Brigadoon

Growing up, my Dad loved the old Gene Kelly film Brigadoon (1954) based on the 1947 musical. On its surface, its a movie about how you can only return home through the power of love, and it was a very appropriate story for a world grappling with modernity in the face of World War Two.

The first few times I saw it, I had a very simple view of things, as most kids do. This movie challenged me because it was not always clear who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Looking back, I feel like that's a very powerful thing for art to do for a kid.

I grew up on a small island on the Puget Sound, and in a way, it's a Brigadoon of its own. Over time, “Brigadoons” have become a kind of metaphor for me, describing the ineffable quality of places that change in a way that makes them recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time. In the same way that you can go to Scotland today and see the tartan and the highlands and the heather, but never really know the way of life. You can go back to Bainbridge Island, and you can see the downtown or my high school or the beaches or the view of Seattle from the ferry, but it will never really be the way it was in 1992.

I feel like Brigadoon was sort of a post-pandemic movie for World War II, in the sense that it was a way of talking about grief obliquely because it's so hard to talk about it directly.

It's difficult to talk about the alternate lives we could have lived, the alternate futures we are grieving, because grappling with that is so universal that it's the unspoken emotional water we are all swimming in.

If you ever wonder why people cry at weddings more than funerals, it's a brigadoon.

If you ever feel like every airport is a portal that could enter you into any city, and yet you'd never be in the city that you wanted to be in, it's a brigadoon.

When you rent a home, an Airbnb in your hometown, because your parents don't own the house you grew up in anymore, that's a brigadoon.

We arrived in Positano last night and I can already tell this will be a brigadoon for me, so hopefully I will be brave enough to come back again and again and watch it change with eyes of love and understanding that we can’t freeze time.

Maybe I should submit this to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows?