Biutiful

“Tell me a happy bedtime story.”

We had just finished watching “Biutiful,” with Javier Bardem, and I had yet to decide if it was the best or worst movie I’d ever seen.

“Biutiful” is poetic, sure. It’s the sort of thing to which you ascribe “poetic” because you can’t quite grasp it. It is one of those visceral films, the ones that leave your tummy rumbling with a feeling you can’t quite put your finger on. Pleasingly dissatisfied, perhaps.

I cried. I shielded my eyes. My fingernails pierced my sweet boyfriend’s skin in moments of suspense.

But now it was bedtime, and I was scared. I lay under the covers, knowing, just knowing, my dreams would be haunted with dead Asians hanging from my ceiling.

“Tell me a happy bedtime story.”

He started with “The Three Little Pigs,” and we laughed and laughed trying to figure out how the plot went. Was it sticks? Hay? The smart one built with brick, that’s easy. No mention of plaster and drywall?

“And he huffed, and he puffed, and he BLEW the house down,” that sweet boyfriend of mine recited from a time before I knew him.

Big, bad wolves are hardly happy, I thought. So we spent another hour, my head on his shoulder, exciting each other with “Do you remember (insert childhood fairytale or nursery rhyme here)!?”

I struggled to remember the moral lesson I thought each of the folk tales were supposed to demonstrate. “Jack and the Beanstalk” is all about listening to your mother, right? Nah, Jack didn’t sell the cow like his mom told him to, and he ended up with a chicken that laid golden eggs, right?

A quick Wikipedia search revealed the original “Jack and the Beanstalk” story had our dear protagonist stealing and murdering and lying and all that immoral stuff. It also had a scary giant.

Turns out all these childhood tales were fee-fi-fo-fum. From three territorial bears to a kidnapper pushed in an oven to Jack and Jill breaking their bones. Even the beautiful Technicolor “Wizard of Oz” forced kids to endure tornadoes and witches and totally creepy flying monkeys.

I was pondering how I had never pondered this before when I finally found that happy bedtime story.

I remembered an old home video my mom and I had created when she jacked my father’s beloved 1980s video camera for an afternoon.

My nursery rhymes boomed scratchily on a cassette tape player, while I act them out.

My mother dressed me in red plaid and made my uncoordinated ass jump over a candle for “Jack be nimble.”

She threw a paper spider at me during our “Little Miss Muffett” skit. I ran away in a decidedly unconvincing manner.

I rode a rocking horse, displaying the proper lady technique in another rhyme, the name of which I don’t remember.

I don’t remember making the videos, complete with outtakes, for that matter. But I can imagine my mother and I showed the man in our lives our masterpiece when he came home that day.

I imagine my father thought were were so silly, and he told me I was so talented. I imagine he loved his girls impossibly more with each scene.

That memory led me to recall my favorite nursery rhyme.

I don’t have a particular memory of that one either, just an overall comfort when it decides to enter my consciousness.

In this scene, I imagine my father holding me, at a time when I was too big to be held, on our back porch. It’s fall in Missouri. The only thing crisper than the air are the stars, penetrating and seemingly touchable. My daddy has a beard, and it scratches me when our words merge.

“I see the moon. The moon sees me. God bless the moon. God bless me.”

And with that happy bedtime story, I fell asleep in another man’s safe arms, this time hoping to never forget the details.