GRANDMA, GRANDPA, TELL ME A STORY

Terrence Malick's award-winning film "The Tree of Life" will divide American audiences like it did Cannes Festival audiences. For various reasons. The vastness of its Biblical spirituality, the enormity of its cinematography, also the innocence of its look at growing up in middle America, in the Middle West, in the middle of our 20th C.

Innocence has been used by authors from Milton ("Paradise Lost"), to Voltaire ("Candide"), to Twain ("Tom Sawyer"), to Wolfe ("Look Homeward Angel"), to the ubiquitous illustrations of an innocent America by Currie & Ives and Norman Rockwell.

However, it's easier now to dismiss innocence. Especially as we work our way through a world fraught with sophisticated desires and dangers on every side. Kids growing up today -- living or at least watching these desires and dangers in violent action -- will find times-of-innocence in their extravagant country hard to imagine. Harder to believe.

It just could be that their grandparents will be their last repository of such beliefs. Yes, their memories may play willful tricks with the actualities of their long ago youth, but things actually lived cannot actually be destroyed. Perhaps summertime -- with its enormously fat juicy lazy days -- is the very best of times to ask them to tell you their stories.

Stories of long-gone days of open windows and unlocked doors....of mothers wearing aprons in bustling kitchens and throughout spic-and-span rooms...of fathers going to work in starched white shirts with the American Dream tucked in their pockets...of neighbors who called you by name when they hailed you to try their morning coffee cake...of mom & pop stores down the street who nobody owned except the folks behind the counter...hours of unsupervised kites and chases and pickup ball games on side streets uncluttered by parked cars or in empty lots of your choice just a walk-away.

In their stories you will meet horse-drawn milkmen and fruit peddlers instead of sleek retail chains, open fire hydrants instead of community pools, wide green lawns for dreaming on instead of digital board games for killing on, oh and grams and gramps may even indulge themselves in little whispered tales about puppy love on the village green which actually remained virgin-white until the wedding day.

I know, I know, Hallmark Cards sell this kind of sentimentality for a quick profit...! You're right. But grandma and grandpa aren't selling you anything. Just summertime remembering. Letting you hop on for the ride...