Friday, January 26, 2007

I Walked Seventy Miles...

We have a new expression of love at our house. "I walked seventy miles for this..." said with a laugh.

This comes out of our recent experience of watching parts of March of the Penguins. I say "parts" because we kept watching it in ten or twelve minute segments in the evening as a family, and eventually had to return it to the video store (they just don't give as much time as the library!). So we never quite saw the whole thing, but were very taken with what we saw. In fact, I think we're planning to purchase this at some point and add it to our movie library.

One of the things we were most taken with is the long, cold, seventy-mile trek the Mommy penguins make to the ocean to get food while the Daddy penguins sit patiently on the eggs. And then, of course, once the Mommy penguins get back with the food, after the babies have hatched, the small penguin is transferred from one set of parental feet to the other and the Daddys (some of whom have lost half their body weight and not eaten for four months!) begin the long seventy mile trek themselves.

Watching that slow waddle/march/slide across the frozen landscape was breathtaking. What a beautiful picture of devotion! We were all a little in awe of it. The sweet girl has been pretending to be an emperor penguin all week and has been acting out the whole wonderful story again and again. She even stands on her Daddy's feet and gets him to cover her with his overcoat, which she calls his "brood pouch"!

And when she asked one of us to get something for her the other day -- a snack or a second helping at dinner or a cup of water (don't recall exactly) -- I can't remember which one of us said jokingly "I'll have to walk seventy miles for this!." I think it was Dana. But the sweet girl thinks it's very funny and now she'll ask us, if we give her something, "did you walk seventy miles for this?" and just giggle. It's actually a wonderful new way of telling each other how much we love each other. Because, you know, I would cross seventy miles of frozen tundra for either one of them if I had to, and I'm pretty sure they would do the same for me.

2 comments:

Erin said...

That's such a good movie... And an awesome expression of love too! Watching that made me very glad I don't live in the Arctic... though to look outside today you almost wouldn't know it...

Did you ever hear that one-hit-wonder song in the 90s by a pair of Scottish twins that went "And I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walked 1000 miles to fall down at your door..." The 70 miles made me think of that - though I imagine 70 miles in those conditions is just as tough as 1000 miles in Scotland!

Beth said...

Yes! I loved that song. And I was definitely thinking of it when I wrote the title to this post. Funny that you picked up on the echo! :-)

I couldn't remember who wrote it or sang it, but the radio station we listened to in the Philly area during our early marriage (hence post-1992) played it A LOT. That bouncy little tune on the chorus has stayed with me all those years...!

We've got lots of snow on the ground too...and it's COLD! But not as cold as the arctic, thankfully!