Nosferatu - A Century of Horror

In the 20s, several years after a worldwide plague had decimated the population of the globe and the U.S. government had lifted public mask mandates - and while Russia was undergoing a widely-publicized political upheaval - audiences gathered in theaters to watch a silent vampire movie called Nosferatu. Wait, hang on a second, my notes must have gotten confused...

No, astounding as it is to believe, those really were the circumstances that F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece was created under, and if they seem almost uncannily familiar, that just speaks to the curious novelty of the movie’s main character: vampires just seem to keep coming back.

Every culture in every part of the world throughout history has had some version of the vampire legend, horror tales to frighten children and the superstitious according to respective mores and traditions around death - corpses that shrugged off their grave shrouds and prowled their hometowns after dark, evil spirits that could be warded off with garlic or silver, charming tempters that you could never, under any circumstances, allow to cross over your threshold. I've made a long study of as many of them as I could get my hands on, and a highlight of my professional career has been teaching some of the better ones to high school seniors enrolled in my Horror & Mystery classes of the Pinkerton Academy English Department. Did you know that right here in New England, for example, a young tuberculosis victim was exhumed from her grave in 1892, beheaded, staked through the heart, and burned, for fear that she was spreading her infection to relatives in a small Rhode Island town? Heartwarming stuff, that's how I like to think about it... even if that's only because those hearts were literally warmed to the point of incineration to end the "vampire's" curse.

The remarkable achievement of Irish writer and theater manager Bram Stoker was to gather many of these disparate threads together and weave them for the first time into a cohesive whole with 1897’s Dracula; the eponymous fangy Transylvanian Count has since become arguably the most recognizable character in world literature.

Last night, my dad and his co-workers at Middlesex Community College held a special screening of the first filmed adaptation of that story as part of their new ongoing series of classic films held at the historic and newly-renovated Boston & Maine Theater in downtown Lowell. To the accompaniment of a live four-piece band (who composed their own original score for the silent flick), a packed room of Lowell theatergoers settled ourselves in for a perfect Halloween season treat.

Nosferatu follows a young real estate lawyer, sent by his mysterious employer deep into the mountains of the frontier East for a private land sale. He is greeted with displays of terror whenever he speaks of his mission to local peasants and villagers, who all inform him in no uncertain terms that he is heading into terrible danger and present him with gifts like a Bible and a crucifix. Spectacularly, comically ignorant of these warnings, the lawyer chooses to press on and arrives at his castle destination, where he is greeted by the monstrous Count (in Nosferatu, named Orlock), a hideous vampire with a bald skull, rat’s fangs, and sickle claws for hands.... not to mention a peculiar penchant for human blood that the Count doesn’t even attempt to conceal. The lawyer has a beautiful and devoted wife at home, who reacts to news of her husband’s travel assignment with terror and dread from the outset. While he is away, she maintains a constant vigil of prayer for his well-being and safe-return, and it is this divine brand of protection that ultimately saves her husband when the Count begins prowling his castle at all hours of the night. The contracts purchased and deeds signed, the Count departs for the lawyer’s hometown in coffins filled with soil from the burial fields of plague victims, literally bringing pestilence in his wake. When the plague soil arrives in port, the town goes into an emergency quarantine lockdown, leaving the Count free to prowl the streets; only by sacrificing herself, luring the Count to her bedroom for a meal of blood, does the lawyer’s wife keep the vampire out long enough to be caught in the first rays of sunlight, vanquishing him forever.

It was a unique and unforgettable experience seeing this classic (which I'd seen before only on Youtube, with a prerecorded score) performed in circumstances nearly identical to those of its original release, and it required no very great leap on the audience's part to understand why the film was such a huge success upon its release both in its native Germany and abroad. It has the distinction of being one of the very first critically and commercially successful horror movies, as well as a landmark production from a country that was still morally and financially ravaged by unfair reparations in the wake of the First World War. There was perhaps only one dissenting voice in heaping praise upon the production, however - that of Bram Stoker’s widow, perhaps understandably outraged that her husband’s ideas and entire bestselling novel had been plagiarized without so much as a name credit, let alone a cent of royalties. Mrs. Stoker took her case to court and sued, where the judge ruled very obviously in her favor (it would have been impossible for any case to be easier), and all copies of the film’s print were summarily ordered for destruction.

Thankfully, however... vampires are very hard to kill, their films likewise. A very few private prints escaped destruction by hiding away in collectors vaults, and it is only through the discovery and restoration of these that we are able to enjoy Nosferatu today in 2022. Nearly a decade after Nosferatu’s release, Austro-Hungarian heartthrob Bela Lugosi immortalized the character for Universal Studios as tall, dark, and handsome; since that time, vampires have become everything from breakfast cereals to sex symbols for teenage girls who glitter in the sunlight. Count Orlock himself is probably most well-known to today's audiences for sharing scares and flickering the lights with the Hash-Slinging Slasher in "The Graveyard Shift," what I personally believe to still be the single greatest episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever animated. But last night was a perfect reminder, in all its black and white glory, of the very first attempt at capturing this bloodsucker onscreen (the rule that says he can’t appear in mirrors evidently doesn’t apply to celluloid reels), and a rock solid argument could be made that nothing in a century has bettered what was achieved there on the first go-around.

100 years on, and we here are perhaps closer to the original climate of Nosferatu than any audience before us has been since its initial release; when the villagers slam their windows shut to quarantine in a plague outbreak, we in 2022 are uniquely equipped to understand the kind of visceral horror effect F.W. Murnau intended. The jump scare hadn’t been invented yet, but make no mistake, this vampire is here to chill your blood before he tries to drink it. I can only hope that audiences in the next 100 years remember their garlic and crucifixes to ward him off.

