Rain Keeps Fallin', Rain Keeps Fallin' Down

I'm feeling a little down today. It's been a stressful week compared to most of the summer, but that's to be expected when you go from doing next to nothing to having actual sustained responsibilities overnight. But that has nothing to do with feeling kind of down.

I saw on Yahoo News mid-afternoon that John Hughes had died. If you were an 80s teenager, you don't need to be told who he was. If you weren't, you still might not need to be told. But in case his name doesn't ring a bell, maybe some of these names will: "Sixteen Candles." "The Breakfast Club." "Pretty in Pink." "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." "Some Kind of Wonderful." Not to mention "National Lampoon's Vacation," "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," "She's Having a Baby," "Uncle Buck," "The Great Outdoors," "Weird Science" (not his greatest moment), "Mr. Mom," and of course two perennial holiday movies, "Home Alone" and "Christmas Vacation."

I like to think I'm a halfway decent writer, but I don't think there's any way to describe the kind of thumbprint that gets left on your life and your world view unless you had the shared experience of being in high school the year "The Breakfast Club" came out in theaters. This is a man who wrote one of the movie lines I quote the most frequently. Whenever one of my students will say something about their church, I'll reply, "You own a church?!"

Thanks for the formative years and 10,001 quotable lines, Mr. Hughes. You'll be missed.