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Death is the Sculptor’s chisel.
Its sharp, slow blade
Carves the shapes life takes.
Plankton and pianists,
Lions and tigers and lambs,
And whatever’s yet to be,
Death makes from stardust,
As it made you and me.

I over-reacted tonight. And it happened so quickly that Pat had no chance to grab my arm and sit me back down in my seat in Carmike's theater 11.

We were there for the 7:05 screening of "Inception." The commercials were over, the theater was dark, the screen had widened, and the previews were underway. But a quartet of young people a row up and over to our far right continued to chatter away. They weren't whispering. They were chattering. Almost constantly. And apparently not about what they were seeing on the screen.

I endured this through four or five previews. Then I had an out-of-body experience. From somewhere above, I saw myself bolt out of my seat, navigate down our aisle and across the aisle at the front of the theater and up the aisle on the right. I heard myself say something like, "I just paid almost twenty dollars for this, and I want to know now whether you plan to talk throughout the movie as you've done throughout the previews?" The quartet were taken aback. One of them said, "The movie hasn't started yet." Another said, "Excuse me. You're being terribly rude." I said, "Don't talk to me about rude," and returned to my seat, fuming. The first part of the movie was all but ruined for me, as it might have been for them.

I shouldn't have flown off the handle. I should have approached them more civilly. My guess is that there is now a shifting set of views on the propriety of talking during previews. My position, as a veteran movie-goer and movie lover, is that talking during previews should be limited to discreet whispers of reaction, e.g., "That looks good" or "Forget that one." Nearly constant chattering, unrelated to the previews themselves, should be way out of bounds. For young people, however, a consensus may be emerging that previews "don't count" and that during previews one may behave as one would at home in the family room.

If things are moving in this direction, then I'll be even less inclined to fork over twenty or thirty bucks to Carmike. To the extent that going to a movie -- and I include watching the previews -- becomes indistinguishable from an evening in the family room, I'll be hard-pressed to justify leaving the family room.

This piece and some others live above George Dean's downtown on Clayton Street in a space now used for storage but once part of a dry goods establishment. Who is the artist? Perhaps I should try to find out. Perhaps no one could find out.

On my morning walk downtown, I ran into an old friend, Lois Player, who handles underwriting for WUGA and is a veteran of our town's retail sector. Lois wanted to show me the upstairs at George Dean's on Clayton Street. It's used only for storage at the moment, but had a previous life as part of a dry goods establishment. Some of the fixtures remain. Lois asked me to imagine bolts of cloth displayed for sale on the now-dusty shelves at a time before the near universality of ready-to-wear. A stately skylight dominates the center of the upstairs. Paintings and other pieces of art lie about, some of them Lois's own work, and some with unrevealed lineages . We had a look around, then descended the back stairs to the modern George Dean's retail space, where another pre-plastic artifact caught my eye. When this machine was born, Herbert Hoover was still President. FDR would win the office the next year, pledging to save the country from the economic calamity that had befallen it.

On Lake Verret, southwest of Baton Rouge, we maneuvered our fishing boat along shores sprinkled with nature's living stalagmites -- the knees of cypress trees.