I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos.

The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sat there for years among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.

Once upon a time, at the same time every night, my late husband would come into my office and ask me with a wink “Well? Are you ready for Tony and the boys?” Yes. I was. I was always ready. He’d pour me a glass of something red, and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of James Gandolfini.

Watching again all these years later, in Mexico, courtesy of Netflix and an unreliable internet connection, Tony Soprano persists. He is still larger than life, still flirting with Dr. Melfi, still fighting about money with Carmela, and I’m still telling myself that James Gandolfini didn’t really die in Rome eight summers ago.

Eight. Summers. Ago.

Tony Soprano had been around forever. Years before David Chase created him James Gandolfini was already playing the part of a wise guy. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,

… the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.

Brilliantly.

An avid movie fan, I had also seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance, his performance crackling with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end is quintessential Quentin Tarantino. I can only watch by peeking out through my fingers. Although I know Tony Soprano’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I continue to be charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness. Duped, I suppose, by a kind of vulnerability that makes him relatable and likable. On the TV screen Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. But not James Gandolfini, with us for the briefest sojourn, and dead at 51.

This past Saturday would have been his 60th birthday. Thinking about him and what he left behind for his daughter, pokes a hole in a well-hidden stash of thoughts about my own mortality and what I’ll leave behind for mine.

She tells me she avoids reading my writing. A grown woman now and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later–– in a digital jam-jar.  When I am gone, she will open it. It is a beautiful stratagem,  a way to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, and it reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview. Perhaps the purest expression of mortality I have ever encountered, I watched it on a September Sunday with my daughter and her dad – who, just like James Gandolfini – would be gone in an instant.

He wouldn’t have to miss us.

Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you … Live your life, live your life, live your life.

I think Maurice Sendak would have missed James Gandolfini––the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best––and what my mother would describe as his most heartsome performance–– may well have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max who, after his mother sends him to bed without any dinner, sails off to a fantasy island inhabited by the wild things.

As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as those that flutter across the faces of Tony Soprano and all the ‘wild things’ he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster,  the embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination.

In the movie version, Max leaves home, running down menacing city streets until he reaches a waterfront where a waiting boat takes him far away to the land where the wild things roam.  At first, the ferocious creatures try to scare him away,  but Max remains unfazed. Fearless now, he is the wildest of them all.  Emboldened and in charge, he is pronounced king of this kingdom and orders his new subjects to ‘let the wild rumpus start!’  But when he tires of their moonlit shenanigans, he invokes his mother and sends them all to bed without dinner.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all

Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for no longer wanting to be king, Carol chases him, lunging at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars.  Undaunted, Max refuses to stay, eventually returning home to a happy ending, where dinner is waiting and still hot. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell, as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.

Far away from my own childhood and from my child, I suspect we all know where the wild things are. Over fifty years later, I can still hear my mother’s voice telling me not to let my imagination run away with me as I fretted over the dark, or disappointments, big and small. Fueled by those wild things, I sailed off by myself many times. I always found my way back home––some journeys were longer than others.   

Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.

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