In memoriam

June 14th was both the anniversary of my parents’ wedding and the birthday of my son. In their memory, I am posting the three obituaries that were originally published in The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter for the month following each one’s passing.

William Douglas Pratt 1926-2010

My earliest memories of my father are when he himself was a young man, whittling wood with a pocketknife and earnestly teaching himself French from a small hardbound workbook.  The whittling was probably something his father had done.  As for the French, he had graduated early from high school and enlisted during the final months of World War II, only to be assigned as an airplane mechanic on the French Riviera.  He also spent one lengthy furlough bicycling around Scotland.  These adventures had left a great impression upon him that lingered during my first years, but I was also aware that such influences and activities fell by the wayside as our family began to grow.  His work became actual homework related to his job at a bank, and his leisure time became filled with entertaining my brother and me, and our friends.  He was, essentially, the only father in our neighborhood who had the time on weekends or summer evenings to drive us to the schoolyard so we could play ball, or to support us and participate with us in any playtime activity where he could be involved.  He was always jovial and outgoing, and when he retired from the bank, it was in a vice president’s position in public relations, where his job had essentially been to keep the bank’s customers as happy as he had kept us children. 

He read to me every night when I was a child, something his father had done and something I did wholeheartedly with each of my children.  The books ranged from nonfiction works such as A Child’s History of England, to popular novels, including No Time for Sergeants and Two Years before the Mast.  When he tended the garden, I would follow him around with a handful of baseball cards and make him try to guess the ages of the players.  He always found time to genuinely listen to me, to explain things, and to tell me stories—both wild fabrications (which were readily recognizable as such, even when I was supposedly at an ‘impressionable’ age) and real tales of history or mechanics or sailing or every topic imaginable.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the discussions that he and my mother had at the dinner table about current events were really being shared for me and my brother’s benefit, so that we would pick up whatever we could about the topic at hand.  He taught me patience, and treated me with patience as he taught me. 

The first movie he took me to see was a double bill of Cinderella and Johnny Tremain that was playing at a theater two blocks from where we were living at the time.  I recall riding there on his shoulders.  He told me that I tolerated Cinderella but became restless with Johnny Tremain, which disappointed him because he had been enjoying Luana Patten’s low cut décolletage when I declared that I wanted to go home.  We saw many movies together over the years, including what was for me a transforming experience, when I was about fourteen, of seeing a double bill of 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits.  (I liked Juliet of the Spirits more then, and I still do; I’m not sure what he thought about them, because I did all of the talking on the way home.)  Those were our last extensive times together, however, because once he taught me how to drive, I started going to movies by myself.  In those days he was a bank branch manager and had a customer with a trio of drive-in theaters.  He wrangled a year’s pass (for successive years), and I pretty much went every night.

I took great delight once I got older in sending him things, including a large coffee table book, which compared Civil War photographs with the same camera angles in the present day, that I know he greatly enjoyed.  I think he would have wanted to have been a history teacher if he hadn’t been pressured by his parents into entering a more ‘respectable’ profession, and that may also have been why he allowed me to follow my own devices without much interference.  I sent him a great many DVDs, from the Kenny Baker/John Barclay Mikado (the songs of which he knew by heart for as long as I could remember) to Rome The Complete Series.  Before he had a stroke last spring, my mother said that he was watching Sink the Bismark! every day.  They were married for fifty-eight years.  As I was helping my mother clean out his things, I came across audio cassettes, computer discs and another workbook.  Apparently, quite recently, he had been teaching himself Gaelic.  He passed away in early November, just shy of his eighty-fourth birthday.  I loved him dearly.

Nancy Annette Poitras Pratt 1930-2013

The first home entertainment was the communal fire, around which people told stories and sang songs.  As technology advanced, home entertainment became less about the fire and much more about the stories and the music, and when the Industrial Era burst forth in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the mass manufacturing of pianos made that instrument the first home entertainment technology marketed to the middle class.  As the Century progressed, gathering around the piano in the evening to sing songs after dinner bonded families and friends, just as coming together to watch a Blu-ray does today.  The piano fell by the wayside with the development of the radio and then, a generation later, television, but like the horse, it did not completely disappear, and even in the middle of the Twentieth Century, cultural habits, from generations past, lingered.  When I was child, we had a piano in the house, and sometimes, instead of turning on the TV in the evening, my mother would sit down and play, my father and I would stand on either side of her, and we would sing the songs being played—I guess these days that’s called ‘karaoke night’ or something.  Anyway, my mother, who died on February 17, eventually became as absorbed in the Twentieth Century as we all were, and the piano fell silent.  But I remember once, when I was still relatively young, arranging for the purchase of a collection of sheet music derived from James Bond films.  I very excitedly asked her to play Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme and so she sat down, exhibiting her usual cheerful poise and, with a little experimentation, hit the chords perfectly.  I burst into tears.  This, she did not understand, and she got a little angry, insisting that I stop crying.  I did my best to heed her request and pulled back the sniffles with all of the masculine ability I could muster.  Satisfied that I was in control of myself, she hit the chords again, and again I burst into tears.  I don’t think she ever really understood why I was crying, that the ability to replicate the music at home made it feel like something greatly desired that had been out of my grasp was suddenly available to me.  That was pretty much it for playing the piano that day (it is actually the last memory I have of her playing it, though she must have done it some more, at least at Christmas), but I still bless her for having brought me that close to my dream, which would eventually be realized when I could start buying movies on laser disc and playing them whenever I wanted to.

