A Girl With a Sword

always winter, always winter and never christmas

Well, I see Laura has beaten me to the it-snowed-and-we-went-to-see-Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe news, but I guess CNN beat me to the "it snowed" news anyway. Yesterday was amazing. It was snowing big fat flakes as I waited for the bus and I watched them collect on my gloves and admired the patterns. All day at work we kept an eye on the windows and the announcements of library closings. (No hope for us, they said the last time our library closed was in The Blizzard of '78.) At one point two squirrels crawled in between the window and the grate outside and huddled together for warmth. This was very distracting to the kind-hearted librarians. The snow fell until after three o'clock, even managing a white-out at one point. After work I learned that snow isn't quite so jolly when you're running/wading through foot-deep drifts trying to catch a bus, or running/sliding across busy streets in the dark.

All of the snow-angst of the day informed and intensified our Narnia experience of the evening, although the children didn't really seem to feel the cold the way I did. And poor, bare-chested Mr. Tumnus, I just wanted to put a coat on him. Incidentally, Hope and I observed that when Mr. Tumnus is mildly good-looking it makes it a lot stranger that Mr. Tumnus is not wearing any clothes.

I think I liked the movie. It was kind of a shock.--I want my childhood dreams back, you bastards!--I mean . . . I remember when the old movie first came out on the BBC. It was the most anticipated event of my early life. I was five and I cried for happiness when I first saw the credits come on, over the map of Narnia, and heard those beautiful cellos and oboes playing the music. Richard Dempsey's Peter Pevensie was probably my first love and everything about the old movie was a perfect interpretation of the book for me. Damn cynicism, why did I lose my childhood suspension of disbelief? So this new movie was a realization for me that I'm grown up now. If I was still five and this movie came out I'm sure I would have been charmed beyond belief. The wardrobe, and the dryads, and the centaur women were all the fulfillment of a five-year-old girl's dreams, but my dreams were made with the old movie and it's getting harder to find them as I look back now and see the typically poor lighting and sound quality of the BBC, the children who are far younger than I am, the cartoon animals hovering (although I still love those cartoon animals. I missed them.) This new movie was beautiful, but I'm not a child anymore, and I'm not sure I can still go back to Narnia. Or at least . . . oh dear that sounds so sad. But it is different, and I'm not sure what I can do about that.