I'd save every day like a treasure.

On saving time in a bottle.

A few days ago I saw a series of screencaps on Instagram of Agnès Varda talking about her breakthrough film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962). In them she discusses the difference between what she calls “subjective time” and “objective time,” and goes on to discuss how she tried to illustrate both kinds of time in her film, so that you felt the passage of time literally, but also how Cléo feels during those two hours.

Agnès Varda talking about time in Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, and especially the way I have been perceiving time. The week that my book came out at the end of February went by in a flash of excitement. March started out great, and then on the day of my first book tour event I got terrible news. I was literally on the jitney on my way to the Southampton Playhouse to introduce a screening of Girlfight, a still from which illustrates the cover of my book, when my cat sitter called and told me that my cat, Miss Fanny Brawne, was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth. She was rushed to the vet, but that whole evening I thought she was going to die. I tried to eat dinner with my partner

Robert Daniels

as we waited for news. In the middle of that dinner I got a phone call saying she had gone into heart failure and they weren’t sure she was going to make it. I sobbed so hard in that restaurant everyone stopped eating and stared at our table.

Robert sent me this photo of Miss Fanny a few days ago.

Thankfully, modern veterinary medicine came through and Miss Fanny Brawne was able to come home a few days later, and now, aside from a few pills she has to take twice a day, she is mostly doing great. But I spent another several weeks on the road, attending book signings and film screenings. And I’m not going to lie, as wonderful as those events were and as grateful as I am to the venues who hosted me and the directors who were so gracious to be in conversation with me, I was mostly disassociating the entire time. All I could think about was getting back to my cat and whether the medicine would keep working. She is ten years old, so every second with her is a blessing.

I was back for a few weeks when my book tour started back up again in April, although most of those dates didn’t go quite like they were supposed to. The screening of Love & Basketball in Boston was interrupted by a plumbing issue, which led to the second screening at the Brattle, where I was supposed to be in conversation with Bette Gordon, being cancelled. Thankfully, the community rallied around the institution, and they were able to raise funds not only to get the plumbing emergency taken care of, but also to keep paying their employees.

David Lynch’s grave in Hollywood Forever

During this same time, I was deeply immersed in the work of David Lynch because of the Music Box Theatre’s celebration of his life and work, aptly titled David Lynch: Moving Through Time. Again, time became a central focus. Not just the time at the theatre, but the way that Lynch himself is always playing with how we conceive of time. Just as Varda spoke about, Lynch knows that emotions color how we experience time, but also that dreams can elongate time. They can stretch and mold and move us into another realm altogether. I have always been an avid dreamer. Sometimes I keep a dream journal, but often I just experience vivid dreams and let them go. Lately, however, I have been having terrible nightmares that seem to go on forever. I am happy to let them disappear back into the ether.

The most affecting rewatch of the Lynch series for me was seeing The Straight Story on 35mm. So much of the film reminded me of my Grampa Gates, who passed away in 2020, and my own Dad, who I did not know at the time would only be with me for six more weeks. I cried through almost the entire screening.

Back in 2020, another year where time seemed to stretch and warp in the most peculiar ways, my Grampa had a cardiac incident which landed him in the hospital during Labor Day weekend. My Dad called while I was in a work Zoom meeting. He left me a voice message saying they thought Grampa only had a few days left. I did not sleep that night. I got the last flight leaving super early Saturday morning from Burbank to San Francisco, and then my good friend Amie drove me the two hours from San Francisco to Sacramento where my brother lives. We then drove the three hours to the hospital where my Grampa was admitted in Redding. From the moment I got my Dad’s call to when I was at my Grampa’s bedside it was less than twenty-four hours. I felt every single minute.

Grampa defied those two days he was given by the doctor. He left the hospital and went back to his assisted living. We asked the doctor how long he thought he had. The doctor replied, “I have no idea. He should already be dead.” Grampa lived for another week. I sat with him for most of that week. I helped him cut up his food and listened to his stories about his childhood. Almost a decade earlier I had written a forward to a book about classic Hollywood actor Lew Ayres. My Grampa was one of the few people who actually knew who he was. During our week together, he asked me if I was going to write another book. At the time, I did not know if I would, but I told him I was. He said that was good.

The day my Grampa died, I could feel it was time. I was having breakfast with my parents when the assisted living place called my cellphone. They said he had had a rush of energy and had asked where I was. By the time I got there, he had fallen back into a half coma. I missed his last burst of life. My Dad and I sat with him for the rest of the day. He was fitful and his mumbling was barely audible, but I could hear him begging for more time. He was ninety-eight and a half years old, but he still wanted more time. My Dad and I sat with him until midnight. Eventually, we realized he was waiting for us to leave. He died just a few hours after we left.

I felt every single minute of that week. When I finally got back to my job at Netflix, where, because I was working remotely from my apartment (the offices never opened back up while I worked there) and working with teams across the globe, I sometimes worked as much as 16 hours a day. I felt every minute of those days too, but in the worst sense. When I was with my Grampa, those minutes weren’t enough time. When I was working on marketing campaigns for films of various quality, and one film that I believe was actively evil, those minutes felt like daggers.