One "Rings" to Rule Them All

As any reader of this (admittedly long, long-dormant) blog will probably know already, I'm what could be described as a pop-culture aficionado. Star Wars, Marvel superheroes, the most twisted recesses of Stephen King's horror catalogue - I'm pretty much here for all of it, and I wear it all proudly on my sleeve. Since early childhood, though, nothing has held a candle to one particular body of work above all others - or, to paraphrase, one to rule them all.

I was an impressionable eight-year old when my dad brought me along with some of his friends to a screening of Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001, and although I may not have realized or appreciated it at the time (if anything, quite the opposite - the same creature work and monster makeup that won the New Zealand-based production several Oscars and other industry awards sent me scrambling for terrified cover under the theater seats), looking back, I now recognize it as one of those key turning points in life that's had an immeasurable influence on everything that's come after. Although it was only half-glimpsed at first through spaces in the fingers I'd placed over my eyes, that December screening marked the start of a lifelong preoccupation with J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth: not just the written words themselves, but any and all other morsels about Tolkien's life, his writing group the Inklings (founded with his best friend and Narnia author C.S. Lewis), and his legacy on all fantasy writings that have followed. Rereading the books every year as I do, there’s a quote from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings that I can pull from for pretty much any and every occasion, and the collective body of Tolkien’s life’s work forms the North Star not just of my literary tastes, but of my professional and even private aspirations as well.

What's prompted me now to finally sit behind the old blogging keyboard again is nothing less than a second cosmic convergence of sorts, one that I hope will bring a new generation of viewers - and, even better, readers - to Tolkien's work, like the Jackson films did for me decades ago.

Let's talk The Rings of Power.

When news hit several years ago that Amazon Studios had acquired the adaptation rights for select storylines in Tolkien's extended universe, I was cautiously optimistic; I'll leap at any and every chance to return to Middle-Earth for new adventures, of course... so long as it's being handled with the proper care and respect due for a mythic body of work that one of the great literary minds of the 20th century devoted decades of his life to creating. Such attempts had famously been shot down before, first by Tolkien himself and then posthumously by his children and estate, who stonewalled any attempts to deviate from or in any way commercialize the books for a screen audience, with a strictness that bordered on outright hostility (most notoriously, Tolkien vetoed a hopeful Lord of the Rings movie produced by and starring The Fab Four, The Beatles themselves, almost sight-unseen). But word on the street was that this new project had not only the approval of the Tolkien Estate, but their involvement and cooperation as well, something that no other filmed treatment of Middle-Earth has ever been able to boast of. With increasing confidence and enthusiasm, then, my excitement began to grow as the show's release date grew closer. If the showrunners' vision had impressed the family, the harshest possible critics, that had to bode well.

Smash cut forward to one evening in mid-August, after months of hungrily devouring every news article and trailer that trickled its way online through Amazon's long-game marketing plan.  My phone ping'ed as I sat on the couch, and checking it, I saw that I'd received a message on Twitter from... no, wait, that couldn't be right... from the official Rings of Power social media team?  Bewildered and confused, I was eventually able to decipher that they were writing to inform me that, if I wanted them, they had two tickets for me to the premiere of the show's first two episodes at a special screening event in New York City, ten days before they were officially released on Amazon Prime's streaming platform. The staunchly Catholic Prof. Tolkien might have called me a Doubting Thomas, but my first reaction was that this had to be a prank, a scam, some targeted attempt at pulling my leg; this sort of thing sounded faaaaar too good to be true. To my utter astonishment and delight, however, it was the real gen-yoo-ine artifact after all - they were checkmark authenticated, and had no sketchy requests to send iTunes gift cards to some deposed Nigerian prince (AKA, an attempt at hacking so obvious it would have been simpler to write it in sky writing). They had seen from tweets that I'd sent out that I was not only a Tolkien diehard, but someone who seemed genuinely excited by and open to what the show had to offer - so ten days later, still riding the Cloud 9 feeling like I'd won a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's factory, my wife Katie & I found ourselves in the back of a taxi cab on Manhattan's 5th Avenue, en route to a 5:30 PM red carpet Alice Tully Hall.

Upon arrival, we were issued special VIP badges, then shown to a special cocktail reception where several of the world's leading Tolkien scholars, experts, and creators of online fan sites or other influential social media accounts were either networking or else giddily anticipating the new Middle-Earth content we were all about to see for the first time - a kind of Council of Elrond for fans, with wine and passed hors d'oeuvres. My head was already on a swivel from one impressive guest to another, not saying much but taking in the sheer presence of some of these giants of the field, when I started triple-taking and realized that, mingled among the rest of the night's attendees and engaged with them in spirited conversations, were the stars and creators of The Rings of Power themselves. Having seen their likenesses on posters or their characters delivering trailer-worthy soundbites as part of the scant clips that had been released as teasers, it was a bit surreal seeing the living, breathing actors themselves, cleaned up and dressed in 21st century eveningwear instead of dwarven chainmail armor. While it was an unforgettable experience from start to finish, some true highlights were getting the chance to meet (however briefly) and take pictures with Morfydd Clark & Ismael Cruz Cordova, Galadriel & Arondir respectively; Rings of Power has a massive ensemble cast featuring more than forty actors across several of Middle-Earths different races and species, but if there's such a thing as leads among them, Clark & Cordova probably fit that billing if the marketing material is anything to go by. I'm also happy to report that, for all their talent onscreen, they're incredibly gracious, down-to-earth people who just seem thrilled to be a part of this special project, looking suitably glamorous as they do so... but that's Elves for you, I suppose.

