Unfinished Business

In the scheme of things, this bit of unfinished business is more like an itch that was never satisfactorily scratched. We all leave much bigger things undone, but this frustration is nonetheless quite real.

Older readers will remember that magical time before video on-demand, Netflix, and even DVDs, when VCRs were first becoming available. My parents, I'm sure driven my my dad being ever the early adapter in all things technology, brought home our first VCR in the late 1970s. My mom told me that a single recordable blank VHS tape cost about $30 at the time. Think about that. And of course, Blockbuster didn't exist yet.

My parents went out one night and left the new machine (a version of which we've seen at the Smithsonian, by the way) recording an old Frank Sinatra movie called The Man With the Golden Arm, not to be confused with a similarly titled James Bond movie. When they went to watch it, the ending had been cut off for some reason. For a lot of my childhood, the elusive ending of this movie was a sort of cultural holy grail for my parents. Silly, yes, and they acknowledged as much. But it was a tiny enduring frustration that they never knew how it ended.

In the last few weeks of my dad's life, I was both grasping for anything at all that might give him more time, and I was trying to help make what I knew must be his last weeks and days better somehow for him and for myself. One of my favorite things about living in this time is the on-demand nature of just about everything. I am old enough to remember the small thrill of catching a favorite movie on TV, when that was my only shot at seeing it, or lying in wait with my tape recorder for a particular song to be played on the radio. Now we can pull most anything seemingly out of thin air. So in those last weeks I tried to order my dad a DVD of The Man With the Golden Arm. And when I told my wife about this ultimately futile effort to close out a tiny thing for my dad, she reminded me that I actually bought my parents the DVD years before. Wait for it...

The version I got them had an alternate ending! Crap-o-rama.