The Tramp's Shuffle

Chaplin's famous gait is taken on by a Film Studies student

He looked more or less the same.

Of the Four Horsemen of aging - Fat, Bald, Wrinkled and Tired - only the first had invaded his territory, something he made light of as the conversation progressed, one that began with me greeting him enthusiastically in an effort - perhaps too hard an effort - to rewrite an uneasy history.

As his eyes lit up at the sight of me and he excitedly shook my hand, I glowed with the happy irony of the moment: here I was, in respectful, even chummy conversation with a man who, upon our last meeting some twenty years ago, I slunk away from sheepishly.

"Uh...I'm in a situation where I can't go on with my studies," I explained delicately back then, trying to hide a novel's worth of content in a single line: my lower-middle class background, my parents' indifference to the value of college, my egotistical refusal to get a low-paying job to subsidize my future. "But I adore your classes." Indeed I did; here was a hip, down to earth authority of all things Movie. "Okay if I audit?"

"Fine," was the curt, almost indifferent reply. Where was the personal sense of failure, the guilt, the larger-than-life kindness that would call him to help me to continue?

I dutifully attended all of his classes and, unlike his other students, who unfairly considered Film Studies but a break from true academia, participated diligently, asking interesting questions, writing essays, attending extra curricular screenings.

One evening, the one that followed my viewing of Chaplin's The Great Dictataor in the university's Resource Centre, I approached him with an anticipatory spring in my step; here was a film I was dying to dissect with him. "You accessed a film in the resource Centre!," he admonished.

"Those Resources are for paying students!" My face at that moment, flushed and saddened by his shockingly stern tone, was a sample of pure Chaplinesque pathos.

Like the celebrated tramp, trudging off quietly and alone at the end of a two-reeler, I shuffled off with that same sad realization: that no manic enthusiasm nor half-cocked effort was going to permit me to access a more legitimate world, in my case, one of movies, higher education, and mesmerizing mentors.

But here I was, close to a quarter century later, in a resolution more Capra than Chaplin, wrapping up a conversation with the man who had once served as the stimuli for those feelings of inadequacy, the kind of dialogue reserved for lifelong friends.

I walked away tall.