Elbows sufficiently rubbed and cocktails finished, we all then made our way into a spacious theater across the street, where Katie & I were shown all the way down to the third row from the front, sitting in the same row as several of the cast and crew; there's not many other experiences in my life I can compare to watching an elf lord projected fifty-feet high as he discusses his family's turbulent history, then turning to my right and seeing the actor who portrays him sitting about four seats away, watching along in unison. The first few episodes have released on Amazon Prime now, and I encourage you in the strongest possible terms to watch for yourself, but sitting in a packed theater with a state-of-the-art sound system and watching Tolkien's work brought to the big screen again, I was overwhelmed in the most positive sense of the word.

If there's one thing I wish for this show, it's that the conversation around it would shift more to that kind of positivity, which has been unanimously shared by those who've experienced the first few episodes for themselves. Unfortunately, much of the online dialogue (and certainly the media headlines) have centered around a shameful issue of outright ugliness and prejudice in the face of Rings of Power's race-blind casting policies. As someone born in South Africa who was down on record as being vehemently anti-apartheid and was even famously passive-aggressive to Nazi German publishers, Tolkien's writings are and always have been about multiple races, species, and classes of all sorts uniting in fellowship against an oppressively monolithic and intolerant evil; and yet, that same evil now seems to have somehow wormed its way into the opinions of so-called "purists." Apparently dragons, balrogs, orcs, and magic rings are all totally credible in a world such as Middle-Earth in the minds of these small and backwards-minded racists - let me be frank here and call them as such, because for all the semantic acrobatics trying to say otherwise, in the plain light of day it's the only reason they could have for outrage - but a dark-skinned elf? A dwarf with melanin? These things are sacrilege to them, and reason enough to boycott the show or even attempt to outright sabotage its ratings. 

On the one hand, it's a real shame to see such toxicity anywhere near a body of work I've spent so much of my life adoring - but on the other, it's also been incredibly affirming to see the majority of the community step up to speak out loudly against such hatred, stating in no uncertain terms that Middle-Earth is and always will be a place that welcomes all who visit it. As of this writing, you can watch the first four of eight scheduled episodes in the first season for yourself on Amazon Prime, with the remaining four scheduled to release Fridays at midnight over the coming weeks. It's not for me to plug a show from Amazon that's already doing quite well on its own without my meager assistance - and, despite hilariously deluded accusations from the literal trolls of the internet who are determined to do everything possible to see it fail, no, my positive opinion of the show is in no way, shape, or form bankrolled by Amazon conspirators. My real excitement and enthusiasm for Rings of Power is genuine, honest, and it has to be stated, earned. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Tolkien's two most well-known works, manage to play many keys on the tonal piano of genre, from horror to comedy to folklore to war epic, and The Rings of Power is already following suit, thanks in no small part to the performances and contributions of the same people the trolls are trying to turn away. This feels like Middle-Earth, and that's about the highest possible review I can give.

That feeling, maybe more than anything, is what's particularly drawn me to Tolkien as I've continued to grow older, especially as our own world has approached Mordor levels of darkness at times over the last few years. There's an adherence here to a concept that’s becoming so rare in fiction as to become almost revolutionary: purposeful hope in defiance of bleak despair. Unlike the majority of WWI veterans who traded their rifles for pens, Tolkien has never been considered a part of the so-called Lost Generation; while shell-shocked and disillusioned writers like T.S. Eliot & Ernest Hemingway drifted around fashionable Paris cafes, crafting works like "The Wasteland" & A Farewell to Arms that spoke to a societal loss of innocence and moral abandonment, Tolkien looked that same darkness straight in the eye and said "not here." His writings are instead full of wonder, heroism, the beauty of creation and of the natural world, and while they never fall into saccharine Hallmark card territory - the world of Middle-Earth is one constantly threatened (and often even marred) by war, destruction, and death, all sprouting from the pen of a WWI veteran who survived the hellish Battle of the Somme and so was intimately familiar with all three - it's a narrative that ultimately reinforces the power of goodness and light in the end.

The Rings of Power, more than any other question it poses to us - will we get to see the downfall of Numenor? What's the true identity of the mysterious Stranger who crashed to earth in a meteor (I've got a stroooooong, strong theory, just for the record)? Which of these characters could secretly be Sauron's seductive Annatar disguise that he uses to tempt the lords of Middle-Earth into his traps? - asks this one above all: what if fantasy television dared to build its foundations on optimism and hope? In contradiction to other prestige dramas like Better Call Saul or The House of the Dragon which often seem like they're trying to top each other in some unspoken contest of gritty nihilism (as one of The Rings of Power showrunners put it in a Q&A session after the NYC premiere, "peak bleak" seems to be the dominant fashion right now), what if an imaginary world chose to reject the darkness and celebrate all the things Tolkien's own characters would've celebrated as good in the world? It's an experiment I'm only too happy to witness, and one that I feel very grateful to participate in over the coming years. I hope you'll join me, and that a whole new generation will fall in love with Middle-Earth like I did.

The door is open for you, hobbits & harfoots. Speak friend, and enter.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

When I dropped down on one knee in front of my best friend at the backstage area of Disney's Lion King live show in January 2019, I could've realistically guessed there would be some bumps on the road between "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" and the moment we put rings on each other at a church altar. What engagement doesn't have them? For a long time, thankfully, my prediction came true only in the most vanilla, cookie-cutter of ways: the usual vetting process of DJs, photographers, bakers that we both liked, reconciling our two approaches to things like finances, figuring out which brand of milk we could agree on. It was a growth period, the kind that should precede most happy marriages, the necessary laying of a foundation on a site where a house can later be built - all that standard stuff.

