derpalicious

Buster Keaton Prepares for the Cricket Season -

Boy's Cinema Weekly, May 4, 1921

[1] "I must understand what the book said: 'Keep your eye on the ball, carefully calculate where it is going to pitch, and play a safety stroke if it is a well-pitched ball and dead on the wicket.' Ah, here it comes! It looks rather swift!"

[2] "I played forward to the beastly thing, but something must have been wrong with the pitch, for the ball shot up to a surprising height, got me a nasty one right in the neck, and gave me a sore throat that I can't shake off.

[3] "I think I had better read over the advice in this book on how to play cricket, as my first efforts don't appear to have been quite as successful as I would have liked them to be: in fact, I might say painful efforts."

We were having a nice day and got stuck in traffic coming home. On the way her phone rang and she was driving so she declined the call with a sigh. “I feel so bad for him,” she said.

“You know that number?”

She did. It turns out her phone number had previously belonged to a woman named Serena. The man calling was her dad. He had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember his daughter was dead, so he just called the number he knew was hers.

I was stricken to hear this. “Do you talk to him?”

“Yeah. Sometimes he thinks I’m her and we talk. I have a notebook with facts I’ve learned about her so I can connect with him better. Sometimes he knows I’m not her and I say I’m her friend.”

I struggled with the beauty and humanity of this for a moment. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know; I just call him Dad.”

We sat in silence and I was overwhelmed with feelings. That she was so kind and thoughtful about this random connection. A man who called and spoke to her with love for the daughter he missed.

"One time," she added, "he called me just after I had a difficult day with my mom. I knew Serena and her mom had a rocky relationship so I talked to him about my frustrations with my own mother and he gave the following advice: ‘Everyone fails sometimes, even parents; what's important is to communicate with our loved ones, even when it's difficult.’

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.