Happy President’s Day 2025. Here’s a story I wrote 16 years ago today, that will be in my upcoming book Daddy Muscles Too, available for Father’s Day 2025.
Originally published February 16, 2009
We went to a movie for the first time today, 9:30 a.m. on President’s Day. We saw Horton Hears a Who! It was organized by Jack’s daycare at UCLA. Tickets were purchased a month ago. Fliers were posted. Reminder sent. It was a big deal to us. And Jack was oblivious.
He’s 21-and-a-half-months old. “Guess where we’re going today Jack? To a movie!” Nothing. No reaction. He just kept trying to take off his pants.
It was raining in Los Angeles, which normally means all bets are off to drive anywhere. But because of the Monday holiday, it was easy to drive across town to the movie theater. We arrived 25 minutes early. Marisa and I never arrive anywhere 25 minutes early.
The old-fashioned, single-screen movie theater on Westwood Boulevard was already half full of other families. Kids were looking around, running around, being loud. There were big red curtains in front and a gold-covered ceiling above. Fathers and mothers followed their kids, or talked to each other, or went for more coffee.
We found Jack’s friend Mimi. Mimi’s mom, Asako, was one of the organizers of the day. I suggested Marisa could take Mimi so her mom could focus on taking people’s tickets. To my mild amazement, both Asako and Marisa thought this was a good idea—in our marriage, and especially about Jack, Marisa does most of the suggesting. Marisa had Mimi, and I had Jack, and we wandered around the movie theater oohing and aahing at the sites.
At 9:30, someone took a microphone and welcomed everyone and thanked the volunteers who’d organized. There was honest clapping and then the lights dimmed. They dimmed only partially, so as not to spook the kids. Horton Hears a Who! began. No trailers, just straight to the movie.
Jack was wiggling at first. He was sitting with mommy next to Alexandra, his other friend from daycare, and her mommy Vladana. Jack can’t pronounce Alexandra, so he calls her “Aki.” Jack can say Mimi just fine. Aki and Mimi are two of Jack’s best buddies at daycare. There’s one more friend, Elena, who is the fourth amigo, but she didn’t come to the movie. Jack pronounces Elena as “Nina.” They are all within six weeks of age of each other.
The four friends are aware of each other, and they will squeal with delight when one of the other three arrives at school in the morning. More than once I have seen Jack say “Mimi sad,” or “Aki crying,” when one of them stubs a toe or has an upset somewhere away in the classroom. He can identify them by their cries even when he can’t see them. Vladana says Jack has girlfriends.
Jack and Aki are both very tall for their age. Jack’s height has been a 95th percentile his whole life. Jack and Aki are almost the same height and they lumber about like dinosaurs, while Elena and Mimi are short and spry.
Aki has white-blond hair. Mimi has dark straight hair while Elena has dark curls. Jack has his strawberry-ginger hair which is starting to curl since we haven’t cut it yet. The four make a bouncy, squealing rainbow, playing together. I call them Cinnamon Sugar and the Raisinettes.
In the movie theater, Marisa passed Jack to me to hold on my lap. I treated the movie like a picture book. “Look at the ball! Look at it rolling! Where is it going? Is that an elephant?”
Why does my daddy voice automatically go high and squeaky? Why do I repeat things when I’m talking to Jack? At the movie, it was actually working. Jack was watching the screen and he was still, lying against me while I narrated and pointed at the screen. I was louder than I realized – I often am – and Marisa shushed me a bit.
How many movies have I seen so far in life? Hundreds? Over a thousand? I don’t remember my first movie.
I had mixed feelings about taking young Jack to his first movie. Teenagers see movies. Adults see movies. Do 21-month-olds see movies? Was it too soon? I didn’t want it to scare him, to be too loud or too dark. Neither of those things happened. This was planned by parents, for kids. The sound wasn’t full volume and the lights weren’t fully darkened.
Dimly, it was dawning on me that Jack too will see hundreds of movies in his life and I won’t be there for 99% of them. That is normal but I couldn’t help feeling melancholy.
Being a dad is funny. I get tired—and I get melancholy. When I’m tired, I want some time to myself, some freedom to float. But, when I’m melancholy, I want time to stand still. I want to slow everything to a stop and look at it and reflect on it and think; I don’t want to lose it.
On so many days, both weekends and weekdays, we are rushing. From the first morning cry from his crib until the last bottle and last book at night, it is busy. Today was different. The Monday holiday, the rain, being early—three things that don’t happen in our normal LA lifestyle. They interrupted the routine.
Jack didn’t make it through the whole movie of course. Toddlers have the attention span of, well, toddlers.
We spent much of the movie in toddler-chaos in the lobby. With Aki, he played “spin around and scream” in the red velvet curtains that were almost the same color as his jumpsuit. He grabbed a bagel off a table before I could stop him, so I bought it for $1. It was sun-dried tomato, not really a kid flavor.
Before I could stop him, he kissed his reflection in the silver, shiny trash. Yuck! I wondered how many germs and how to clean them off his lips and whether or not to tell Marisa. I did manage to keep Mimi from kissing her reflection too.
That moment—him sitting on my lap, warm and heavy, his first movie unfolding, me narrating and pointing and Jack being mesmerized—that magical moment was quickly gone.
But to begin with, for those first minutes, while Jack was on my lap and I was narrating the movie to him like a picture book, for those short minutes the world did stand still. His body was still. He was heavy on my chest and he was enthralled. I got to share the first moments of his first movie.
Jack will see more movies and so will I. But I don’t know if I’ll love anything more than I loved the first ten minutes of Horton Hears a Who!
Dylan Stafford 
What did you think?