Smash cut to March 2020.

We were sitting on the couch of the new apartment we'd been settled in to for a grand total of three weeks. I was about halfway through the knee-high pile of books I'd taken off the shelf a week earlier, when I'd been told to stay home from my job as the PR & Communications Manager for the local auditorium. I'm not above admitting that, for the most part, I was sort of enjoying the unprecedented amount of free time I found myself with then. At that stage of things, I was aware only on the outermost periphery that, for sure, these were some fairly unique circumstances, and that yes, a lot of people seemed like were absolutely losing their minds about toilet paper - but the incoming tide of horror stories from nurses and ERs across the globe hadn't quite hit yet. The mask scars, the wartime shift lengths, the heartrending goodbyes said through plexiglass... my ignorance was bliss, however short-lived it was about to be. In the meantime, read all the books, watch all the shows I'd been wanting to catch up on for a while, without any other professional or social responsibilities? A kind of "SNOW DAY" feeling on steroids? Yes please.

As I turned the page from one chapter to the next, my fiancée Katie leaned over and asked, with only the most passing hint of concern, "You don't think any of this will affect the wedding, do you?" 

"Ha!" I laughed. "Hun. Come on." What a silly idea. What a downright preposterous, frankly laughable suggestion. This whole thing would be over long, long before then. We'd have weeks, MONTHS in the clear before our scheduled August nuptials, when we'd most definitely be looking back and saying in a church packed full of people "wow, weren't those a bizarre few weeks we had way back in March?"

Reader... you may or may not know this already, but it turns out I was more or less wrong in assuming this, in the way the villagers of Pompeii were more or less wrong in assuming the clouds overhead were just a passing shower.

I don't particularly feel the urge to get into every landmine of that journey, that rolling-back process from our original vision to the actual day itself, because no one here needs a newsflash or reminder about anything that's happened in the 2020 verse of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" we find ourselves living on a daily basis. 2020 has been... yep. It's been. 'Nuff said. In truth, we had a hard road, but we don't for one second forget that it could have been a lot harder. Temporarily losing employment or compiling socially-distant seating charts for a wedding with reduced capacity sorta pales next to the reality of mass graves and, like, the West Coast being on fire. I don't want to belittle our problems, or the problems of anyone in similar waters, but even when things were at their darkest in our little personal bubble, it was always soberingly worthwhile to take a look around at the big picture and realize, "you know what, it could be worse."

For engaged couples who are panicking about the current state of their Big Day, let me share the advice that got Katie and I through in one piece - advice that we only got by living through it all firsthand - and you take it for what it's worth. 

Allow yourself to feel, to process every negative emotion as it comes through, rather than just slapping some duct tape of forced positivity on your emotional Titanic. Sure, it's all going to be fine in the end (and I cannot stress this enough, it is, honestly), but you're entitled to feel upset that a day you've been imagining since maybe childhood is subject to changes beyond your control. Feel that frustration, that sadness, that loss. Feel it... then move on from it before it paralyzes you.

Lean on your supports. We didn't have an ace up our sleeves in this respect, we had the deck of fifty-two. I readily acknowledge that it's unfortunately not the same for everyone, but it just makes me appreciate the fact all the more that our parents, siblings, extended relatives, and friends checked in with us daily, if not several times a day. Katie and I are both incredibly close with each of our families, and our expectation for the wedding had been a 200+ person blowout of epic proportions, giving as many of those loved ones the chance to celebrate with us as possible. Phase regulations being what they were, unfortunately, meant that it wasn't to be, and there were lots of very, very difficult texts and phone calls to blood relatives and lifelong friends where we had to break that news. Across the board, not one single person expressed anything besides unwavering sympathy, understanding, and excitement that we were still going to be married at the end of it all. If anything, such responses made these absences even harder, because it just reaffirmed why we wanted those people there in the first place. 

Through everything, my mind kept returning (like it pretty much always does, in all scenarios) to a quote from Tolkien, which replayed over and over as I tried my best to comfort Katie through venue closures, chainsaw cuts to the guest list, etc.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

For Katie and I, using our given time meant not waiting or postponing the wedding until some unspecified future date when hopefully, "fingers crossed!" this would all be blown over - because the plain truth is that neither of us had much confidence or certainty about when that would be. Couples who have gone that route have absolutely made the right choice for themselves (really, we're all well off the edge of the map here, so there's no such thing as a wrong route no matter what you choose), but Katie and I decided that in our case, if 2020 has taught us anything, it's that you just can't predict what's coming at you next month, let alone next year. All you can do is plant yourself where you can, declare "this is where we make our stand together," and refuse to give any further ground to a year that's been only too happy to take as much as it can and more.

And you know what?

Despite all the stress... despite all the headaches and back and forths and late night tears and uncertainty... despite masks and social distance and all the other straight-up historical obstacles we had to contend with...

We got married, folks. And it was, down to the last cliché, the greatest day of our lives to date.

Katie got her big moment walking down the aisle, and the general consensus (held by no one more strongly than her lucky-as-hell husband) is that she was the most radiant, joyful looking bride anyone in the church had seen. We had our full Mass ceremony, followed by a small, intimate outdoor reception where people could roam around in the fresh air and safely spread out according to social distancing standards. Besides the sheer joy of becoming Mr. & Mrs. now, one of the things we're most happy about is the fact that we got married and it felt like an actual wedding, complete with first dances and cake cuttings... but SAFELY, and within all recommended health standards. Well past the two week barrier now, we're happy to report there was not a single positive case or scare among anyone in our small assembled group, and that's more important to us than we can state in words. If nothing else, we've got stories and pictures to spare that could go down in the history books as documentation of what weddings were really like in this crazy old year. Future historians, you heard it here first.

