Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: A+ | 16 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Work
By Drunken Bee | Season 4 | Episode 5 | Aired on 06.04.2010
Outside, Matt kind of lopes away from the house when Coach calls him back with two sternly-worded "Matt"s. Matt stops running and breaks down crying, doing that extremely sad, limbs-folding-in-on-yourself kind of collapse-sobbing. Coach comes up next to him and just stands there for a bit until Matt gets control of the wracking sobs. Then Coach just says, quietly, "I'm going to walk you home." Matt doesn't say anything but they start walking, in silence. Cut to a shot of them from behind, Coach just reaching an arm around Matt's shoulders as they go. Matt is doing the work of grief, and he's doing it alone, nobody can really help, but someone can at least stand next to him for a while.
Commercials. The morning of the funeral. Grandma worries a tissue in her lap while Shelby fixes her hair. Matt laces up his church shoes and looks at the piece of paper with his eulogy on it. The hearse enters the cemetery where soldiers stand at attention near the grave. People start to gather, and by people I mean LYLA GARRITY IS THERE! Lyla and Tim exchange a glance, we cut to a bit later as the pastor finishes up the Lord's Prayer (during which Tami closes her eyes and holds Eric's hand tightly) and says that Matt has some words to share with them. Matt gets up, puts the paper in his pocket, and says that he's just going to tell one story and that will be it. Then he launches into the story: about being at the supermarket with his mom, dad, and Grandma. His dad put some toilet paper in the cart and Grandma said "No, that's not the right one, that's not the right toilet paper we use!" Totally nails Grandma Saracen's weird locution there. So then Grandma puts the right toilet paper in the cart and storms off and his dad waits a minute and then just starts stacking tons of toilet paper in the cart. "It wasn't spiteful or nothing, and maybe you had to be there, but as a six-year-old it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life." Now partly, this eulogy shows Matt coming to terms with the fact that there might be facets of his father's personality that he didn't know, but the thing I find most moving is that yes, I do think you had to be there. This is not a funny story. At all. But it's a family story, one that doesn't make sense because families don't really make sense when you try to translate all their specialized languages so others can understand. And so for me this eulogy is moving not because it shows Matt discovering something about his dad, but Matt realizing something about family-- of which he, lucky kid, now has two. Matt's eulogy continues, he says that he guesses that his father was more funny than he let on, that he was kind of private in that way. But one thing he wasn't private about was his service. He was in the army for twenty years, and he was proud of that. And he missed a lot of Matt's birthdays and a lot of him growing up, but Matt muses that he guesses the point is that he got to grow up. He got to have birthdays. His father did a job that not many people want to do and because of all of that we all get to be here and grow up and have our birthdays. Okay, now I'm totally with Matt on the "job not many people want to do" and I think it's crazy how this country is served so well by its least privileged members. But I don't exactly think the result of people not being in the Army is mass annihilation to the point of non-birthday having. And ultimately, Matt falling back on the language that others have used to describe his father-- he was funny and he was a good soldier-- is kind of an ambivalent ending. Because it seems to foretell that Matt, because he is SO good, won't be able to make his own path in the world, that he will always be upstanding and good and doing for others, but he won't ever be pathbreaking. Matt recognized the "wrong" feelings he had toward his father and he turned them into "right" ones. There's a real ambivalence there.