Recently, I revisited a particular scene in Mel Stuart’s 1971 musical fantasy, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Of a heavy evening, the poor paper boy Charlie Bucket arrives at the laundry where his mother, Mrs. Bucket is working late. He offers to walk her home, but the impromptu visit is really intended to lessen the burden of his own broken heart. Mrs. Bucket unfortunately cannot leave her work and so Charlie turns to go just as abruptly as he arrived. She rises wearily from stirring a vat of soaking shirts with a wooden ladle and says, Stay a minute; here pull up a pile of clothes and sit down. He does so. She is sensible to his hidden burden and softly asks: Everything all right at school? Yep, he says. Good, did you go on your newspaper route today? Just finished, he says. Good, says Mrs. Bucket, and then this simple, unattractive woman in a besweated starch-blue work dress, remarkably beautiful in her humility, pauses, looks up and waits for her son Charlie to go on with what is there for him to reveal. The boy has an expression of supreme discouragement upon his thoughtful face. He grabs hold of the long wooden ladle in the laundry pot and screws up his brow, licks his lips and then comes forth with the pain of words: I wanted to tell ya somethin’. Oh?, says Mrs. Bucket. They found the third ticket today. Did they?, Mrs. Bucket retorts. Yeah. Charlie lowers his face. Well, I guess I’ll be going now, he says and zips up his coat. Mrs. Bucket asks, Is that all? Charlie, walking away, turns and responds, I thought you’d like to know, most people are pretty interested; I know I’m interested. There are only two tickets left, you know–just two! Pretty soon, just one. Mrs. Bucket pauses. She twists a saturated shirt free of its soapy water and ponders aloud, I wonder who the lucky ones will be? Now, the fury in Charlie’s pain is present and he confides, Well, in case you’re wondering if it’ll be me, it won’t be! Just in case you’re wondering, you can count me out! Mrs. Bucket steps forth and puts her hands on her son’s shoulders and says, Oh Charlie, there are a hundred billion people in this world and only five of them will find golden tickets. Even if you had a sack full of money you probably wouldn’t be able to find one and after this contest is over you’ll be no different from the billions of others who didn’t find one. It is here that Charlie is most vulnerable. He looks up into the eyes of his concerned mother and with great, honest courage says, but I am different, I want it more than any of them! Charlie, she says, you’ll get your chance! One day things will change. When?, he asks, when will they change?! Mrs. Bucket says with magnificent tenderness, probably when you least expect it. She blinks, leans down to her son and kisses his cheek. She dare not say more because she knows what he is up against. Mrs. Bucket’s wise restraint is her manner of protecting Charlie’s pure heart. An ache of bitterness and sweetness reflects itself in the expression of her face. In spite of her utter limitations and all the wisdom of her long years she would bear his burden if only she could, but she allows him to carry the weight of it just as it must be born and alone. What she can do, and does, is watch and wait in the wings of his unique stage as he proceeds forth, once again out into the world. As Charlie walks on, Mrs. Bucket steps out of the laundry and sits on the steps to watch him go. In the form of a song she issues a gentle wish at his heels. Cheer Up, Charlie…
Charlie Bucket walks the lonely and crooked streets on home. His intelligence grants no quarter to the obvious and hard truth he perceives. His own sensibility metes out a measure of sharp pain and equal understanding with each step. He accepts all of it just as it must be, but never to the point of diminishing the hope of a dream in his purest heart. He sees the world as it really is and even as it ought to be and finds himself exactly where he is within it somewhere in between. His value is intact even in its insignificance. And his noblest courage is in admitting these delicate shades of meaning to himself. He knows the golden ticket is just a piece of paper and maybe it alone cannot fully provide proof of the sort of imagination he will keep for himself. And so he lets it go. He can walk another day along the line of the gray curtain of a weary and indifferent world.