If getting married in a pandemic has any upside at all, it's the focusing of perspective that occurs amidst it all. The fat that can sometimes distract people from the absolute nucleus of what this event's supposed to be gets trimmed away, and laid bare for what it is. It's not about the cardstock used for the invites, the length of the flower stems, the font used for the party favors. It's you and the other half of your soul, staring each other in the face and promising "I do" as easy as breathing, since spending the rest of your life with that person is the most-no brainer decision you can imagine making. That's all, folks. Everything else is confetti. Nice confetti, maybe, sure, but swept away when the party's over all the same, while the two of you drive off into the wedded bliss of Forever.

Puzzling as it may seem, Katie and I are both grateful to have been refocused like this onto the things that really, truly, deeply matter. Laying the foundations to that house I mentioned way back at the beginning in the midst of a proverbial earthquake means that we're bomb-proof now, baby. Bring it on. Undoubtedly, there will be lots, lots, lots more challenges in the decades we've got ahead of us - most of them probably beyond my imagining now as a newlywed - but with a start like this, we know we've got it in us now to face whatever it could be. 

Our deep, deep thanks and appreciation for everyone who's been on this journey with us. It's been an adventure and a half, but we know it's been only the prologue to all the ones still to come, ones that we can't wait to share with each and every one of you. Stay safe out there in the meantime, folks. We're gonna make it through this together, in all the ways that "together" now means.

Until next time, these two newest, luckiest Cooks in the kitchen are sending lots of love your way. Our happily ever after is one that has you all of you in it.

Brady's Bunch

It was the tail end of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady's record-setting 2006-07 season, where he seemed to have achieved some kind of telepathic link with wide receiver Randy Moss. League records were toppling faster than they could be set, so in the sports-loving Cook household, "Brady" was without question the name of the hour.

Which is why, when a 6 lb crate arrived first class at Logan Airport hours before a blizzard descended on the region in February 2007, there was only one name in mind for the fluffy white creature whose nose poked out of the shredded newspaper bedding at us.

I was in the 8th grade at that time - gangly, translucent, my cusp-adolescence phase in full swing. Amazing as it is for me to consider now, I hadn't had much contact with dogs at that point in my life - hardly any, as a matter of fact, to the point where I was almost skittish around them. The moment this Oklahoma-born fur-ball made his first tentative steps on our home kitchen tiles, however, all that unfamiliarity just vanished without a trace, and my life for the past thirteen years has been incomparably better for it.

I sit here writing to you now, though, feeling that unfamiliarity again for the first time in all those years. I'm stunned, and trying to process. Writing is how I do that, so here we are.

The Cook family had to say goodbye to our best friend last night. Our hearts are shattered.

The cotton ball ear-swab with legs that was Brady as we first got to know him, in puppy form

You've heard about it. It's covered ground. It's not a fresh take.  I don't care. If you're lucky enough, hopefully you'll know what I'm trying to get at, because a master's degree in writing isn't good enough here to provide me with the language to describe the friendship these beings bring to our lives. Sweet, unselfish, and faithful, faithful, faithful, Brady stopped being thought of as a "pet" or anything like it from the moment his puppy barks were first heard in our kitchen. He was, and will remain, a core, central part of the Cook family unit, no matter where it roams and spreads to in the future.

At the end, he passed, of all things, from a heart that was almost doubly large normal size, and the fitting poetry of that almost insults me. He really was all heart. He looked at you (you've got dozens of examples below that I won't apologize for including to excess), and in that expression was - sincerity? love? unmatched genuine-ness? contentedness? the unshakable feeling that he, a dog, comprehended and understood whatever it was you said to him better than most people could? I'm grasping here, trying to find the right description of Brady's personality, and adjectives are falling short in the same way that a puddle falls short of the ocean.

He was a lot of things to the Cooks - everything, in some ways - but the best I can do here is to include some of those things in picture form, and hope it imparts some minuscule sense of the unfailingly bright spot he was in our lives. Maybe, just maybe, we can follow some of his examples, and be all the better for it.

MASCOT

Not surprisingly for a family that named their dog after a quarterback, the Cooks are all about sports, whether watching or playing them. Brady was on-hand for both situations. He sniffed his way through countless cross country races or field hockey games, but his preference was definitely tailgating at home for Stanley Cups or World Series - because tailgates mean food, and food means plenty of chances for sharing. If that meant other people came over, the more the merrier, because visitors meant fresh and unsuspecting victims for begging.

In an ironic twist, his least favorite sport to be around for was probably football, because whenever his namesake made a mistake on the field and the room erupted in angry cries of "COME ON, BRADY!" it was always hard to clear up the confusion.

FASHION ICON
(This section largely falls under the category of "things Andrew had no involvement in or knowledge of until after the fact")

Whether it was hats... 

... sombreros...

... Shakespearean neck ruffles...

... or just a pair of sunglasses, Brady was a dog of many looks. And he was adorable in every single one of them.

PHYSICAL TRAINER

We attribute Brady's long and very healthy thirteen years to the fact that, literally right up to the last day, he was an incredibly active dog. He went for multiple walks a day, (usually one early in the morning and one after work or around dinnertime) and could have been a world-champion fetch player. One of my proudest and greatest accomplishments so far on this Earth is that I was usually his go-to fetch partner; it was a highlight of many, many a day for me, let alone him.

