There’s no sign to announce it, but I like to think of this place as Serendipity Farm. It’s the perfect name for this new home: we weren’t looking for it, but we found it. Through the happy accident of serendipity, we came across these five shaded acres. I didn’t know I wanted something like this, and now I can’t imagine my life without it. When I go out to the road around five each morning, the stars (so many more than you could ever see in town) are so vivid and sharp, they’re like pinholes allowing me a glimpse of a new and unbelievably bright world.
And sometimes in the morning, when the newspaper brings me bad news, I walk down the lane, through the trees, to see how things look from the gazing field.
It’s a large field at the end of the road – a wide open hay field, though sometimes the owners rotate in cattle and in the mornings, they moo their displeasure with these sudden and unexplained moves. And sometimes in the evening, I take my wife’s hand and suggest we amble down to the gazing field to watch the sun set. There are too many trees on our property to allow for the proper appreciation of a sunset. But down at the gazing field, there’s nothing to block out the sky or your thoughts.
Today’s bad news is the death of Paul Newman. I suppose he’s probably the first actor whose films I started to look for. When I was a boy, I went to the movies every other night. We lived on an Air Force base and the features changed that often. My parents let me ride my bicycle to the theater alone and sometimes sit through both evening showings. It was quite an education. I always sat in the center of the front row. I leaned back in my seat, waiting to be overwhelmed.
I saw “Hud” in that smoky theater. I was a child and unsure what was going on in the film. The audience was filled with over-sexed airmen groping their heavily-mascaraed dates. They gave me no clues; the theater was just a quiet place for them to be together. So as a kid, all alone at the movies, I had no one to explain the plot to me. But I couldn’t stop watching. Newman’s cool and his confidence were magnetic.
Later came “Harper,” “Hombre,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Paul Newman continued to make fine films throughout his career, but those movies hit me at the right time of my life. I was his most ardent pupil.
I recall that within the Christ allegory of “Cool Hand Luke” was the scene of a young country vixen washing her car as the chain gang works a few yards away. She torments the prisoners, at one point doing most of the washing of the windows with her barely clad, soaking-wet bosom. And so I also shared one of my most memorable early moments of lust with Paul Newman as well.
My father was an impossibly intelligent and decent man. I fiercely admired him, but wondered how I could ever live up to that ideal. So I suppose what was going on in that movie theater was me looking for clues in how to be a man. Paul Newman portrayed the anti-hero … a pool hustler, a down-on-his-luck d
etective, a small-time criminal. But he also was a man who faced the world with kindness, humor and a shimmer in his eyes. He was not only comfortable with his imperfections; he seemed to wear them like armor.
Beyond his work on screen, he showed us how good people work hard to help others. He took the central tragedy of his life (the death of his son) and used his pain to create something good, a drug-treatment center. Later, he used his money to create camps for terminally ill children, teaching us that life, even when it is short, can still have a tremendous capacity for joy.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Maybe you have to be someone of my age to understand the profound loss I felt, standing there, looking out over that field, and realizing that Paul Newman was gone. I was lucky to have such a man as a role model. I wasn’t looking for him, but I found him, up on that huge silvered screen.