Here’s a not very daring assumption: We tend to remember movies that feature the urgent call of a single name. See if you can identify the films the following names go with. (Hint: Add “-Come-Home” to each name and you’ll nail at least one.)
“Stella!”
“Shane!”
“Heidi!”
”Grandfather!”
“Lassie!”
“Rosebud!”
For extra credit, name the name that is most different from the others in at least three ways.
Extra credit answer: 1. Unlike the other pleading, top-of-the-lungs cries, “Rosebud” is called out in a hoarse, private whisper; 2. The name Rosebud doesn’t belong to a person or a pet, but to a sled—the ironic, iconic, most-valuable childhood possession of eccentric publishing tycoon, Charles Foster Kane, who invokes its name as he breathes his last. 3. It’s not clear why Kane calls out to his sled, and thereby hangs a movie and a metaphor.
A Mild Obsession
I have been visiting this Rosebud trope for a few years now. I’m convinced that it is ripe for creative applications. For instance, has anyone ever thought of making an animated TV series about young Charlie Kane and his faithful sled, Rosebud? They could time-travel into the future and help the grown-up Kane remember that what matters is sharing, kindness, friendship, etc. Or better yet, what about a live-action series in which a main character is reunited each week with a long-lost, essential possession? Maybe a guy rescues his boyhood trumpet that he discovers in a pawn shop window. Or an artist who is creatively blocked has a vivid dream about finding an old sketchpad in her attic. Sure enough, there it is in the same chest drawer she saw in her dream. It inspires her to win back her confidence, and she becomes a famous painter. Or it could be a private eye who reunites the high and mighty with their forgotten humble companions, kind of a reverse set-up from the old enriching-a-stranger TV series “The Millionaire. “ (John Beresford Tipton, meet Charlie Kane.)
The truth is, my obsession with Rosebuds is more selfish than those altruistic gambits. It usually coincides with my thinking about a random item from my childhood that might qualify as my own Rosebud. Not necessarily deathbed-worthy—that criterion can’t be determined ahead of time. Call it a lifebed-worthy reconnection with something that mattered in the past and still reverberates — some alchemy of power and sentiment, access and comfort.
Hurry Up, Cows
Eight years ago, in my previous blog, I revisited the memory of a 45 rpm record I listened to a lot as a six-year-old. The record spoke to me—literally. It spoke as the record, complaining on side one that the needle was too sharp and on side two that the velvety turntable surface tickled. Is that what made the record memorable? Partly, but mainly it was the song of the little cowboy. There was a story on the record about a big cowboy and a little cowboy, who sang a song as he rode at night among his herd of tiny cattle:
“It makes no difference if I’m small—
Hurry up, hurry up, cows.
It doesn’t matter to me at all—
Hurry up, hurry up, cows.”
That was what endured, I think: the power of authoritative nonchalance. The nothing-to-it of being small. To test its Rosebuddiness, I tried it out with a Kanelike hoarse whisper of my own: “Hurry up, hurry up, cows…” Hmm. It had a stale, seized-by-a-drunk quality. The fact is, I didn’t need the little cowboy as a role model anymore. Unlike Kane, I had not been forced to give up my boyhood for a career in acquiring wealth. My problem was the opposite: too much boyhood, too little business.
I wonder if it’s the name—“Rosebud!” or whatever—that makes the difference , wielding the power of a password, a war cry, or a magic pronouncement like Rumpelstiltskin or Open Sesame. Or is it the object that matters more—the artifact of the sled, say, with all its evocative details? Most likely it’s a combination—the name summoning the object like, say, a gun-shaped movie projector I once had that brought the magic of technology a little nearer when I was about ten.
