Over and over.

I have just finished re-viewing an episode of Without a Trace, a show I got into because I watched it with my daughter and her brand new baby (my granddaughter!) in Scotland last summer. It was a good episode, guest-starring Charles Dutton as a father whose son was kidnapped several years earlier who couldn't give up looking, even though the search was ruining his life--marriage, job, etc. Even though I knew how it ended, and that it ended in tears, I watched it again, just the same.

My first husband couldn't believe that I like to do stuff like this, especially with regard to movies. His philosophy was, there are so many things to do/see/read, repeating something is effectively choosing not to do something new, and thus constricting rather than expanding your horizon. This is certainly a legitimate point of view (although repeating the experience of some things, like recordings you love, seems more the norm. Plus, I believe that seeing a great movie is like looking at a wonderful painting more than once, except you sit in the dark and can opt to eat popcorn.). I, however, have been a repeater since my tender years. Here is a partial list of things I like just as much, and maybe better, upon repeating:

1. Re-reading certain novels--Harriet the Spy, Underworld, Housekeeping
2. Eating again and again at the same good restaurant (Thai Delight, Trio).
3. Eating the same thing at the same good restaurant (such as kung pao shrimp).
4. Eating the same thing at every restaurant in a certain category (such as kung pao shrimp at every Chinese restaurant I ate at during a certain era. Okay, let's not kid ourselves--I ate kung pao shrimp until I got sick of it, and then stopped eating at Chinese restaurants altogether, for the most part. I switched to Thai, where now I eat papaya salad).
5. Certain movies: Raising Arizona, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, French Kiss (really, there are too many to list in this category.).
6. Seeing certain movies in a theater repeatedly (I saw Cabaret eight times in various theaters, I think, and also The Way We Were and O Brother Where Art Thou?, though not quite that many times).