 As seen here, though, Brady didn't stop his exercise involvement with fetch games. Whether in a (literal) support role for stretching after runs -

- or with more hands-on approach for weighted squats, Brady was deeply invested in everyone's health and fitness. 

Especially if that meant time for chin-scratches between reps.

HOME BODY

Without a single shred of doubt, Brady's favorite place in the entire world was within the four walls of his own home. Car rides were hit or miss (made better if they included fast food "magic windows" that handed cheeseburgers right to you), walks in the park were fine and good, but nothing made Brady's day more than a soft blanket and room to stretch on his couch. The quarantine lifestyle suited him just fine.

For 22 lbs, he was also able to occupy a surprisingly incredible amount of cushion space all by himself.

His happiest dreams included cheese pizzas and the horrible demise of mailmen (more on that later)

And he definitely appreciated the comfort of a friend to fall asleep with.

Once he could be bothered to move to a new position and yawn himself awake, Brady himself probably took greatest pride in his role as 

PROTECTOR

If tributary plaques were scattered around the Cook household, the one under our large front picture window would read "Brady's Spot." This was his perch; his crow's nest; his eye in the sky upon the world outside, which he guarded with never-failing vigilance.

A literally uncountable number of joggers, bicyclists, dog-walkers, and cars were greeted on their way up our street over the last thirteen years by this fearsome sentinel, whose steely gaze surveyed all in his domain. Notice the one paw draped over the side of his perch, panther-like. A masterclass in intimidation.

Again, the definition of loyalty, Brady would remain in this perch for hours on end when one of his flock was away at work or school, patiently waiting for their return. Seeing a car pull into the driveway, he would then leap down to the carpet and sprint to the door. A better or more faithful greeting party, a body could never hope to find.

However, on the other side of that coin, a fiercer defender you could never encounter, and no one clashed with Brady in this regard like the dreaded mailman. Starting at puppy-age and never once taking a day off, Brady would always be woken from a peaceful sleep by the distinctive engine of the mail truck tck-tck-tcking to life around around the corner. He would scramble to his vantage point in the window, spot his prey, and proceed to come UNGLUED as the mailman - who, I should mention, is actually a very nice gentleman - returned, day after day and year after year, to "invade" our home territory. Diving from his perch to the mail slot, he would then catch whatever the post was delivering that day as it fell from the slot to the floor, and either violently shred it to pieces or hide it behind living room furniture.

We stopped displaying Christmas cards we received because of puncture marks through loved ones' faces; when Heather and I were expecting college admission packets, we had to meet the mailman on the walkway for fear of  acceptance letters being hidden or destroyed. Mail deliveries are about to become a lot more uneventful, and my heart is broken.

BEST FRIEND

The scope of this hasn't hit me yet, and I doubt it will for quite a while. Moved into a place of my own now, it's going to take me a very, very long time to return back and not expect a 22 lb muppet to come barreling down the hallway at me whenever I visit. How could I? When we met, I had braces, asthma, and a raging hatred of middle school; half a lifetime later, I had planned to google "dog bowties" for an appearance at my wedding (my opinion on middle school hasn't changed, though).

Brade - my cheese connoisseur, my nap partner, my co-pilot, the Chewie to my Han - I'm going to miss you, bud. A lot. A whole lot. You were a perfect, beautiful soul that it's been one of the privileges of my life to grow up alongside. I cannot state this strongly enough... I would not be the person I am today without you. No sunset walk and no ice cream cup will go by without a thought in your honor. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being such a  source of joy in our world. 

Rest easy, pal. You've earned all the cheese and chin scratches the universe could give. Keep a watchful eye over us from your brand new and improved perch. We'll see you later.

The Force for Good

Now is the Golden Age of fandom. From Avengers Assembling to Boys Who Lived, everyone now seems to have at least one pop-culture phenomenon in an ever-expanding landscape full of them where they can return, again and again, for enjoyment, excitement, or even escape. A majority of these ebb and flow from the spotlight of public attention (no matter how many Harry Potter themed weekends Freeform Channel tries to flood us with over the course of year), or attract a devoted yet small and insular group of like-minded individuals, but the point is that seemingly everyone can find their own pick on the menu at the moment.

However, one body of work seems to have missed the memo concerning this typical order of things entirely, casting an almost hypnotic effect on humans as a worldwide collective that's gone unbroken since it first trumpeted into our lives more than four decades ago.

I'm talking, of course, about Star Wars, and my suspicion is that no one reading this here needs a refresher on what it's about any more than the average person would need a refresher on, say... well, actually, I'm having difficulty coming up with anything as well-known or pervasive by way of comparison. Yoda, the Death Star, "I am your father" ... these things just seem to exist in the universal consciousness, with no explanation required, in a way that's almost baffling.

For those on the fringes of the Outer Rim who may recognize some of the more iconic things at first glance but aren't necessarily plugged in at diehard levels, Star Wars is back in the news again this week because the ninth and final installment of the so-called "Skywalker Saga" (a.k.a. the story George Lucas began telling way back in 1977) debuts around the world this Friday. It's being billed as the culmination of all eight films that have preceded it... everything from the original trilogy of the 1970s and 80s, the prequel trilogy of the late 90s and early 00s that filled in the back story of the most iconic baddie in all of cinema, the most recent installments under the direction of Disney, and even beyond, to the multimedia universe of spin-offs and adaptations that have sprung up around the central, Episodic films. For the millions of fans of a galaxy far, far away, this week has been circled on the calendar for a looooooong time.