My mother was an only child, growing up during the Great Depression in a small woodsy house that is still standing today even though more suburban homes surround it.  Her father was a plumber and both of her parents had a French-Canadian heritage, which lingered in some of the meals she cooked for us.  She went to the university and was majoring in business administration, but her sole purpose for doing that, she readily admitted, was to meet a guy, and my father, back from the War and starting at the university in business administration himself, was the guy she fell for.  As their dating progressed, it became imminently clear that they were going to be married, so she dropped out of school and worked as a secretary to start their nest egg.  Two years after they were married, I was born.  She stopped working outside of the house and became a homemaker, and she would not return to the outside workforce until both my brother and I were off on our own.   Homemaking is not something that is rated by the outside world, but if it were, she probably would have achieved record-breaking high scores.  My father once told me that when they found out I was on the way, she asked him where I would be put and he suggested a room that was being used as kind of a storage area.  When he got home from work that night, it was completely transformed into a nursery.  My mother’s skills as a homemaker were legendary.  We belonged to a community swimming pool and my mother would go there every sunny afternoon to relax and tan herself.  When I was a teenager, a friend confided in me that she had once said to her own mother that our house must be a mess since all my mother does is sit around and sunbathe, and her mother corrected her quickly, with a hint of bitter envy.  “No, their house is spotless.”  Indeed, even the towels that we brought with us to the pool were so incredibly and steadfastly white that their whiteness was remarked upon on more than one occasion.  This was not because of any kind of compulsive disorder; it was, rather, because ‘homemaking’ was her job, and she did it exceedingly well, just as she would do her other jobs when she did go back into the workforce, first as a secretary for a record distributor and then as an administrative assistant at a hotel.  If I inherited any trait from her (and it certainly wasn’t a musical ability), it was this knack for tackling every assignment with an earnest and thorough industry, which I believe has been reflected in the quality and consistency of the Newsletter over the past 30 years.

Our city had a wonderful World’s Fair when I was a child, and we attended it several times as a family, but that fall, a few days before it closed, my father had to work late, so my mother arranged babysitting for my brother and she took me one last time for a very magical evening, going expressly to the exhibits that I wanted to go to.  She may not have understood my excitement about the James Bond Theme emitting from her fingertips, but she did comprehend my passion for film, and would accommodate it whenever she could.  She had a thing for Marlon Brando, which led to me being dragged as a child to Morituri and The Appaloosa, something I would not wish upon any youngster, but gradually, as a family, we began to attend, religiously, double bills of recent releases at the local theater on Sundays, and it became a part of our routine almost entirely because she recognized how it was feeding my soul.  She did make us leave in the middle of Fellini Satyricon one time, with the lame excuse that it was snowing out and driving was becoming more hazardous every minute, even though my father was the one who was going to be doing the driving and I would have been perfectly happy snowed in at the movie theater with the film running again and again all night long.  On the other hand, when Midnight Cowboy first came out, it was rated ‘X,’ and I was too young to attend it, but she had seen it and judged that I would appreciate it, so she identified a theater that would likely not turn me away if she was accompanying me and we went, and I did appreciate it.

My mother was always slender, and yet never spoke of dieting.  She simply ate well.  Like her house, she was always effortlessly immaculate, doing a few basic things (such as keeping her hair a dark black) but never fussing inordinately over her appearance.  Other than her children, the pride of her life was a 1969 red Camaro SS convertible with a white top and black interior that she had gotten special ordered through an auto dealer that my father was doing business with when he worked at the bank.  At the time, it was the ’68 Camaro that was considered the ‘hot’ car, and the ’69 was somewhat passé, but eventually, it was the ’69 that became the collector’s Holy Grail.  She was constantly being stopped on the street by people offering to buy it from her, and heads would turn as she drove it, even when she was in her eighties, the car still gleaming like the day she first got it.  She also taught me the most important lesson of design I’ve ever encountered, when she sold her previous car (a black and white ’59 Ford Fairlane) to make way for the Camaro.  She put a sign in the back window that said “For Sale” and, underneath that, our phone number, but she made the lettering of the “For Sale” quite small, just large enough for people to recognize what it was, and our phone number she made as large as possible, so people could see it and jot it down from a distance.  The car sold almost immediately.  Whenever I see other ‘For Sale’ signs, I often note to myself that their designers never listened to my mother. 

