Red Right Hand to Yellowstone
Happy New Year. This is the first time I’ve sat down at a computer in three weeks. It’s the most natural position for me, but it does feel foreign at the moment. 2023, we are lucky to have made it here.
Season 6 of Peaky Blinders was earlier this year, but I watched it once it dropped on Netflix. To be honest, I cannot tell you what month that was. The entirety of 2022 has been a single day. Like Tommy, there was a loss, searching through the old ways and dazed visions, and then the burning of the past as we become something new.
I can tell you that Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand was my theme song and my motto for the year has been, “In the bleak midwinter…”
Tommy dealt with the loss of his daughter in season 6. I cannot begin to compare the loss of my mom to the loss of a child, but I love the people in my life as they belong to me and only me. I love them with a possessiveness that defies reason. When Tommy threatened the doctor attending to his daughter, I had flashbacks to the doctors I argued, reasoned with, and threatened in the past few years. Tommy went to the gypsies for answers. I just managed to stop listening to the voicemail of the doctor telling me my mom would be okay the day before she died.
I didn’t believe I was dying as Tommy did, I just knew I wasn’t alive. I also didn’t mind. In the bleak midwinter, I can work 70-hour work weeks, not sleep, and live on coffee until my kidneys almost fail. I have a high threshold for pain evidenced by a phoenix that has become my friend after five straight hours of slow, fine, and deliberate cuts.
There is no surviving this. It becomes a part of you and you continue. If there was a part of me that mirrored Tommy walking away from his caravan it would have to be the burial service. Like the rituals Tommy followed in the caravan, those I witnessed on that day started centuries before I was ever around and will continue long after I’m gone. The part I played that my mom would understand was running to the bathroom to hurl my guts out as the congregation began to sing, trying to sneak into the church unnoticed and somehow slicing my hand open on the door without knowing.
Fanning myself during the service, I noticed red splatters land first on the pew and then on my program. I thought at first it was the trick of the lighting and it was me seeing my mom’s blurred red program, but then I saw it for what it was; droplets of blood. I followed the trail to the blood flowing down my arm, and finally the open wound on my right hand. Armed with a single tissue, I nonchalantly dabbed at the wound, hoping the bleeding would stop before I had to give the eulogy. I got through my mom’s service with a single tissue soaked in blood wrapped around my right hand, and blood caked on my wrist traveling down my arm. It was definitely a Tommy Shelby moment.
I will have a scar on the side of the knuckle of my index finger. I will cherish it because it was the bittersweet day my mom was put to rest next to her family members.
I hope they go through with making the movie of season 7 material. I need to see Shelby deal with WWII.
I’ve avoided Paramount+ because subscribing to it would mean that I subscribe to all of the major platforms, which would completely make my cord-cutting a moot point.
Then I saw an ad for Harrison Ford holding Helen Mirren and I had to know what Yellowstone and every branch of that show were about. I binged 1883 on a flight and ended this year-long day for me.
I had a passing knowledge that it was a standalone prequel starring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. I can play their duets all day in the background, but I hadn’t gotten around to watching their show — I waited too long to see an amazing series.
1883 is simply a realistic look at how hard it was to complete the Oregon Trail. If you ever felt bad for winning that game as a kid with 50%, the reality was much worse.
Elsa Dutton was captivating and having the lives of all of these characters narrated by a strong, teenage girl seeing the beauty and horrors of human existence for the first time was a hook that had me watching all 10 episodes in a single sitting.
There was a lot of death. There was a lot of pain. Many people were lost on the trail. The silver lining was understanding that the wilderness, like life, doesn’t owe you a certain number of years; you have to work with the days you’re given.
When one of our main characters, probably the strongest of the group, realizes that their wound just might be a mortal one, they simply continue to enjoy everything around them.
I didn’t enjoy things for a very long time. There was a wilderness I was making my own way through. After years of doctors and hospital visits with uncertainty, a year of the worst fears realized followed by a soul-crushing year of loss, that entire wilderness became my reality. I was lost in the woods and I no longer could tell where I was. There was no trail. Like Shelby and the Dutton family, I was dealing with the loss of my family, which isn’t something that can be negotiated away.
Palominos are beautiful. They glide across the prairie lean, and long with the pride of a wild beast that knows it cannot be tamed. Never tired, and always at the ready when the rest of them have reached their limits.
Life has a funny way of continuing. With a fleeting moment of being exerted against exquisite masculinity in motion — two thoughts crossed my muddled mind simultaneously; I was flesh and blood and I hadn’t stepped in a gym in two years. I remembered I was alive.
The open frontier is still a hard place to survive. We will enter 2023 with our best foot forward. I will also spend the New Year's long weekend in bed watching 1923.
A final thought that came to mine with the new frontiers in the universe. What would a mustard-colored wool-knit sweater look like against denim at my eye level? Colors and textures are again seen.
