Just come back from seeing Dark Knight for the second time with my young friend Daniel who turned 14 this week. This was a small celebration compared to a year ago and his Bar Mitzvah and all the preparations and celebrations which went with that. So it is a year since I made the Oriental quilt for him to drape over his bed, he now has a double bed so this has been a year of transition for him. I felt that taking him to the movies at a more grown up time was more of a celebration so we went to the 6pm session and afterwards we went to a cafe where Daniel had hot chocolate..a first for him and coffee for me and we both had scrummy chocolate coated marshmallows which came with extra dipping chocolate. I served myself some water from the communal tap which was placed so that customers could access it themselves. Unfortunately the tap when I turned it off did not turn off, it continued to pour water [there was no sink or basin] all over the surface of the cabinet! I grabbed some napkins and cleaned it up as best I could and sat down with Daniel and said that was interesting! I would have been mortified when I was younger…just find it interesting now.
We had a great time dissecting the film and discussing the repercussions for Heath Ledger of playing The Joker. My son has had profound sleeplessness for over six months now and I am well aware of the sense of sheer exhaustion which accompanies this disorder. I was able to explain the reasons behind Heath’s death and the adverse drug interactions which led to this. We also discussed the implications of the housekeeper not calling the ambulance hours earlier and the whole how do you know when someone is asleep or in trouble. We also discussed the aspect of heroes and what it means to do the right thing and how good people can do bad things and how in fact it is harder sometimes to make the right choices in life. We found it a lot of fun going out later in the evening as opposed to our usual practise of going to movies in the daytime where there are often a lot of younger children present. Lots of topics were covered and we were discussing role playing as a method of learning how to interact with strangers in a social situation when his mum arrived at Chocolart to take him home.
It is interesting and a lot of fun seeing him grow up…we have a great relationship and indeed he thought for a while that I was his friend…not his mother’s when he was a little boy and he was also quite jealous of my son. Eventually he came to see Christopher as a role model and almost older brother which is good for them both. We were joking all the way home that he had a date for the evening even if his older sister’s didn’t! Below is a photo of the Bar Mitzvah quilt and above is the little cutie when he was about eighteen months old. Yes people did keep saying to me that I had a cute daughter when we were out together, they would not make that mistake now…his voice has broken and he is a young man, one whom I am so proud to know!