Her social life, particularly after she and my father moved out of our family home and into a more convenient city apartment, revolved mostly around my brother’s friends and a couple of friends she had met during her time with the record industry.  I had moved far, far away, to a place where there were more movies, and would see her every other year or so, at best.  My father’s illness and his stay in a nursing home lasted about six months, but it apparently took a greater toll than we realized at the time.  When I came to help her clean out his things a few days after he passed away, she talked about volunteering to answer phones at the local PBS station, and about coming out to visit us, but in the months that followed, she kept putting off plans.  Other than the evenings she would go out with my brother and his wife, she saw no one beyond her apartment neighbors.  Two years after my father passed away, she fell on the stairs leading to her apartment while trying to bring in some groceries.  My brother found her a nice room in an assisted living location and moved her, but we all kind of knew the jig was up when she agreed to sell the Camaro in December.  She pretty much stopped eating, collapsed, and was hospitalized, and the doctor explained to my brother that it was time for her to go into hospice.  He thought she would last about a week.  So I stopped everything and hopped on a plane for a brief weekend visit.  She knew who I was but was otherwise confused about where she was, worried or even fearful about the noises she heard in the other rooms, and was having difficulty getting comfortable in her bed.  She seemed calmest not when I was talking to her, but when my brother and I, believing her to be napping, were talking about smart phones, British television shows, The Who and other esoterica.  The aide would come in and try to get her to swallow a protein drink, but she would have a spoonful at the most.  I stayed the whole afternoon.  My brother had a few other things to do and then came back with his wife.  The three of us went out to dinner, and then returned afterward, to stay until it was time to take me to the airport.  When we returned, the aide announced that my mother had downed an entire glass of the protein drink.  When I did say goodbye that night, it was almost as if a switch had been turned on.  My mother rattled off the names of my children and told me to give them her love.  In the days that followed, she began eating solid food three times a day and sitting up again.  She was even standing a little bit to transfer from her bed to her wheelchair.  So it actually came as something of a shock when my brother got the call that she had passed away.  We had expected it three weeks earlier, but we weren’t expecting it when it happened.

By definition of physical attributes, fathers serve their kids best when they are on the ‘outside’—not absent, but sustaining a certain level of objectivity in guiding their children through life.  Mothers, however, do not have that luxury.  By physiological imperative, they have to be the subjective ones, the ones so involved that they sometimes cannot separate their own selves from the selves of their children.  Whether he was originally responsible for it, or whether it came from one of his writers, Alfred Hitchcock seized upon a line of dialog in Psycho, “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” so much so that he used a variation of the line in one of his next films, Marnie.  It is not an innocent line, but one drenched wickedly with satire, and it reflects back upon an intense emotional dynamic that is an essential part of human DNA, coded thus before any environmental factors take hold.  Another trait I inherited from her was a very independent spirit, but as I grew older, that spirit came into conflict with her ingrained need to remain connected to me, and I felt it necessary to forcibly place a country’s worth of space between us, moving to the East Coast from the West Coast when I was twenty.  I know it hurt her deeply and profoundly that the situation prevented her from seeing her grandchildren grow up on a daily or weekly basis, but by the time I understood and became reconciled with the nature of our relationship, it was too late to change course.  She was extremely grateful that I came out to help her when my father died, and I’d like to think that my final visit at the hospice added a couple of weeks onto her life.  It was easy to say that I loved my father.  It is much harder for me to say that I loved my mother, but I did, very much.

Nathanial Albert Pratt 1987-2020

Remember when September used to get really cold?  It hasn’t for a while, but back in the Eighties that used to be how the weather worked, and so I had cause to dress my newborn son in a snowsuit to take him outside, and I recall thinking at the time that there must be something wrong with the suit, because I had great difficulty getting his arms into the sleeves.  It wasn’t until November, however, on a day when it actually did snow, that the pediatrician suggested my son, Nathan, might have cerebral palsy, that the muscles in his arms and legs were tightening on their own.  A few weeks later, after CAT scans, MRIs and so on, the doctors confirmed that not only did he have CP, but an array of problems that suggested he would never be able to function in the adult world.  It had become apparent as well that his responses to sounds were also limited.  How much of a hearing loss he had could never be determined, but his primary sensory input was visual and would remain so.    

