Dear fellas, I can't believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.

Unlike Her, I’m not a big movie person. If deemed a good one, She’ll watch the same film 100 times. I think I’ve seen my favorite movies twice.

At least I know what I like, and Shawshank was one of the first of them.

James Whitmore played Brooks Hatlen. It is a supporting role probably designed to push Andy Dufresne’s excape narrative beyond something like an Alcatraz break-out. Since I don’t repeat viewings, by now I barely remember the character, but the scene of his suicide was enough to assign his message to long-term memory.

At the time, I didn’t truly understand his note. I saw the movie on VHS a few years after it came it, so I was probably about 25 and just about to graduate from LSU. What youngsters really relate to the passage of time, anyway? We don’t even know what time is yet.

It was the idea of a “hurry” that was lost when I heard that line, probably because I wasn’t convinced that “slow” had any value. By then I’d been working nonstop for over a year to finally get out of college and everything in the universe told me not to prolong the experience.

Then life happened, not that I was very intentional with it. Those words have lain dormant in my mind since then. I didn’t examine that duality — by questioning my hurry — for more than 20 years after graduation.

Sometimes it takes a while to reach a familiar conclusion when you take the long route.