Me with my Grampa during my high school graduation in 2004

I left that job in December of 2020 and have worked freelance since then. In fact, I’ve worked as a freelance writer longer than I stayed at any of the corporate jobs I’ve ever had. These last five years have gone by pretty fast, mostly because I have spent as much of my time as possible doing things I am passionate about. Working on my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, conducting interviews for my Female Filmmakers in Focus column, traveling to film festivals where I can see small films by women from all over the world. Having control of my time allowed me the space to work on my book, the one I told my Grampa I would write someday.

My Dad was always very concerned about my well-being. I lived alone for almost twenty years after I graduated from high school. I moved from my hometown to the Bay Area to Los Angeles to Atlanta and back to Los Angeles before I moved with my partner Robert to Chicago. During that time, there were moments where I was estranged from my family (I wrote about that here). Those years were hard, but necessary for healing and growth and allowed me to have the capacity for forgiveness.

When my book finally came out in February, my Dad was extremely supportive. Almost every week he asked how it was doing. He memorized my book tour and sent me texts to ask how each date went and what the crowd was like and how many books I sold. He had planned to do a book event at his shop here in my hometown. I was going to help him place an order, but we never were able to lineup a time to get that done.

Later, I found out that he first felt the back pain that would soon turn out to be advanced cancer the same week that my book was released. Whenever we spoke about the book, he also talked about his back pain. During one of our last phone calls he told me after several trips to the ER, he finally had an appointment with his primary care physician. I said I would be on the phone with him during that appointment if he wanted me to, so that I could press them to actually help him. But then it turned out I was going to be on an airplane during the appointment, heading to a film festival in Washington State. I told him I would check in with him after my plane landed, but that if he were still in pain when he was there to not leave the hospital.

When my plane landed in Seattle, I checked my phone. I had a voice message from my Mom telling me Dad had been admitted to the ER. My heart sank. I spent the next few hours trying to figure out if I needed to leave the festival. Once I arrived in the town where the festival was held, my Dad called and said he was being transferred to a hospital in Reno. I knew what I had to do. I got my flight changed to one leaving at 5am the next day. I slept for maybe two hours before my host graciously drove me to the airport at 2am. I got to Reno about an hour after my Dad did.

I found him in a bed in a makeshift room in a hallway; the hospital was still waiting for a room to open up. I asked him how he was doing. He said, “I’m dying,” and then got really quiet. I didn’t know what to say. I felt every second as we waited in that hallway for his hospital room to open up. Ultimately, we spent ten days in that hospital, and then another few weeks back in the hospital in my hometown. As I wrote earlier, we watched a lot of movies during that time. One day I had to help him drink liquid for a colonoscopy. We watched four movies that night. Every fifteen minutes my phone alarm went off and he had to drink more fluid. It was awful. I felt every single second of those thirty-five days I spent with my Dad in those hospitals.

Mr. Bingley and Lady Brett Ashley a few weeks ago

One of the last things Dad asked for in the brief moment he got to be home was for “the kitty.” He was referring to my seventeen-year-old cat Lady Brett Ashley. She was one of four cats I left with my parents when I went to grad school in 2011, along with her littermate, the late great Mr. Rochester who passed away from kidney disease in 2015, Ginger, a stray I found in the shed who is somehow still alive despite being seventeen or eighteen years old, and Mr. Bingley, who was sixteen years old, and who I sadly had to put down this week after taking him to the vet and discovering he had advanced lung cancer. The strange thing about both Lady Brett and Mr. Bingley was that, even though I left them with my parents fifteen years ago, they always remembered me as Mom. Every time I would visit, they would love me the same way they did when they were young. In the vet’s office I saw a poster that indicated that their “physiological” age put them in their late 80s. How did they experience time between my visits?

My Dad has been gone for three weeks now. His memorial service was just a week ago. Somehow those three weeks have gone by in a split second. The week leading up to the funeral I took Robert to a lot places that were special to my Dad. The Modoc Forest where he worked for fifty years. The town where he and my Mom lived the first year they came up here. The county museum he helped open. The day after his funeral, I had to drive Robert to the airport in Reno and I stayed the night in my Dad’s favorite casino. It was surreal. I cried while eating a baked potato at the casino’s cafe where we had eaten so many meals together. I cried when I walked past the video slot machines that he loved best. It felt like the end of a pilgrimage.

Coming home the next day, I realized I had never driven back from Reno by myself before. I had always done that trip with my Dad, in various cars over the years. Looking at the land in all its barren beauty, I again felt every second of that three-hour drive. I thought about all the times he had driven it to pick me or my brother up at the airport during college, or the various international volunteers he had greeted at the airport over the years. How many times had he driven this road?

He spent fifty years building a life up here with my family, and preserving its history. He and my Mom’s wedding song was Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” a fitting song for a couple who dedicated their lives to history. I realized now that I never asked him how he experienced time. Did he feel it acutely? Or did the sheer magnitude of time that he studied allow him to understand it in a way I never will quite understand?

I guess I’ll never know.

I found this photo of my Dad circa 1972 in a box on the day of his funeral