For a while, babies have a state of grace.  They cry when they need something, but otherwise they are content to be in the company of others and curious about the world around them.  Unlike most children, that state of grace never left Nathanial.  He was not only powerless to misbehave, he never had cause to.  He had an angelic smile, an infectious laugh and he was the most beautiful little boy you could ever imagine meeting.  Even when he got older and his condition began to affect his facial features, he was still a good-looking guy.  He was and had always been socially aware.  His face would light up whenever someone new came into view, and even more so when it was someone he recognized.  And he had empathy.  One time he was sitting with me as I watched the TV.  When a politician’s manipulative speech brought me to tears, he saw my expression and a look of profound sadness immediately overcame his face.

Life goes on.  Along with his older brother he eventually had a younger brother and a younger sister.  He was part of a family, and his sense of social orientation was unhindered by his condition.  He enjoyed the pres­ence of people.  If the kids were playing in the backyard, he would be happy to sit in his wheelchair and watch them.  He loved it when I took him into the water.  Freed of gravity, he would kick like crazy and laugh away.  He could hold onto things, but not really manipulate them, and as he grew, his muscles tightened even more (he could actually stand while leaning against something when he was two, but that skill was fleeting), despite extensive physical and occupational therapy.  The school that he attended emphasized the therapies and the socialization of a classroom setting, and it became part of his routine.  At home, he watched a lot of TV, and thank goodness for laser discs and Re­peat Play.  I could put something on, set him up in the living room and he would be in the middle of the action as people came and went throughout the house, but still be stimulated when things were quiet.  I once pointed out in a review a very long time ago that children respond to animation be­cause there is a finite amount of visual detail in a cartoon, while live images have a near infinite level of detail that is too much for younger brains to proc­ess (adults tend to ignore what their brain recognizes; kids haven’t absorbed as much yet).  And indeed, he enjoyed cartoons, whether it was Looney Tunes, Walt Disney, anime or even experimental works, such as the animation of John Whitney.  Most of all, he loved Winnie the Pooh, always laughing in anticipation of a character’s appearance or foible.  He also enjoyed live action programs, such as westerns (he would giggle when he saw people riding horses) and musical production numbers, and he loved The Three Stooges, particularly when Curly crept down the hallway with a balloon bobbing behind him in Spook Louder.

As it turns out, I ended up taking care of him for more than half of his life.  Having seen the documentary, Best Boy, I fully understood that he would eventually have to move out, but it was still wrenching when, at seventeen, a position became open in an ideal group home.  By then he was closing in on a hundred pounds, and while the increases in his weight had been so incremental over the course of his life that I could still readily lift him, my ability to carry him and care for him was clearly approaching a limit and it was time for him to move onto the next phase in his life, however much I missed his daily presence.  He spent about a decade at the home, but as he aged, bouts with pneumonia became more invasive and more common.  He eventually had a tracheotomy to assist in extracting the fluid from his lungs, and he was still able to stay at the group home, but once he required permanent access to oxygen, they were not set up for that and he was transferred to a nursing home.  Wherever he went, the staff would fight over who got to take care of him, because the rewards of working with him reminded them of why they had chosen that profession.  Unless he wasn’t feeling well, he always greeted visitors with a big grin and laughed with delight at any focused interaction.  Even as an adult, he enjoyed bubbles and balloons and preferred watching cartoons.  Everybody who worked with him loved him, and I would like to think that I succeeded as a parent by giving him the skills that facilitated this amenity, which in turn enhanced his care, but much of that was really his own innate state of being.

He had a bout of pneumonia this January that was no more or less unusual than his previous bouts, and he returned to the nursing home before February began.  Fearful because of what had started happening around the world with COVID, I began calling there twice a week to see how he was.  Not only were they taking very good care of him, but he never had a fever, much less a cough.  By the time May rolled around I was becoming optimistic that he might indeed make it through the pandemic unfazed.  But on the 14^th, exactly a month before his thirty-third birthday, I got a call at 5:00 am that he had developed a temperature overnight and was being sent to the hospital.  By 7:00 am his heart had stopped and he was pronounced dead.

Nathan not only made me a better father, he made me a better person, and in all likelihood, he made everyone who met him—at home, at the schools he attended, at the care facilities, and even at the hospitals—a better person.  That will not change with him not being here anymore, however, since the memory of him will endure, and his influence will most assuredly be passed along.  I firmly believe that the future of mankind will be filled with a greater amount of goodness and brotherhood, arising from the butterfly effect of his laugh and his smile.