I can almost hear the cynics among us rolling their eyes: "The last one? Really for real this time, the last one? What about the last two times the series claimed it was the last one? Those didn't count, huh?" much in the same way people roll their eyes about KISS announcing a nineteenth "This Is It, ULTIMATE FAREWELL" tour. In the name of fairness, if there's one thing Disney knows how to do, it's make some $$$ (the entertainment mega-corporation acquired total rights to the franchise's past, present, and future back in 2012, to the tune of $4 billion). Any parent who's left a ride in Disney World only to find themselves conveniently distributed into a ride-themed gift shop will testify as much, and one can't see the Mouse House abandoning a cash cow as ludicrously lucrative as Star Wars any time soon.

However, with Baby Yoda spawning new memes on a weekly basis over on The Mandalorian (the flagship show of Disney's new online streaming service), at least three more confirmed original shows coming down the pipeline, a deluge of comics, cartoons, and video games all dominating the market right now, and even a newly-opened theme park area, I'd say Disney's accountants have to be pretty happy with their Star Wars-shaped future. There are other stories to tell in this sandbox now, without needing to rely on the main films about the Skywalker extended family tree as the primary generators of content, so the film debuting Friday - Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker, for those keeping track - has an air of definite finality to it.

To be fair, when the memes are this consistently adorable, who wouldn't want more?

Rather than delve into theories about what the movie will likely hold - REY + KYLO, IS IT FINALLY HAPPENING? IS THE EMPEROR ALIVE AGAIN THROUGH CLONING? WILL THERE BE BLUE MILK? - or try and philosophize about Star Wars' standing in relation to other pop-culture sensations before or since, I actually wanted to dedicate this post to what I think is the most important part of the series... the fans.

Through texts and social media posts, I sent out the question to friends and family: What does Star Wars mean to you? What is it about the appeal of this big goofy, wonderful space franchise, do you think?

Boy, it turns out people LOVE talking about Star Wars.

The answers I received back were better than anything I could've hoped. Wandering, passionate, personal, scrutinizing, these responses represent a whole spectrum of perspectives and opinions. If some seem to contradict one another, it just goes to show the range of interpretations Star Wars can offer to audiences. To me, the amount of similarities is what's even more interesting - echoes of people finding common ground and agreement in a time when those occurrences are more and more uncommon. Go ahead and take a read through them, then stick through the end for a final personal anecdote from Yours Truly that articulates my own thoughts about everyone's favorite space fantasy better than anything else I can think of.

WHAT DOES STAR WARS MEAN TO YOU? 

"Star Wars is my first memory of going to the movies. Star Wars is scrounging around my cousin Mike’s house looking for batteries to power up his Han Solo blaster. Star Wars is playing with my X-Wing fighter so much that I repeatedly snapped the wings off, which my dad then had to bring to work to have it fixed on the special machine that specifically fixes X-Wings. Star Wars is having a calendar countdown when the first prequel was about to be released. Star Wars is sitting in Gilday’s dorm with a mountain of beers, watching the entire original trilogy (on VHS) and cheering every time the opening credits started. Star Wars is getting to watch my son run around and fight invisible storm troopers. Star Wars is pretty good."

"Watching it, you see that one person has the ability to spark a change in the course of history. It's their decision whether this change will be for better or worse. Also, laser swords are pretty awesome."

"It shows how if you try to force a natural balance to favor one side, it will always result in disorder, no matter which direction it is pushed."

"Where to begin? I am the only girl out of three children, and I remember watching A New Hope in the basement on VHS, then spending the 15-20 minutes it took for the tape to rewind playing out the action, with my brothers playing Luke & Han. And then, of course, rewatching the movie and repeating the cycle all over again. Star Wars is the only pop culture experience that has stayed with me consistently my whole life, never once drifting into the realm of nostalgia or 'I used to love...' I was born during a decade in which the original trilogy was readily available, then got to experience the prequels as a young child on the big screen as they premiered, and now I get to live through this resurgence of popularity with my fiance. Our biggest argument thus far has been in which order we'll introduce our future children to the franchise... chronologically by story timeline, or by release date? (I'm Team Release Date, in case you were wondering)"

"Nostalgia. Everyone has a childhood memory of Star Wars that you keep near and dear to your heart forever."

"It can be frustrating, actually. Especially lately, but going back decades with George Lucas, it just seems like it's all happening at the whims of whoever happens to be in charge at the time. George Lucas is one of the worst creators around in terms of revisionist history... whether or not Han shot first (he did), Luke & Leia turning out to be siblings, all those controversies that radically alter what's come before them, only for Lucas to say 'Oh, that's what I intended all along, you're wrong to think otherwise.' And then you have something like The Last Jedi, where a director can come in off the street, ruin one of the franchise's main characters because it's where he so happens to think the narrative should go, then that's now the official story... there's a lack of cohesion or respect for the fans from installment to installment that has made me just lose more and more interest in it as it progresses."

There's debate about whether Han shot first or not, but no doubt at all about Patrick

"It says that anything is possible."

"I think it's the fact that the storyline is strong enough to hold the attention of people who may not be your typical sci-fi fans. For people who prefer movies that have 'deeper' meaning, it offers that element if you want to bother looking past the somewhat-hokey elements. While of course the different species and droids and all of that play their part, you can look past all that, and at the heart, there is a compelling story."

"I’ve always enjoyed the science-fiction aspect of the movies, the thought that this could actually be the future, that this could actually happen. The story line of good versus evil, and the twists in between where you have good-natured people that turn away and turn into the dark side. There are different twists, and you never know where it’s going."

"Everything."

"What drew me in was classic evil versus good plot line that also has a ton of grey areas. I think, like most stories, Star Wars is trying its best to show that people are complex, there's always a backstory, and life sucks."

