{"id":1220,"date":"2016-07-15T06:01:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T13:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1220"},"modified":"2016-07-14T21:38:01","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T04:38:01","slug":"long-live-tarzan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2016\/07\/15\/long-live-tarzan\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Live Tarzan"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday of last week at Camp Grandma, it was time to go to the movies. \u00a0I had read through recent reviews and looked at the ratings, and I decided we would see either BFG (The Big Friendly Giant as opposed to B.F. Goodrich Tires) or the brand new movie about what pets do when their humans are otherwise occupied.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a summer Friday afternoon, so there was actually a line at the box office. \u00a0As we waited, Colt looked over at the line of movie posters, muttering longingly and almost under his breath, \u201cI\u2019d really like to see Tarzan.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve maybe heard of arachnophobes\u2014people who are afraid of spiders? \u00a0My daughter, Colt\u2019s mommy, is a herpetophobe\u2014someone who is afraid of snakes. \u00a0And for good reason. \u00a0When she was four years old or so and old enough to remember things, we moved to a recently built neighborhood on the far side of Spanish Trail in Tucson. \u00a0Recently built as in new construction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing about snakes\u2014all kinds of snakes. \u00a0They prefer to live and die within about 1500 yards of the place where they are hatched or born. \u00a0(By the way I just checked. \u00a0Approximately 70% of snakes come from eggs and the rest don\u2019t. \u00a0For the purposes of this blog it doesn\u2019t really matter which is which.) \u00a0The point is snakes are generally homebodies, and just because somebody brings in a construction crew and builds a bunch of houses in the neighborhood doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the snakes\u00a0will move away.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that was the case in Tucson. \u00a0Our neighbor, Mr. Green, used a hoe to dispatch a very angry rattlesnake with my daughter looking on in horror from only a few feet away. \u00a0That was the only rattlesnake we actually saw, but I suspect there were a lot of others that we didn\u2019t see. \u00a0In the end, though, my daughter\u2019s and my real issues were with garter snakes, because it turns out they don\u2019t move on, either.<\/span><\/p>\n

One day while I was at work, the children\u2019s father told them to go to the bathroom and then take a nap. \u00a0My daughter came racing back into the living room saying, \u201cDaddy, daddy. \u00a0There\u2019s \u00a0a snake in the bathtub!\u201d \u00a0He sauntered into the bathroom, chased the snake down the drain, put in the plug and said, \u201cNow go to the bathroom and go back to bed.\u201d \u00a0Except the snake squirted right back into the tub through the overflow opening.<\/span><\/p>\n

Garter snakes aren\u2019t dangerous but they are VERY quick. \u00a0They turned up in the bathtub occasionally and also in the hallway. For as long as we lived in that house\u2014the shortest amount of time possible, by the way\u2014both my daughter and I would pause at the beginning of the hallway and take a deep breath while we checked for snakes. Let\u2019s just say, she\u2019s never quite recovered.<\/span><\/p>\n

So here Colt and I are standing in the ticket line. I\u2019m thinking Tarzan\/Jungle. There are bound to be snakes. \u00a0(I have it on good authority that the Tarzan movie from the eighties was plugged full of the creatures.) \u00a0In other words, if Colt was going to see Tarzan, it would have to be my problem rather than his mother\u2019s. I knew from reading my sister\u2019s online movie review of Tarzan on Jayflix<\/a> (She\u2019s a great reviewer by the way!) that this version was PG-13. What to do? The only thing possible. \u00a0I bellied up to the ticket counter and bought tickets to Tarzan. <\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out the showtime for Tarzan was fifteen minutes later than the one for BFG. \u00a0While I was sitting there watching previews of movies I will definitely NOT be seeing, I found myself thinking about my father.<\/span><\/p>\n

Norman Busk was born in August of 1916. \u00a0Next month will mark his 100th birthday. \u00a0He loved Tarzan. \u00a0According to family legend, he was given his first Tarzan book written by Edgar Rice Burroughs on the occasion of his tenth birthday. \u00a0Even though he had broken his glasses at the time, he stayed up late that night, holding his glasses together, so he could finish reading it.<\/span><\/p>\n

My dad was ten. Colt is ten. Ninety years later it seemed entirely appropriate that Colt and I would go to see that particular movie together\u2014in honor of my dad. And I can tell you straight out that Colt loved it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Happy 100th, Gramps. Colt never had a chance to meet you, but the two of you share something in common\u2014a love of adventure stories\u2014and that\u2019s a good thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS: \u00a0In case you\u2019re interested, there are absolutely NO snakes in this version of Tarzan.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday of last week at Camp Grandma, it was time to go to the movies. \u00a0I had read through recent reviews and looked at the ratings, and I decided we would see either BFG (The Big Friendly Giant as opposed to B.F. Goodrich Tires) or the brand new movie about what pets do when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-jG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1221,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions\/1221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}