It was the natural wonder that was there when I fell in love with Richard Dreyfuss. My mother wouldn’t let me see Jaws (and with good reason- my father had convinced me that the government had released sharks into Conchas Lake when I was 8 years old leaving me terrified of swimming in the fresh water lake in Northern New Mexico). I was 10 years old When Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and Roy Neary had a vision and was experiencing the super natural. I was right there with him.

My mother was a bit horrified with herself for taking me to see Close Encounters; not because of the scary idea that aliens came to take people from Earth (and mind you, we lived in Roswell, New Mexico at the time). It was the kiss between Richard Dreyfuss’s character and the widow, Jillian Guiller, who was very clearly NOT his wife, that disturbed her. After the movie while my mind was whirling with the synthesizer tones that beckon aliens and how I could maybe play them on my piano and get aliens to come see me and maybe bring me the appealing Dreyfuss as an unclear bonus, my mother hesitatingly asked me if anything about the movie bothered me. How could I explain the stirrings I felt that was an unfamiliar combination of thrilling beings from another planet and the stirrings I felt in my body for a grown man? I stammered out an answer, something along the lines of, “Aliens are real?” and she said, “NO! Of course not! But you know, honey… that kiss between the daddy who went with the aliens and that lady who was not his wife? That was a kiss between friends. He will always be married to that blond lady.” Oh. I briefly thought to myself, “So he can kiss me too?” before I shoved the idea out of my protestant guilt ridden mind.

Over the years, I have often felt like flinging newspapers on my kitchen table and slamming mud onto it and shaping a form with frustration. Maybe clarity would come, probably not aliens and most definitely, Richard Dreyfuss would never arrive. Being an adult isn’t always fun and regrets and choices can pollute visions.

Seeing Devils Tower for the first time completed part of my own vision. Oddly, there was no mention anywhere in the Devils Tower Park of the movie. It is a beautiful site and now that I have been there, it has more texture in my mind. It is a kind of filmic icon that rarely occurs in filmmaking. Who besides me remembers what the New York apartment of the single mom looked like in The Goodbye Girl?