Brief movie review: Beyond Silence (1996)

This German film won the best foreign picture Oscar recently, and is about a girl, and then young woman, whose parents are deaf, and who is given a clarinette by her aunt as a young child.  She turns out to be talented, and has to challenge her parents' inability to appreciate her music to pursue the talent.   She also has to stop being their interpreter, leaving the task to her younger sister as she goes off to Berlin to live with her aunt and study clarinette.

It's not unlike a German twist on Mr. Holland's Opus, but the characters are richer, I think, and the story more believable and less dramatic, as if often the case in comparing European and American films on the same theme.  It's worth renting, for sure.

I am the queen of multi-tasking.  I was queen of multi-tasking even before I owned a computer.  It's not a drive for efficiency; it's that I'm very easily bored, so I'm often doing two things at once so that I never have nothing to do.   I've discovered, however, that being queen of multi-tasking without any grace, co-ordination, balance or physical dexterity is hard on the knees.

I know that everyone I know has some particular internal system that is where all their stress and general weakness shows up: for me, it's my lungs; for my life-partner, it's his digestive system.  Now I'm becoming convinced that we also have a particular external body part that is also the locus of our weakness or stress.   Again, mine is my knees.

It all started when I was only 12.  My parents had forbidden me from riding a bicycle.  My dad was a truck driver, and found cyclists dangerous distractions; my mother had had a serious skull injury at 16 from a bicycle accident (making her one of Dr. Wilder Penfield's first miracles, she told us proudly.).  So neither my brother nor I was ever to do something so risky.  So, the first time my parents went away, leaving us with a neighbour, and another neighbour showed up with a bicycle, I decided to learn to ride it.

Okay, so I chose to do it on a gravel parking lot.  And it's true, I have no natural balance or grace.  So, I fell. A lot.  On my knees.   They bled. I taped wet washcloths around them, and got back on the bike.  Hey, I only had three days to learn!  I also learned later that I'd broken the veins in my knees.  They also never really looked very pretty after that weekend.  And yes, I got some blistering words from my parents on their return. 

(An aside: Learning to ride a bike in three days and then not doing it again for a long time wasn't all that smart. I've tried riding twice since then.   Both times, I did serious damage to other parts of my body, too, but I also scraped knees pretty badly both times.  Not on gravel. Oh well.)

Okay, so the next time (before the subsequent attempts at cycling), I took the dog out in the back on a cold winter night, in slippers.  It was 2 a.m.! Anyway, I slipped on the ice-covered snow, and landed on -- you guessed it -- my knees.  After that round, my skin surface on my left knee went numb, never to return to real feeling again.  Then came the two falls off bikes.

Then, there was yesterday.  I was trying to pay a bill (only one day late), and I had the dog with me. (Same dog.)  A neighbouring pitbull followed us in, so I took my dog out, tied him to a parking metre, came back in and was trying to shoo the pitbull at the same time.  Multi-tasking.  Sigh. What followed must have looked like a scene from a very physical comedy.  I tripped over the door jamb:  there was a distance of about twelve feet from the door to the counter of the shop.  I tried to regain my balance for the entire twelve-foot distance.  At the end of it, I ended up on my knees, my fingers jammed against the counter, my glasses flying.  (But I know I'm not graceful, so you'd have to stomp on my glasses at least ten minutes before they'd break.) 

My dad used to say I was an accident looking for a place to happen.  He also used to say I was the only kid he knew who could trip over the pattern in the linoleum.  I can't tell if he was right, or whether I was multi-tasking even then, making staying upright more of a challenge.  In any case, my left knee today is a glowing purple colour.  A blotch the size of a dinner plate is going to turn a range of colours over the coming week, and I'm going to live with it.   And people wonder why I don't pray: I spend enough time on my knees as it is!

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