You Are A Part of My Being
My first memory of film wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t the thrill of the Star Wars crawl or the roar of a blockbuster battle. It was watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a small, wide-eyed child, and being terrified by a scene I wasn’t prepared for. I remember the shock and the instinctive run to the hallway where I dove into a box of packing pellets—my mother still tells the story of how I cried for minutes afterward.
That experience cracked open my world. Life became more than the small routines of toys and scribbled books; suddenly a single VHS could transport me to other lives, other places, unlimited by my backyard or bedroom. From that point on cinema became a doorway. Whether it was Ray Stantz dangling over a street in Ghostbusters 2 or a dinosaur scene from Jurassic Park, films continued to expand my imagination and help me make sense of the planet we all inhabit.
Cinema became part of my identity, another layer in who I am. The images, the characters, and the stories formed a collage inside me—a matrix of memorable moments that inform how I feel, think and dream. So for everything you have given me, and for everything still to come, thank you, cinema.
I love you.
Craig