There's this scene in one of my favorite movies that I often think of. I love it for it's simplicity and sound, the movements though very small are etched in my mind.
The movie is The Go-Getter with Zooey Deschanel. While ratings are not always great I fell in love with the movement and the scenes from the beginning. It reminds me of everything I love about simple adventures, driving through deserts, staying in cheap motels, getting crappy food and having good conversations.
Don't worry, there are no spoilers in this post.
Whenever I'm working in a kitchen or talking to a cook, whenever I think about getting a hamburger and fries or when ever I drink a soda and hold it a certain way this movie, and more specifically, this scene comes to mind.
The boy and girl characters are sitting on the floor of a hotel room, they have their meals spread out and he asks what her is. It's just a big mac without the meat she says. The first thing to get me because at the time I was still vegetarian.
And then my favorite lines happen, they go a little like this:
"And I love cooking...I would work from one to twelve with all these creepy guys... these criminal guys... and I had, um, tendonitis. And I smelled like old butter... and I was really good at it too... and um my hands.... um... are like.... um... steal. You could burn them like it's nothing. all those knives and blood. it's like I didn't have a brain. in the kitchen you just have like this, one brain. It was... really nice."
While the quote isn't the most eloquent it is simple and makes an experience that would normally be portrayed in a dark light into an experience that I wanted for myself. Is that strange?
The best part, I now work around a kitchen and I find what she says is true. When things are going well it's like everyone has one brain in there. I get to experience it on the outskirts, watching and occasionally taking part.
While the kitchen I work around is nothing like I imagine hers to be, I still enjoy it. I wonder what it would be like though, to be in a diner type kitchen like I figured she had been in. The butter scent, stale but strong, never quite leaving my hands.
Hands. Mine now are so sensitive. I briefly courted (yes I did the initiating) a cook and he came over one night after work to make me pancakes. I sat on my fake wood kitchen counter, my back resting against the orange cupboard doors, and I watched him as he made the best pancakes I have ever had. I asked him, with this scene in mind, if his hands had become use to the heat of the skillets and he said yes, that in the beginning it had hurt, but by the end of his training it was like nothing.
After pancakes we sat down at my kitchen table for a game of cards. I was excited that he had grown up on the same games as I had and we shared a love for gin rummy. Or maybe it was that he had been an avid rummy player and I had always played gin. Either way we settled the difference and even kept score through the late night.
I'm sad to say that nothing came of that interest. He was too shy when I thought I wanted someone more forward, and when the more bold happened back into my life I took it without thinking of what I was possibly walking away from.
The bold game me no memories such as this, no moments of shared space where histories were exchanged.
Regardless of the iffy choice I made, I consider that night, with the pancakes and cards, my version of this scene.
Has any specific scene stayed in your mind like this? So simple but somehow important?
xoxo
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