Beauty of the ordinary

After adulthood sets in, it's not long until a person realizes that peaches and cream are not life's theme song.  But, young adults still see Life as something to be tamed.  After a while, young people realize that Life is more volatile than the way they first looked at it.  There are moments where achievements are made, but they are only moments, not a way of life.  Highs and lows exist like a rollercoaster.  Some people, however, like the analogy of weather.  Weather is rarely even.  It comes in seasons and in a variety of forms.  The sun heats the earth, the earth follows its orbit away from the sun, Winds blow in the transition stage, the sun isn't so hot, then winds bluster, the cold follows.  Snow comes, precipitation falls, ice forms.  Then the Earth shifts in its orbit and the weather changes yet again.

Thus, life is filled with all kinds of weather with storms as the representative and salient feature of weather/Life analogy.  The key is to find shelter in the storm.  Bob Dylan has written the perfect song for this.  In the movie, St. Vincent, this song was chosen as a memorable and vivid way to symbolize all that had transpired.  Bill Murray comes out into his back yard to sing this song as the movie ends. The movie had depicted a number of life's storms in the four characters it followed. A young boy had been totally uprooted through divorce of his parents and his world had become stormy.  The shelter Vin had provided literally for the boy proved to be some of the only stability the boy experienced.  The prostitute that Vin saw had a storm of her own, and it was Vin that wound up providing shelter from her storm.  The young boy's mother, newly divorced from her husband, needed help in establishing herself again, and Vin was a key in helping to provide shelter for her storm by helping with her son.  Vin as well faced his trials valiantly, even the stroke that happened after being stressed by his money troubles.  At the end of the movie, his house was still standing as it always had been (it was hard to miss that symbol), and it appeared unchanged throughout the story.

So when Vin went to his back yard at the end of the movie, everyone appreciated the activity that happened there.  In one last scene, the writer capsulized all the storms that had happened by showing Vin getting settled in a yard that had no grass, only dirt.  He turned on a hose to water a plant that had already died.  When Vin tried to prop the hose on the pot of the plant, the plant fell off of its little table. So, Vin just returned the plant to its upright position and reproped the hose.  While this action was happening, Vin just sat in his double lawn chair, smoking his cigarette, comfortable, enjoying the pocket of time given to him to enjoy his "average" looking house in the background and his little plot of ground under the sun.  His doorframe and window sill needed painting.  The electrical wires had been placed in tubing running the length of his wall from roof to ground.  The paint was not colorful, but a humdrum earth tone tan.  Vin was singing along with the cassette as it played Shelter from the Storm.  He knew it by memory, so the viewer knew it was an important song to him, and Vin sang while smoking and watering his plant.

My hat is off to the script writer for showing a movie in which his theme and accompanying symbol were so excellent in showing the fantastic kindness, resilience, and strength of character extant in every person.  The ordinary was transformed into extraordinary. People can take heart because they provide stability for each other when they give others what they need -  a shelter's walls! It's what we would all do even though we are regular people acting in ordinary ways.  St.Vincent has to be the movie of the year for its tremendous subtlety in portraying the strength of Everybody in our ordinary, yet extraordinary, worlds!