simon and garfunkel and movies.

Simon and Garfunkel stimulates such aching nostalgia for me about growing up it takes my breath away. Literally. Last night Mark and I were watching the movie ("moomie" as Jonathan, my nephew would say) Bobby, a 2006 flick nominated for a couple of Golden Globes and Academy Awards about the day that Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, a watching which carried on until entirely too late an hour considering our alarms would sound at 5:45 this morning. We have trouble conceptualizing cause and effect relationships: i.e. if you stay up til midnight, you will be tired at 5:45. Nevertheless, we continue to pretend we're at college and that watching late night movies during the week is a good idea. I digress.

The movie is brilliant - one of those surprisingly entrancing performances with a stacked cast of five star actors and actresses that makes you proud to be an American because even though we live in a young country, we've got some pretty massive history. Senator Kennedy's death at the end of the movie is obviously no surprise, so you sort of anticipate it the whole time you're watching, which gives the whole story a grave poignancy, though when the gunshot is delivered in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel it is still shocking. My head had been on Mark's knee, and I sat bolt upright as the images flashed between the real 1968 footage and the movie footage from 38 years later in Hollywood, amazingly grafted together.

"The Sounds of Silence," a song that sails me to six years old in West Chester riding in my dad's car on a summertime Saturday morning to the hardware store, watching dust and lint particles glisten against the windshield and the feel of the polyester fabric against my skinny little legs. Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, James Taylor, the Oldies FM station... the first entries in my musical memories. And although I still love that music, truly, it stirs me up so much to hear it now - makes me want to be there again - small and spindly and young, unaware and mostly happy. No shoes, wild hair, playing with my big sister in the creeks and muddy woods. Perfectly, the haunting song plays behind a speech of Robert Kennedy, which plays overtop scenes from the news that day.

This is just to say that I haven't seen a really good movie in a while (except Inception) and Bobby is a really good movie.