Eyes Wide Open

Fifty years ago today, Stanley Kubrick released "2001: A Space Odyssey".

This was the year my eyes opened wide and I began to gaze through them the way I do now.

In June of that year, it opened at the Teck Theater in downtown Buffalo. At that moment it was the only theater in the area showing the film as it was meant to be shown, in "Cinerama"...1968's version of "IMAX". Downtown was dying, painfully as the suburbs flourished, so this was a way to get people like my mother, out of the local shopping centers.

So, my mother left little, two-year-old Tony at home and brought Martina​ and I along with her mom, in town visiting, downtown to see the film.

So much had happened that year for all of us, especially an eight-year-old who celebrated his eighth birthday that past April 4 watching Dr. Martin Luther King get assassinated as presents were opened. A war raged on and cities burned. A thirty-something suburban housewife who really only drove to the market and back was now entering into what the TV news was calling "a war zone" to watch a movie.

Yet the world was changing quickly and that was the power of the media already. People were moved to tears, rage and fascination with the turn of a channel...no remote controls just yet.

So, having already had my eyes riveted on a world that suddenly sped up to light speed, I watched as another world was presented to me in glorious "Cinerama". The movie screen was so huge, and I was so small, it became part of me. Instantly I was there as near humans picked up bones and discovered how to kill using them. I was there as the black-and-white, nineteen inch images of blurred moon scenery I had witnessed on the breakfast table television became massive and stunning...in colors of living gray and blinding white as the sun reflected through the deep black of space. I was young enough to have the hairs of my skin bristle and stand upward on my arms, but old enough to realize the music of Strauss was foreign to these experiences yet embraced them passionately. Suddenly music other than bubble gum pop and the Beatles entered my world and instantly the past was married to the future...as it would be.

It was all too much for me to take, yet I couldn't pull my eyes away from the screen. I looked outward with nary a blink. I absorbed the light that shot through me. I watched as gravity disappeared and all semblance of up and down became meaningless. Suddenly, I myself was floating. Suddenly, as I watched this massive experience in front of me, I lost reality. I was untethered.

The fiend at work in this experience was not human. It had no shape, no form. It existed with only a bright red glass eye. I feared it more than anything sinister I had yet seen in my brief life. I was still too mesmerized by the majesty of it all to realize what was truly happening. The experiences in that theater had me forget I had popcorn and milk duds on my lap. I forgot about my mom, my nana, my sister. I, like everyone else in that theater, were actually part of what was happening in front of us.

And we watched as we were suddenly catapulted into another realm. Space fled by us and over us. Walls of blinding light full of spectacular color appeared before us and rapidly, we soared into them, and through them. The music suddenly made no sense...and yet it did...it was what we saw, and that made no sense at all. The walls of light zoomed by and they closed in, squeezing us and threatening to consume us as they increased their speed. The crash was imminent.

So, I hid.

I turned from what was in front of me and buried my head in the seat in which I sat. I covered my ears because the cacophony of "broken violins" was too much for me to bear and it was letting me know the walls were closing in. Yet still, through my shaking thin fingers pressed upon my brow and temples, enough of that blinding light seeped in that I knew it would go on forever.

This was the future.

Suddenly, silence.

I braved a look, still cowering and turned away from the screen, I looked behind me now. No one had come to my aid which was odd to me. I was truly on my own. Suddenly I saw an old man, dressed in the red astronaut's space suit. It was him. It was me. It scared me to see I had become so old, so fast. My life was ending and it was too much for me to bear. He dared to venture out and eyes wide open, he saw his fate.

There were no shadows in the room with a bed. It was stark white and full of light. The furnishings were old, ancient, yet not real, not of the world.

Suddenly, he lay in the bed, even older now, seemingly his last visions. Eyes not opened wide anymore, just knowing.

And after a while the deep low rumble of Strauss began again. And I was in space again. And as I floated along the face of a infant appeared...and I understood it had not yet been born. And it floated with me back to the world. And somehow, even though I was not the same being, all was right again.

We left the theater and the brightness of the day shocked me. The world around me was stark and surreal. Garbage cans littered cracked sidewalks full of cigarette butts. Smells of gasoline and smog filled my nostrils. The soundtrack that played wasn't Strauss, it was car horns and bus engines.

Yet even as I entered my world again, my eyes remained wide open and I saw things differently. Suddenly I was not the same person. It was frightening.

But it wasn't.

I was somehow ready to go forward. I wanted to see what was ahead of me. I longed for the walls closing in. Eyes wide open.