007.5 Reporting For Duty

I’m pretty sure the first movie I remember seeing was a James Bond flick. The first “adult” book that I read was an Ian Fleming 007 novel. So it’s no great mystery that I am a James Bond fan. Our dad was a spy of sorts. He served in the Army Intelligence Corps, Military Intelligence, so his work was shrouded in mystery as we were growing up.

He never wore an Army uniform; he always went to work dressed in a black suit and tie. He was a pistol marksman, a martial artist and possessed skills like lock-picking and safe-cracking, all of which we didn’t really know about until after he passed away. Somehow, some of those qualities rubbed off on me, and the closest role model I had was Bond, James Bond.

Of course, real life has a way of squashing those secret agent fantasies, so my life as an MI-6 rogue agent had to be lived through the movies. And I followed them all, starting with Dr. No through Quantum of Solace. My wait for the latest 007 movie, Skyfall, seems to have been months long. So when the movie previews started to hit the Internet, I was all over it.

I knew the local theater chains would each have a midnight showing, so I made plans to be there and not even Odd Job from Goldfinger could stop me. Since it was at midnight on a Thursday, I would be making the mission solo, as my wife thought I was crazy since the movie is nearly two-and-a-half hours long, meaning I wouldn’t be home until after 3 a.m.

So the long-awaited Thursday arrived, and I followed my usual daily routine at home and work. There is nothing normal about being in the newspaper business, and by the end of the day, I was run pretty ragged. Still, I managed to make it home and prepare for the midnight movie. I still had a few hours to kill before even leaving for the theater, so I decided to take a nap. The next thing I knew, I was being awakened by Pussy Galore, who turned out to be my wife. She said, “Ron, come to bed. It’s 4 a.m. Sorry honey, but I fell asleep and didn’t wake you for your midnight adventure.”

“Oh well,” I told her, “on my way to see M and Q, I guess I had to get some Zs.”