On legendary talents: RIP, Rob Reiner

On December 15, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn moviesLeave a comment

I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.

I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.

The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.

And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)

I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.

May his memory be a blessing.

(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.

(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.

#REVIEW: Pope Francis (1936-2025)

On April 21, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Okay, no, not really, but as soon as I thought of the headline I couldn’t not use it. I was already going to Hell anyway; it’s not like that can get worse.(*)

Despite having been an atheist for literally my entire life, I frequently refer to myself as biologically Catholic; my parents both attended Catholic schools for at least part of their childhoods and while we were never regular churchgoers or even “Easter and Christmas” Catholics, I attended the occasional service with my grandparents and, of course, any weddings or funerals in the family were inevitably Catholic services, to say nothing of how religion affects a family’s general culture even when that family stops practicing the religion. I taught at a Catholic school for three years at the beginning of my career, and hung around at a part-time job at the parish for another year or so after that. One way or another, the Church fascinates me, with all of its plentiful warts, and Francis in particular has been a fascinating Pope, especially after his odious predecessor. I look forward to everyone on the Internet becoming an expert in the Conclave over the next week or two (note that I am already an expert on the Conclave, as someone who has been opining on religion in public for over a decade) and I am tantalized at the idea that this guy has a nonzero chance of becoming the next Pope:

I saw a decent article a few weeks ago, while Francis was hospitalized, about five or six of his most likely successors, and my recollection was that Cardinal Pizzaballa was actually one of the more progressive possibilities. Anything can happen once they head into that room; I’m fairly certain that Francis himself was a dark horse when he was named Pope, but I may be misremembering. It’s hard to imagine how the same crew of people that named Benedict XVI, plus eight years of cardinals he named, might have chosen someone nearly Benedict’s complete opposite, but it happened. Anyway, if I can find the article I’ll post it. The same part of me that enjoys reading about old-school political party conventions back when they actually chose the Presidential candidate rather than simply coronating him loves to read people speculating about the Conclave, which obviously doesn’t happen in public, so there’s a lot more people wantonly making shit up out there. Maybe I’ll pretend I’ve got an inside source! We’ll see.

At any rate, it would be nice if something happens in 2025 that doesn’t make things worse, so even if you aren’t a Catholic we can all hope that someone sane emerges after the smoke turns white. One thing not swinging further to the right this year would be great.

(*) To be clear, I don’t believe in Hell either.

On the unimaginable

On September 29, 2024September 29, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.

He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.

Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that he was still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.

The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.

Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:

I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)

Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.

68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.

I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.

(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)

I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.

In which I’m doing this all wrong, somehow

On July 18, 2023July 19, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I had a conversation with a couple of former students a few weeks ago, at the end of June, and in that conversation one of them mentioned that their mother had had to leave town unexpectedly because their uncle was dying. I expressed sympathy and was, for a moment, rather taken aback at how little concern the student was showing. The explanation came a few moments later; they simply weren’t that close with that side of the family, and that particular uncle was someone they barely knew. Mom had apparently expressed her own lack of desire to leave and had done so purely out of a feeling of obligation.

I thought about it for a moment. I get it, I said. I have a few uncles myself who I probably wouldn’t mourn all that much.

My mother passed away in January of 2020. If you were to read her obituary, you would come upon the sentence Cremation will take place, and a celebration of life will occur at a later date. It is now July of 2023. That “later date” was meant to be a couple of months later, enough time to let everyone recover from the immediate shock and to give a family scattered across the country some time to gather.

You may be a step ahead of me in realizing what happened instead, and as of today my mother has never had a formal funeral. Her ashes– this is in accordance with her expressed wishes, for the record– are in my hallway closet, perhaps twenty feet from where I’m sitting right now. “You just keep me until Dad dies,” she told me, “and then scatter us somewhere.” She left no will or any other end-of-life instructions. Honestly, everyone just sort of took my word for it.

(That’s what she told me. I promise.)

Perhaps you have put two and two together already, given that I have yet to reveal the identity of the handsome gentleman who sits atop this post, and given said handsome gentleman’s fine taste in hats and facial hair. The same night– the exact same fucking night— I texted that sentence about having uncles who I probably wouldn’t mourn very much, I got a text from my brother that my uncle Bruce was dead. I don’t know the date of his death, and I doubt I ever will; he was found in his apartment, and I don’t know who by. My uncle Jim got in touch with my brother and he told me.

Bruce was my dad’s younger brother, by only a couple of years; he was 69 or 70, I think. Dad is the oldest of four, and Bruce was the second-born, followed by my aunt Lori and then Jim. Lori and Jim are far enough removed from my dad that Lori babysat us when we were kids, and I believe both still lived at home with my grandmother when my brother and I were very young. I have not spoken to Bruce or seen him in at least fifteen years, and I don’t think I’ve talked to Dad’s other siblings since the boy was an infant.

We just … don’t really talk to that side of the family, all that much. There are reasons. I won’t share them here– I’m sure you can find a way to forgive me– and honestly I probably don’t know them all.

