gift

 

Had a couple of real helpful responses to my memories about Bud Davis Drive In Theatre, and just now, as I sit up in the bed with blanket pulled up because to me it's cold outside and my feet are cold, my office/study/den is cold and the heavy sweater was not keeping me warm, channel 13 just ran a piece about all the great plans for the Martin Theater downtown at 4th Street & Harrison Avenue, looks like we're going to have a real success of a facility. To me it'd be absolutely perfect if they corrected the name back to Ritz Theatre.

My memory, the Bud Davis Drive In was so far out in the boondocks on the northern edge of town, and now two bits of info - - from Mike with a link about it and saying it was actually very close, where the CVS pharmacy is at the corner of 15th Street and Lisenby Avenue, actually just north of Lisenby Hospital and Lake Caroline:

The first drive-in theatre to open in Panama City was the Bud Davis Drive-In. It opened on March 27, 1948, featuring the 1946 comedy/musical “Meet Me on Broadway” with Marjorie Reynolds, Frederick Brady and Jinx Falkenburg. It was opened by M. A. “Bud” Davis. Before opening the drive-in he was the city manager for all the Martin-Davis Theatres in Panama City. Since 1935, Davis had been working in several positions for Martin-Davis Theatres in Alabama and Florida. The Bud Davis Drive-In was his first theatre venture on his own. Built at cost of $40,000, it featured a car capacity of 370 cars. In August of 1950, high winds from a tropical hurricane that made landfall in Alabama had ripped away several panels from the screen tower and some fencing around the drive-in. The screen tower panels and the fencing were replaced.

In December of 1953, a new 72 ft. x 38 ft. curved CinemaScope screen was mounted in front of the old flat screen. Also upgraded, were the lamp houses for the projectors with a total cost of $16,000. In October of 1956, the concession stand was remodeled. In looking at movie advertisements it looks like Martin Theatres started operating the Bud Davis Drive-In in June of 1962 and it closed at the end of the year for good. The Bud Davis Drive-In was demolished and the property was sold for new retail businesses. cinematreasures.org/theaters/45661 

The other from Carl, with a map of that section of Panama City and going off into the woods up there

So, that's settling old memories into reality! 15th Street runs across the center of the map, and Bud Davis Drive In is to the left, below and slightly to the right of Greenwood Cemetery. 

Other things are in my mind this morning, first watching with anticipation as Captain's Table restaurant takes shape and new, larger form out my window here in StAndrews at the corner of Beck Avenue and 11th Street.Picture above! Looks like they're going to have an outside eating area, covered. Capt's Table was my favorite here in StAndrews because they nearly always had fried mullet, our only local restaurant that did, hoping that stays on the regular menu. Although at the moment, the Red Tide seems to have hurt the mullet, I fear, especially concerned now, which is roe and hatchling time of year.

This morning, Linda is looking through the freezer for ingredients put aside to make soup now that the weather is chill and grey, season that is always just right for a hot bowl of soup at noon or for supper. Usually chicken base, now and then beef or ham. 

++++++++

Which brings me to an article I read earlier today on my cellphone. Having myself gone through the excruciating fears of parenthood, a lifetime of worrying about their safety, health and wellbeing, I find myself now unendingly worried about a family who, still so devastatingly recent and horrifyingly raw, lost a child, as the Litany says, sudden and unexpected; that, for myself, loving each one so intensely and protectively, to lose a child would have destroyed me and my will to go on - - anyway, this article I copy-and-pasted from my subscription to The Atlantic, with maybe just one short comment of my own after the end.

What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness

Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated.

By Paul Bloom

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what having kids means for happiness. Some of the most prominent scholars in the field have argued that if you want to be happy, it’s best to be childless. Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play: What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness?

The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other studies find that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, in addition to a drop in marital satisfaction that doesn’t usually recover until the children leave the house. As the Harvard professor Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”

After all, having children, particularly when they are young, involves financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is also in many cases the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And children can turn a cheerful and loving romantic partnership into a zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and work and who doesn’t. As the Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior notes in her book, All Joy and No Fun, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—“more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex.” Someone who doesn’t understand this is welcome to spend a full day with an angry 2-year-old (or a sullen 15-year-old); they’ll find out what she means soon enough.

But, as often happens in psychology, although some research provided simple findings—in this case, “having children makes you unhappy”—other efforts arrived at more complicated conclusions. For one, the happiness hit is worse for some people than for others. One study finds that fathers ages 26 to 62 actually get a happiness boost, while young or single parents suffer the greatest loss. And crucially, there are geographic differences. A 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of people with and without children in 22 countries found that the extent to which children make you happy is influenced by whether your country has child-care policies such as paid parental leave. Parents from Norway and Hungary, for instance, are happier than childless couples in those countries—but parents from Australia and Great Britain are less happy than their childless peers. The country with the greatest happiness drop after you have children? The United States.

Children make some happy and others miserable; the rest fall somewhere in between—it depends, among other factors, on how old you are, whether you are a mother or a father, and where you live. But a deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and marriages had they chosen not to have kids—yet they still describe parenthood as the “best thing they’ve ever done.” Why don’t we regret having children more?

One possibility is a phenomenon called memory distortion. When we think about our past experiences, we tend to remember the peaks and forget the mundane awfulness in between. Senior frames it like this: “Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids … But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.”

These are plausible-enough ideas, and I don’t reject them. But other theories about why people don’t regret parenthood actually have nothing to do with happiness—at least not in a simple sense.

One involves attachment. Most parents love their children, and it would seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative. In his book Midlife, the MIT professor Kieran Setiya expands on this point. Modifying an example from the philosopher Derek Parfit, he asks readers to imagine a situation in which, if you and your partner were to conceive a child before a certain time, the child would have a serious, though not fatal, medical problem, such as chronic joint pain. If you wait, the child will be healthy. For whatever reason, you choose not to wait. You love your child and, though he suffers, he is happy to be alive. Do you regret your decision?

That’s a complicated question. Of course it would have been easier to have a kid without this condition. But if you’d waited, you’d have a different child, and this baby (then boy, then man) whom you love wouldn’t exist. It was a mistake, yes, but perhaps a mistake that you don’t regret. The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.

This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier.

Raising children, then, has an uncertain connection to pleasure but may connect to other aspects of a life well lived, satisfying our hunger for attachment, and for meaning and purpose. The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”

This article was adapted from Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

Paul Bloom is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. His latest book is The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

++++++++++++++

My own reflection. That all the things that happened in my life of raising each child give memories that make life itself worth living. There were Times, but looking back, I would not change one second of it, for fear that changing one word or one movement or one reaction might have changed everything that came after and I'd not be exactly where, "lifewise", I am this morning with my treasure chest of memories of them. With Robert Frost and "The Road Not Taken", I had many of them. My other thought is something I think I read from John Claypool's writings after the death of his young daughter - - that as Time went on and the edge of his grief became a less raw and excruciatingly painful part of his daily life, John wrote about his little girl as having been a gift, someone to whom he was never entitled, but a sheer gift of love and joy; and that he would choose to have had her in his life as the gift she was for just their short eleven years together, and even suffer this grief, than never to have had her at all. 

T