Word: grandpas
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...BRANSON, Missouri, my Grandpa and his pals used to head down every afternoon to the straightforwardly named Branson Cafe--another bygone champion of the Bottomless Mug. Amidst a clutter of ash trays and never-empty mugs, they'd toss around sly insults, last week's news, and raspy laughs. That place was their entertainment, their escape, and the Bottomless Mug was the basis of their circle...
...equally adept at prying open a wild croc or a can of Foster's. But ask Paul Hogan how he feels about the success of his first film, "Crocodile" Dundee, and he's likely to sound like the laid-back grandpa he is rather than the hottest actor to come up from Down Under since Mel Gibson got his driver's license. "We're doing real well," deadpans the self-described former pub lout. "And I'm feelin' real well." Bet you are, mate. The story of a crocodile poacher who trades the dangers of the Australian Outback...
...readers: they are less interested in distinctions of fact and fiction than in rousing stories and lively characters. The Prince of Tides provides plenty of both. There is the time Grandma tried out a coffin at the local funeral home and nearly frightened Ruby Blankenship to death. There is Grandpa, who can water-ski 40 miles and carries a 90-lb. cross through town every Good Friday. Conroy can be shameless in his extravagances of language and plot, yet he consistently conveys two fundamental emotions: the attachment to place and the passion for blood ties...
...even look up from his newspaper when they are talking to him. Our House tugs at the heartstrings a little too aggressively, and Brimley's big scene (telling off the school board when it denies his granddaughter permission to transfer high schools) plays like a recruitment poster for Grandpa power. Still, Brimley's unsentimental portrait and an unusually well directed group of child actors give Our House a warmth and authenticity reminiscent of The Waltons...
That kind of plangent wistfulness is hardly confined to Mother's account of her honeymoon or Grandpa's homesickness for his youth. The tug and ache of nostalgia pull even at the hardiest of travelers. The caustic Evelyn Waugh introduces his collection of travel essays, When the Going Was Good, with a heartbroken valedictory to a vanished Golden Age of travel that is, in effect, a valentine to his own lost youth. In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore...