They’re coming, like mirages in the desert. I know them. I recognize them from FaceTime.

Both of my daughters, survivors of Los Angeles, are braving the crowd, putting their busy lives aside and coming to Maine to visit their exiled parents.

They’re leaving the smoke and screams, the burning hills and drought, to come and soothe us, relive pre-pandemic memories, as though none of it ever happened.

That’s Hollywood, where nothing ever really happens. It’s Chinatown, Jake.

We’ll touch and kiss and hug, cry and smile and tell each other how well we look and lie about our wrinkles.

We’re family, characters in our own screenplay written and acted and directed by each of us. We’re Hollywood people coming home to love each other again.

Quiet on the set. Camera … action.

The youngest, the agent, can only spare a few days; her clients —hungry actors — are jealous, anxious and impatient.

Actors need people like her, to tell them where to go and how to dress.

To them, and to me as well, she is a Godmother, psychiatrist and lifeline. She’s coming in September for my birthday, with her husband, a smart, retired Broadway publicist, who sits, sunglassed and stoic, smiling in the cool shade she gives.

But first comes the oldest daughter, who does something very important for a major international publishing company, while finishing her master’s.

She comes now with her husband, Rick, who has just finished putting together the nuts and bolts of a new movie, and ain’t I happy? Yes, I am.

Rick, who arrives twice a year like a house doctor, goes from room to room. He runs a finger over cracks, shakes his head, mumbles to himself, as he measures and makes notes on his cellphone.

Rick sees my old cape as the set of a broken movie that requires constant attention, and myself as an aging writer who lacks the skills to make it breathe.

When I, trying to impress, ask him questions about broken things, he listens patiently, then puts his hand on my shoulder and smiles. It’s a quiet smile that tells me everything will be OK.

It’ll be OK, old man.

Rick will go around the house, moving soundlessly like a samurai ghost or a hired assassin.

He’ll find something amiss, and he’ll go to the basement and pull out his huge, shiny tool box, this big masculine Ark of the Covenant, full of secrets too arcane for an amateur like me.

It’s a wonder, that tool box, full of silver things that turn other silver things, and make immovable objects come alive.

I’m not allowed to touch it, nor would I want to. It’s an important part of his world. I just stand in awe.

I remember people like him from when I was an actor, silently moving across movie sets.

The people who get their names on the credit rolls at the end of movies and make millions of dollars count on Rick and others like him to wave the proper wand and make it all happen.

In that role, Rick comes to my house once a year, maybe more, to make sure that our “set” looks presentable, Oscar-worthy, an enchanted cottage for lovers.

Quiet on the set. Camera, action. Welcome home, old Rick.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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