nothing makes me sadder than not having had him at my wedding.
Jamie
Aw hell, that kills me too.
Just about any broken toy does.
There was also this short story I heard about this girl who had a cat who would always sit on the piano and listen when she practiced.
I can’t make myself type out the rest so somone else who knows this one is gonna have to finish it.
When I was ten eleven twelve (somewhere in there) a friend and I found a secluded spot in the woods, within walking distance of both of our homes. It was a little hollow, fairly clear, in the middle of a thicket of trees. We decided (as most young boys do, at some point) that we’d found the spot for a “fort.”
So, we comb the neighborhood, looking for building materials. We scrounge some busted up, discarded 2X4s from a construction site, an old beat-up mattress someone had stuck out on the curb for the next morning’s garbage pick-up, plastic/nylon tarps, a coffee can full o’ nails and screws from one or t’other of our basements, and so on.
We haul our loot out to the spot, and begin construction. A large hole in the ground, with the sides shored up by the beams, the best of the tarps stretched over a framework of wood and metal pipes (where he found those I can’t recall), and after three days work, we’ve got a fairly servicable bolt-hole.
Hell, we’ve even got a bed mattress wrapped in garbage bags as a couch. This is paradise, man. We cover the whole thing up in leaves and bits of fallen branches, to hide our work.
Over the next couple months (summer break from school, y’see) we constantly add little bits of this and that, adding a bunch of small but wonderful (to a pair of ten-year-olds) refinements to the thing. With a decent sized cooler fulla food and sodas, you could live in this thing for a weekend. Which, by each of us telling our folks we were spending the weekend at the other’s house, is just what we did.
School starts up again, and we only get out to the “fort” a couple times a week. One Saturday afternoon, we agree to meet out at our home away from, and just listen to the radio and scarf down some junk food.
The place is destroyed. Turns out, a few of the older kids in town, one of whom was my buddy’s older brother, stumbled across our place, raided it for the candles, munchies and nudie magazines (hey, we were twelve), then stomped the structure itself down into the hole it covered.
We looked at each other, and, being tough macho pre-teens, refused to cry in front of each other. We check over the damage, and realize the thing is a wash. There’s no fixing it, and our bad-ass couch is now ripped to shreds and hanging about ten feet up in a tree. So he said, “Well, I got chores and stuff to do anyway, so I’m goin’ home.” I replied in much the same fashion, and we headed off to our respective homes.
I’m pretty sure I made it home without openly crying, but the trails and streets I traveled that day were more than a little blurred.
A local movie theater just installed flat screens in its lobby running ads. The first time I saw them, there was only one ad. A Nokia cellphone appeared on the screen, ringing with its distinctive little tune. It faded, the word NOKIA appeared, then some sales message. Fade to black, the whole thing begins again.
For some unaccountable reason, I found tears streaming down my face at that ad repeating over and over.
Listening to the Gypsy Kings. A lot of their music is so happy, and upbeat (well, at least that I’ve heard) and every time I hear it I cry. It reminds me of my friend Noel, who died 8 years ago. I miss him.
