Movie magic under the stars carried us through the year of COVID – The Providence Journal

Paul Edward Parker|The Providence Journal

Most of us were in need of magic this year as the coronavirus pandemic left little in our lives unchanged.

My son and Ifound that magic on a hillside in North Smithfield, home to the Rustic Tri View Drive In.

Jeremiah, 13, and I became regulars at the Route 146 drive-in, taking in movies on 18 of the 31 weekends the theater was open.

We started May 22, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, which was the second weekend the drive-in showed movies after Gov. Gina M. Raimondo allowed it to reopen following the spring lockdown.

Until then, the only things we left the house for were occasional food shopping trips and often with Jeremiah's older brother walks through Lincoln Woods State Park, where the deer took over the landscape and the number of other people we saw could be counted on one hand.

We had been to the drive-in a handful of times in the years leading up to 2020, but this time felt special, a breath of freedom after two months of lockdown.

The visit recalled special trips I made as a child with my parents to the drive-in in North Haven, Connecticut. Dad died in 1986, when I was in college, and Mom died in 2015, having met her grandsons.

She was a child of the Great Depression who started grade school around the beginning of World War II. She had told me how movies got people through those bleak times. I hoped they would work that same magic on us.

That first weekend, we saw an utterly forgettable "Wretched" and the hilarious mystery "Knives Out." It would be a month before we returned, for a Harley Quinn double feature.

But, a couple of weeks later, on July 9, the magic struck.

Jeremiah and I went to see "The Conjuring" and "The Conjuring 2." No longer a "little kid," he wanted to challenge himself by watching scary movies.

As the summer days got shorter and yielded to crisp fall nights, we took in more than a dozen horror movies, including such classics "The Shining," "It" and "Nightmare on Elm Street."

With each passing weekend, my little boy grew up a wee bit more. His burgeoning maturity carried over into his willingness to do household chores and schoolwork. But my pride came with a touch of melancholy, realizing that my baby was fading, scene by scene, into a young man.

While the drive-in season was a coming-of-age story for Jeremiah, much of it was a flashback for me.

A flashback to those childhood outings with my parents. We would get to the drive-in early so my brother and I could play on the jungle gym up close to the big screen before darkness fell. We would get treats at the snack bar during intermission. My brother and I would fall asleep during the second feature, only to be woken at home as Mom and Dad carried us into the house.

(Jeremiah, his brother and I made a trip this fall to that drive-in. It's now a BMW and Mercedes-Benz dealership.)

And there were flashbacks when the Rustic showed some of the same movies I had seen at a drive-in as a kid. In August, Jeremiah and I saw "Smokey and the Bandit," which I had first seen at the drive-in with my parents when I was Jeremiah's age. (My mother had quite a crush on Burt Reynolds.)

But it wasn't just the movies that Jeremiah and I shared this year. It was time together, time to talk about life, time to pass on a family tradition.

It was also time to eat special food, whether it was delightfully greasy treats from the snack bar or takeout from local restaurants following Raimondo's appeal to support eateries crippledby the pandemic.

We also shared our summer with Jake from State Farm, who starred in commercials that the Rustic showed before the first movie and during intermission.

And "Who Can Say Where the Road Goes?" by Enya became our unofficial theme song as it played during Kraft macaroni and cheese ads.

It leaves me to wonder where the road will lead next year. Will life return to normal? Will the road lead my son and me back to the drive-in? Will we be able to again capture magic under the stars?

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Movie magic under the stars carried us through the year of COVID - The Providence Journal