Turtle Diary

In LA when I was school teaching in South Central 20 years ago after a very bad week, my then boyfriend and I would hop over to see films where Westwood blended with Beverly Hills.It was a very extreme time in my living... This film was one I so enjoyed. It is a quirky love of life story about a woman (Glenda Jackson who is a marvelous actress) with a terrible haircut, her joyous affection for turtles and a friendship formed with a used bookshop owner, a fellow lover of turtles and literature, and centers on a plot they develop to save some turtles. It is small and intimate and I believe a film my brother in law calls "a nothing really happened" piece. Recently thought of it clearly again sitting at a long horrible funeral for a friend who was a gentle lady, with a bad haircut, and a deep abiding love and kinship with turtles and a special bond with my husband. I realized this film had foreshadowed a bit of my ordinary "nothing happened" existence to me 20 years ago. In life we form friendships and find compassion and connection with people in seemingly random and precious moments. My turtle friend, who worked for my husband for a time, as a secretary in his school-then my school, took care of him , my kids, myself and was very private-revealed something of herself in this love of the turtles she had around her from time to time one of the few things you really knew about her. Real turtles and those collectible. She treated them like cats actually(in the film you are seeing giant sea turtles) , these pet turtles responded back as bonded as you can imagine. It was a very unique thing to see a person so vibrantly connected to turtles. I felt that in the film , in the love these individuals had for the species...it seemed to relate to the privacy, shyness, fragility of feeling and yet strength of character, the primitive dignity of my friend, she easily could have been placed into the movies' internal spaces. For me now there she lives freed of earthly connection. So I watched it again this evening after 20 years and grieved deeply losing someone who was very shy and private and who suffered a terrible end of life to cancer spread through her system. To me I see the touching beauty of the friendship between the characters in the movie as so valuable and so meaningful on a personal level-I'm aging with such an awareness of how gentle simpatico with another , how the shared love of turtle, of literature , of something understood really about life , brings a kind of lightening of heart. For my friend her shared relating to my husband was so meaningful/personal to her in ways I could not entirely understand.. and her to him.This was movie core message. It was a lesson to me. I recommend this film to those who value friendship. You know I was also thinking of a film with Anne Bancroft(in New York) and her friend in London in the bookshop-anyway a very similar piece. Maybe it is a phenomonological relationship(whatever that is no?)....but for me a tender film and now I'll always think of Terri Truxler and my love for her, turtles and dear warm moments I hold in my heart with friends of the spirit.