"It's the universality. It not only appeals to everyone, both on a cross-cultural and cross-generational level, but it's one of the only things around today where you can get as much or as little out of it as you want to. I love Star Trek and Game of Thrones and a lot of today's other fictional universes, but you have to invest a lot of time and effort into understanding them sometimes.You can't necessarily just come off the street and enjoy them. Star Wars, you can. There's a simplicity to it that everyone can latch on to. There's a really appealing *pew pew* ray guns and laser swords element to it, playground style, and you can just put it on for a few minutes and mindlessly enjoy the sheer window-dressing craftsmanship on display of other imaginary landscapes, species, technology - BUT, all that said, you can also go deep and peel away at it with a scalpel and examine its tapestry as a modern mythology in a big, operatic sandbox. The ancient Greeks who had all these myths about the bloodlines of Zeus and self-fulfilling tragedies, Shakespeare and his plays about destinies written in the stars and all his comic relief characters... these people would've adored Star Wars. It really is satisfying on all those levels, it balances all those perspectives in a way that not much else can. We're so lucky to have this as something we can pass on to the future as a product of our time."

For being in the first grade at the time, I have to say I made a pretty convincing Sith apprentice

Now folks, turn back your clocks to circa 2005, with the Iraq War raging overseas and Green Day on the radio. I am in the sixth grade, and belong to that group of individuals who, in a word, struggle through their middle school years. Success at my small Catholic middle school is judged by peers according to two main factors: your ability on the kickball field, and your ability to act like you have NO enthusiasm for anything in the world at all, because caring is for geeks only. I am A) asthmatic and can't kick the rubber ball past the pitcher's mound, while others can send it soaring into the outfield ("automatic out!" is usually the signal that I'm stepping up to the plate), and B) deeply enthusiastic about all sorts of things, Star Wars high among them. Couple that with a big heaping helping of pre-teen introversion, and yeah, it's still not a time I look back fondly on, even now.

The Revenge of the Sith will be debuting in theaters in a few months, the final film of the Star Wars prequel trilogy that sees the once-heroic Anakin Skywalker finally transform into the black-armored behemoth the galaxy knows as Darth Vader, and books full of teaser images and concept art have been released to an eager public ahead of time. I've been keeping one of these stashed in my desk, and after sailing through any classwork the teacher assigns, I've been spending my days pulling it out to take a stab at drawing my own versions of the new ships, droids, and costumes it shows inside. There's a corner in the back of the classroom where the teacher, either impressed by or filled with sympathy for these sketches, has set up a makeshift art gallery for anyone to post their creations to. At the moment, it's papered from floor to ceiling with Star Wars masterpieces that I've been thumb-tacking there for weeks, the gallery's sole contributor.

One day, I'm mercifully spared from kickball, because some kind of bad weather is happening outside and we're having recess indoors. On special occasions like this, the divider door between classrooms 6A & 6B (the two halves of St. Margaret's small sixth grade year) is left open, and we're allowed to travel, wide-eyed, between the two rooms, getting a taste of what daily life is like for the tribe on the other side of the island. Realizing this opportunity for the unique market it provides, I pull a desk over near the open divider door, grab a stack of plain white paper, and prop up my concept art book so that there's no mistaking just what it is I'm offering. Forget playing cards, or the huddle forming around the one girl in class whose parents have bought her an early-model cell phone; I scrawl "FREE STAR WARS DRAWINGS" on the top sheet of paper, hang it over the side of the desk as a makeshift advertisement, then sit back and wait for what I know will be a steady stream of classmates who won't believe their good luck about this one-time offer. I wait... and make some hopeful eye contact with some passerby... and wait... "You want one? Oh... ok, no worries, you can always come back tomorrow if you want..." and wait... until recess is over, and I bring the utterly untouched pad of paper back to its storage bin.

I'll stop here to spare you any further tragic details, and leave off with the slightly surprising suggestion not to feel too bad for this young lad when all is said and done. For whatever reason, this incident didn't send him home that afternoon feeling miserable - by the time the next bell rang, the art book was back out again, and new drawings were being produced for no one else's enjoyment but his and the gallery wall's. In doing so, he was immersing himself once again in an epic saga that told how all evils passed eventually, be they Evil Empires or Wars on Terror, or even something as hellish as middle school; the trick was just to not give up on hope in the meantime. He learned that lesson well, and it's never left him since.

(As you can clearly tell)

Near fifteen years later, and while on a personal level I've moved on to a place galaxies away from the 6B classroom - seven marathons now separate me from the asthma of the kickball field, and I'm currently counting down the days until I get to marry a soulmate who actually shared that same recess yard with me - the world at large is seeing more than its fair share of new evils. For some mind-boggling reason, it seems that Nazis are, like, a thing again in society, mirroring a plot development in the Disney-era films that (I'll speak for everyone here) we'd rather have kept in the fictional universe. Vitriol, prejudice, divisiveness seem to threaten with every new venture into the Internet comment section, and a feeling of downright oppressiveness looms over the lives of a dishearteningly large portion of our society today.

But if Star Wars offers any kind of message whatsoever to its millions of fans worldwide, I think it's a rallying call to resist, to rebel against this kind of doom and gloom, to fight it with lightsabers and X-Wings and plain old stubbornness until it passes away, as it inevitably always will. I couldn't be prouder to stand and be counted in a Rebellion like that, with each and every one of my fellow Rebels quoted above, and it's been a joy to have experienced a story that inspires so much hope - A New Hope, you could say - with friends and family right up until the conclusion here.

Grab your lightsabers, folks. Let's get out there and do it all again one last time.

May the Force be with you.