****
Not long ago, I awoke from lousy sleep. I had been having some nonsensical dream that left me confused and within which I heard Mrs. Bucket singing Cheer Up Charlie over and over again in a loop. The music had a faint tinny quality to it as if it were muffled behind some heavy door from some considerable distance. There have been plenty of dreams in which songs play in my mind and I usually think nothing of them. But for some reason I felt impelled to go downstairs and find the particular scene I’ve just described above. Nothing profound came in watching it again. I know the scene well from many years of viewing it throughout my life. Maybe it was the familiarity of the setting and the kind-hearted message of hope in heavy times that calmed me, but I didn’t think too hard about it. I closed my laptop, got a drink of water and returned to bed.
Over the ensuing days I kept thinking about the scene at the laundry between Charlie and Mrs. Bucket. What interested me was a texture inside of the narrative. There is nothing complicated there, what is shown is obvious and more than evident in its sequence, but it triggered a consideration I’ve had in mind for some time about shadings of meaning, or rather essences of humanness where the light sort of trails off and leaves a delicate sensibility to something usually in plain sight but not altogether obvious to see. I don’t know that Roald Dahl or Mel Stuart were trying to say or show more in that particular moment then they did but what I rediscovered was the acute recognition of my own face mirrored in the reflection of Charlie Bucket or rather, his face in mine. It reminded me of something Walt Whitman often considered when viewing any other human being along the course of his own life, that we are all, in the end just a little bit of each other, that our histories and hopes are all inextricably intertwined. That a greater reward comes when our own sensibility changes perspective with an outlook far broader than the one we started out with.
I thought of a single word.
****
Many years ago, I flew from Atlanta to Brussels. At 37,000 feet through the gloaming, I chased ethereal light along a voluble horizon until suddenly it brightened into pale morning just over the North Sea. Glimpsing milky-hued cerulean water through a thinned silk screen, as the Boeing 767 began its descent, I prepared for a long unobstructed gaze over Belgium. A pleasant fragrance wafted proximal to my nose and I looked away from the window. The sinewy stewardess I’d wondered about during the night passed and gaited down the aisle to the main cabin. She turned and looked right at me and lifted the telephone mouthpiece to her fine face wherein she fluently announced, first in liquid French, then in guttural Dutch, and finally in received-pronunciation English, preparations for landing. I listened intently, watching closely as her lovely mouth shaped the sound of each word in an effortless lilt. When she gracefully concluded and returned the telephone to its hook the sound of the Rolls-Royce RB211 engines seemed far away. I returned my gaze to the alabaster veil beyond the plexiglass and waited. The broad wing dipped and there beneath the cloud deck of a gray morning were red rooftops as far as I could see. I was stunned! The bright shock of a deeply embedded emotional memory rose vividly in my mind. Years before, framed inside the small screen of a zenith television set I had placed atop a card table in my bedroom closet, I peered out of the pristine glass of the Wonkavator and saw the original red rooftops of Munich identical to the ones I was looking at through the glass of the big descending jet I rode all the way into Brussels. Instinctively I whispered the lyric, if you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it. I thought of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe and Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket and Russ Staker as an eight-year-old version of his contemporary self all hovering together right there above a mysterious Chocolate Factory–only we weren’t marveling at that. Below was a propinquitous range of vision, as messy, and as full of memory, and as unfinished and gloriously real and imagined as any we might have known. The wonder of everyday streets and routine movements and patterns of lives being lived in languages foreign to our own was profound. The real mystery lay just under every red rooftop. As I reflected upon this, I discerned that there in every small space of the drab world, inside every dank and loathsome alleyway and crooked sidewalk, in every difficult choice and untold disappointment, and in all of this world’s terribly absurd history an articulate and life-affirming shade of perspective resides and replenishes every hope and dream. As the 767 lurched into Zaventem and came to a full stop at the gate I promised myself not to dismiss any of it. Somehow, if I paid close enough attention to every banal intricacy in any small hour, I was sure to get a glimpse of paradise.
…there is no life I know to compare with pure imagination…
RCS
20 March, 2021
*The Entire Essay Is Read And Discussed At Length On Russell Cordell Staker’s Podcast These Small Hours