Mrs. Selby – Kilter Street Chronicles

Mrs. Selby doesn’t mind falling asleep during movies or shows. The other day, she settled in for a viewing of the 2009 Emma mini-series, a BBC production. Here and there, she flickered into a light doze. Whenever she woke up, there were pretty British people waiting for her on the screen. Or beautiful landscapes presided over by large homes. She enjoyed herself tremendously.

The way she saw it, sleep didn’t make her miss out on much. Movies and shows were rarely good the whole way through. They usually had their dull patches. More often than not, the character development was written awkwardly, with missed opportunities. Memorable moments of dialogue weren’t the norm. As far as she was concerned, she could nap while sampling the bright spots of whatever she was watching.

So, there were Emma and Knightley, experiencing gentle but profound revelations on a dance floor. And there they were, touching their foreheads together while seated on a bench. Seemed they were having a lovely day, after many a quarrel and misunderstanding. They looked very well deserving of this moment, and Mrs. Selby was satisfied with that.

Movies and shows really were at their best in a handful of crystalline scenes that had the right words and gestures, a tender look on someone’s face or some dramatic music. Who cares what came in between. Screen productions, like people, were at their finest in doses of five to ten minutes with breaks for snoozing.

Does Mrs. Selby have a first name? Her mailbox just says ‘Selby,’ and to be honest, I can’t imagine her with a first name. She seems like she was born Mrs. Selby. (Selby being the name of her second husband, I think.)

Mrs. Selby is old. How old? I don’t know. I’ve heard people wishing her happy birthday on different dates, and she seems to just absorb multiple birthdays as if they’re nothing.

She’s a beautiful woman. Not a magazine beauty, but beautiful in the way of an old china gravy boat or a lace doily. She can talk about almost anything: The weather, the flowers on her windowsill, what she tells her flowers when they’re dying on her. She talks about the mice and squirrels that live in the walls. She’s heard ghosts in the corridors of our apartment building. She tells me about her childhood, her jolly drunk father, her mother who never smiled. She describes books she reads, written by outdoorsy folk who wax poetic about the tawny hides of fawns in dappled woods. She watches black-and-white movies and spoils the endings for me. She watches soap operas and fills me in on which pair of amnesiacs made love last week on a hospital bed or a bearskin rug. I know all of the pet peeves of both her late husbands. As a rule though, she never talks about her only child, who died when he was twenty.

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Why sleeping during movies isn’t so bad

Kilter Street Profiles: Mrs. Selby