Bruce lived in Chicago for most of his life. He lived there the entire time I was there, but I only saw him a few times during the near-decade we were both Chicagoans. He moved around a lot, spending a lot of time in Jamaica. He introduced me to Bob Marley’s music, instantly cementing himself as someone responsible for a chunk of my brain development in high school. He once brought back some hand-woven bracelets from Kingstown and gave one to my brother and I for Christmas, and in response to our nonplussed reactions offered us, rather grandly (Bruce did everything rather grandly), to provide us with the cash equivalent instead. Which was perhaps $2, if we were lucky. He may not have actually had that much cash on him, either. I remember him finding me reading the novelization of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and asking me if I enjoyed it, a question that somehow led to him taking the book from me and quizzing me about it. I remember this story because I didn’t know the answer to the very first question he asked, from the very first page of the book– he asked how old Lao Che was, and I insisted that information wasn’t in the book at all, which is how I learned that the phrase pushing fifty means that one is nearly fifty years old.

I would guess he’s about my age or a little older in that picture up there, which would make it twenty-ish years ago. I’m not on Facebook, but his profile is public, and I was able to find his page and scroll through his pictures. And the thing is, I have no idea what he might have been fighting or struggling with toward the end of his life, but the most recent pictures were shocking. He’d lost a ton of weight, his beard now halfway down his chest and whiter than mine is. And he was old; that feeling would be inevitable given how long it had been since I’d seen him, but my dad’s younger brother now looked to have a decade on him at least. He looked like he’d been sick for a while when he passed. I have no idea what might have been wrong. He never mentioned anything being wrong, never said anything about a hard day, or being tired, or not feeling well.

The caption on nearly half the pictures? It’s a wonderful day to be alive. He had friends; there were tons of pictures of him with other people and lots of references to people and tags back and forth. But that quote kept coming up over and over again. It’s a wonderful day to be alive.

And now he is gone, and I’ve barely talked to him in two decades, and I somehow miss him anyway. I never missed him when he was alive. What kind of person does that make me? I don’t know.

We gave my uncle some time to get back to us about some sort of service and then, having heard nothing, I asked my brother to reach out to him again. Jim had said that he was going to go to Chicago to clean out his apartment and settle his affairs, which I suspect was not as big of a job as it might seem. He took a while to respond. He’d been busy with last-minute details for his son’s wedding– a wedding that no member of my family had been invited to– and said that “his cousins” were having a get-together later that week that he couldn’t attend. This is a direct quote: “There will probably be some reflection on Bruce’s life then.” Did my aunt come up from Florida for the wedding? They live in Michigan, not far from us. He didn’t go to this “get-together.” If the two of them were together recently, they did not bother to reach out to my father or to my brother and I.

My mother never got a funeral. Bruce, it seems, isn’t even going to get an obituary. My grandmother is buried in South Bend; my grandfather, who passed away when I was very young, is buried in a family plot in Arkansas. I have no idea whether he left any instructions about what to do with his remains when he was gone (and I kind of doubt it; Bruce was not a planner) and burying his ashes with his mother seems to be the cleanest solution, but right now I have no idea what’s become of him. I don’t know how he died. I don’t know when he died.

He mentioned having a cat, in one of the pictures. I hope one of his friends has it.

But hey. The cousins got together. There was probably some reflection.

I guess that’s going to have to be enough.

Here we go again

On June 12, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

It’s confirmed. Devon Green, a 23-year-old former student of mine, passed away in his sleep two days ago. That’s all anyone knows at the moment. His family is struggling to pay for the funeral; there’s a GoFundMe. If anybody happens to have a few spare nickels with nothing to use them on, donations would be greatly appreciated.

In which I’ve accomplished something

On June 11, 2023June 11, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Okay, on some sort of Absolute Scale of Adulthood, successfully installing a ceiling fan at my dad’s house is probably not at or near the top of the scale. But as far as I know the damn thing is solidly installed, working properly, and isn’t going to come flying off of the walls or collapse or anything like that, and now there is both light and moving air in Dad’s kitchen again (we’re not going to talk about how long it took for this to get done, especially since it diminishes the actual achievement itself) and as far as I know the only thing that really still needs to be done is painting that patch of naked drywall up there that was underneath the original fan.

I mean, y’all, this involved wiring and everything. Wiring is scary! And I only had to go back to Lowe’s once, because I forgot to bring a wire stripper from my house and Dad didn’t have one, and Lowe’s was closer than going back to my house for mine. I thought for a few minutes that I was going to have to install a junction box but it turns out I didn’t have to, so all good there.

And then I got home and found out another former student had died, or at least that’s the rumor; the kid moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago so right now it’s all rumor mill shit and no one who I still talk to has any idea what happened. If I remember right this kid was a year ahead of Makyi’s class, and if I’m being honest I don’t remember him all that well, so it’s not hitting me nearly as hard, but … Christ, between this and everything going on in America this week the emotional whiplash has been a motherfucker and I would really like the world to calm the fuck down for a couple of weeks. It’s enough.