Weekend report--hope

Sometimes I feel like the "Life and Weekend" reporter for the UU blogosphere...anyhooo.....

Tomorrow the new Pixar movie "Up" opens.

People all over the country are going to see it. The movie got 98 from Rotten Tomatoes, does anything ever get a 98? My local NPR station's movie critic said he wishes every movie was made by Pixar, that's how good they are, that's how good this movie is. At least that's what we hear. I'm not surprised.

A group of my friends from high school, back in Minnesota, are getting together tomorrow to go see "Up". Why would a bunch of 40 somethings go to see an animated movie on opening night?

Well, ya see, we all went to high school with Pete Docter, the director of "Up",

and the director of "Monster's Inc", instrumental in "Wall-E" and "Toy Story". That Pete Docter. No one who knew him is surprised that he's successful, that he's creative. That he's funny. I remember him as being kind and funny and good. I remember him going downtown to a festival of animated films as a junior. We had philosophy class together, we had a yearbook class together. He drew a little animated fellow in my year book, and he went on and made a great life.

The funny thing is that even then, even when I was a kid in high school I sensed something about Pete's family. I knew some strange things about his family, like his mother knew two of my friends' mothers--were they maybe even sorority sisters? And during the year the Docter's were overseas while his father was teaching at a university for a year, one of them friends family stayed in their house. They got to live overseas. He has a younger sister with my same name but prounounced the real Norwegian way (car-ee instead of care-ee) and everyone in the family is musical. I think his sister is a professinal cellist.

But more than those funky little weird things, I had this sense that Pete and his sister just had a wonderful family life. A great launch. I remember even as a young woman thinking "I want to raise my kids like Pete and his sister were raised". Somehow it just seemed that there was something going on in that family that allowed Pete to be ready for a life. Ready for dreams. Ready to be sure of who he was and who he would be.

I so wanted to do that for my children, give them a sense of family and home that would allow them to grow into the tall trees that they were meant to become. Fertile ground.

I hope.