Dad and movies: Two hours is too long to sit around (unless it’s ‘Lonesome Dove’)

Note: Written June 23, 2019, six weeks before Dad went to Heaven …

Maybe the only way you can get my father to sit still for two hours to watch a movie: Late-stage bone cancer. That was our visit Saturday as he pushes through the final few months of his life.

It’s not that Dad doesn’t like movies. In fact, he has several favorites, ranging from old-school Westerns to “Forrest Gump.” It’s that he simply couldn’t tolerate devoting two hours to watching a movie.

In my 43 years on this planet, I can’t remember going to a single movie with him in a theatre. I fondly recall trips to the drive-in with my mom and brother when we were children. Dan and I watch “Star Wars” and “Bambi” at a drive-in outside of Joplin. Those were our first movies outside of the house.

Dad wasn’t there, of course. Odds are he was sleeping. His typical day went something like this: Wake up at 4 a.m., work from 4:30 a.m. to noon, lunch and a nap to 1:30, work until 6 (often later), dinner and a little TV (“Magnum P.I.” and “Hill Street Blues” were staples), then to bed by 9 p.m. 

He woke up multiple times, averaging about five hours of sleep a night for 50 years. I can’t imagine surviving on that. I tried for three years in my late 30s and ended up with Epstein-Barr Virus.

The No. 1 exception to the “no-movies” philosophy was the one we watched on this Saturday afternoon: “Lonesome Dove.” Keep in mind that this was a miniseries and spanned four evenings in 1989 on network TV. Without commercials, it’s 384 minutes long. That’s more than six hours.

We did not watch the entire movie. Because of his illness, Dad sleeps about four times as much as he did for five decades. We settled on watching the first part of the series, which lasted a little under two hours.

Set in the late 1870s, “Lonesome Dove” is the tale of two aging former Texas Rangers as they travel across the country on a cattle drive to Montana to build the first cattle ranch in that state. The miniseries is loaded with twists and turns, tragic deaths and the wonderful banter of Call, played masterfully by Tommy Lee Jones, and Gus, portrayed just as masterfully by Robert Duvall.

It is one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. So good that even my father will sit and watch it for hours.

I think one of the reasons he loves “Lonesome Dove” so much is that it reminds him of his father, Ernie Sr., who died far too young at 65 in 1984. Dad often spoke about Grandpa’s love for Westerns.

“If John Wayne was on the TV, you could forget watching anything that day,” Dad said. “We watched a lot of those old movies with him.”

I also think he loved “Lonesome Dove” because he saw a lot of himself in the main characters. He absolutely had the stoicism and work ethic of Call. And he was ornery and witty like Gus.

I can name a handful of movies I remember watching with my father: “Lonesome Dove,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Good, Bad and Ugly” and “Sudden Impact” come to mind.

I asked a few times why he had such an aversion to watching movies and sitting for more than 10 minutes.

“I have too much to do to sit around for two hours, Ernie,” he said. “Shit needs to get done. I don’t like wasting minutes, let along hours.”

That wasn’t the complete truth, though. While he couldn’t sit for two hours and watch a movie, he could fish and hunt for hours. He’d go on long walks on our properties, which typically were plush with trees, hills, creeks and scenery. He’d spend hours working on our garden or planting flowers, notably his father’s favorites: Tiger Lillies and roses. He’d sit on his small deck or porch and watch the sun rise and set.

Ultimately, it wasn’t just about “getting shit done.” It was just as much about stopping to smell the roses. He just saw a lot more value in that than he did in watching a movie.

I think of this often as I sit on our front porch which I’m talking my wife about life and watching nature. And I thought about it that Saturday as we watched a movie together, maybe for the last time. He enjoyed spending that time with me more than laughing as Call and Gus argued.

Maybe I’ll start spending more time on our porch than watching “Karate Kid” and “Rambo.” I know my wife will approve.