Picture Gun
I don’t remember calling it a Picture Gun, or any other name. I had Googled “movie projector gun-shaped” for no reason other than a passing thought, the same because-I-can whim that prompts anyone’s Google hunt for a childhood memento. And there it was, more or less. I found it on eBay as an “Auto-Magic Picture Gun” with a layout of photos and descriptions. My memory of that gun was a lot more impressive than this retro assemblage of parts and picture pieces! (I would be remiss if I didn’t insert a caveat for any potential Rosebud hunter using Google, YouTube, or other digital aid. Something like: Caution: the integrity of the original memory of your “Rosebud” may be permanently altered after being enhanced and supplanted by this digitally-retrieved simulacrum.)
In its original context it was a working movie projector. And I was the guy in control, the commander of this doo-hickey. It was far and away my coolest toy, if toy even applies. Toy doesn’t convey the power it conferred: to show your own movie in your own room; to project the authority of being the projectionist of an actual Popeye cartoon or a Flash Gordon adventure; not least of all, to display the friend-impressing mechanical knowledge needed to squeeze the trigger, which sent the beam of light through the mini-amusement park ride of a filmstrip’s journey and out the gun barrel to come to life on a draped bedsheet or a wallpaper-free wall. Yes, I know, it was shaped like a gun, but beat your swords into plowshares, your honor! Besides, as it says on the website. By the laws of ebay this is not a real gun, it is a movie projector with a light bulb and batteries, it can not be made into a weapon.
Exactly right: the power lay in the movie projector, not the gun. I paid no attention to the gun half of its identity until much later, after the movie projector broke, and I used it as a prop for a detective character on Halloween, some square-jawed cartoon like Fearless Fosdick or Dick Tracy. Yes, your honor, I know this “trick-or-treat prop” could get me killed nowadays, or even thenadays. With that in mind, it’s best not to overload a potential Rosebud with too much responsibility. The power of a memory accrues best in small amounts. Even Kane’s sled was no be-all and end-all. Well, maybe it was an end-all.
To keep it from being unwieldy, there is a bridge you can build with some of these preview Rosebuds (Rosebuddies? Rosedubs?) In fact, this bridge corresponds nicely with the arc of a memoir. Case in point, the little record with Hurry Up, Cows and the Picture Gun movie projector. What bridge are they part of? Salvation? Too heavy. Entertainment? Too light. How about technology? Aha.
The technology bridge probably started with TV, the one-eyed invader with a white dot representing the open sesame magic. Too everyday and ubiquitous to bear the mystery of a Rosedub, but at age six, a talking record parlaying a lesson on self-confidence through a cowboy song to a herd of cows? For sure. And the Picture Gun gets a bridge pass for threading a filmstrip alone. Next technological marvel to deliver the wisdom of the world would have come a year after the Picture Gun, an age 11 birthday present from my dad: a sleek gray table model Hallicrafters shortwave radio. Whose invisible radio waves, measured in hertz and megacycles, caromed off the ionosphere up there at the edge of outer space; allowing me to receive the exotic laughter of the kookaburra bird, introducing another morning broadcast from Radio Australia to my bedroom in El Paso, Texas. That radio kept technology wonderful before a succession of devices took over called computers, laptops, search engines, smart phones, iTunes, iPads, and so forth, none of which have possessed the puppy-in-the-window nameability of a viable Rosebub.
Gather ye rosebuds
Which brings me to one last literary and small-r, but not exactly botanical, rosebud. It lives in the opening line of a 15th century poem by Robert Herrick. There’s even a link between this poem and a movie. The poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” is presented in the film “Dead Poets’ Society.” The dead poet Herrick begins it thus: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old time is still a-flying / And the same flower that smiles today / To-morrow will be dying, So, seize the day! Robin Williams urges his class of callow preppies. Carpe diem!
Two rosebuds, two perspectives from widely divergent times of life—the poet’s rosebud looks ahead: You’re not going to live forever, youngster; death waits somewhere along the road, so grab your chances while you can.
The capital-r Rosebud looks back: You’re not going to live forever, Kane; death’s thumb is poised on your stopwatch, too. So remember who and what matters most in your life and connect with those Rosebubs and appreciate them while you can.
As the saying goes around the rental agencies—Car-pay per diem!
Or so I gather.
The Old Hatchery 