Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(35)

The experience wasn’t all bad—for me, anyway, although I’m sure the studio wasn’t thrilled. I learned many great lessons about filmmaking, including things that I would do differently next time. And I vowed there would be a next time. I just needed to find the right movie.

Our first baby was due just after Miles from Home closed in theaters. The due date was November 8, 1988, election day the year George H. W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis. That morning we got up early, walked up the street to vote, then went for a bite to eat at McDonald’s, after which we planned to see a movie. But Moira started feeling funny. At first we wondered if it was the double cheeseburger and fries she’d been craving and had just downed. But then we realized she was having contractions, so we went home to wait for them to quicken. I had a little plastic drum and started beating on that, doing what I called a “labor dance,” singing and chanting in hopes the baby would hear and be motivated to come out. We kept the TV on, and by late in the day Bush appeared to be winning. Moira wanted to wash her hair before we went to the hospital, and when she emerged from the shower, wrapped in a towel, she stood at the sink brushing her teeth, watching the election results on TV. Just then a huge contraction hit. She moaned, still with toothpaste in her mouth, and uttered, absolutely deadpan, “The Dukakises must be sad.” It set me to laughing, despite our circumstances. Her contraction passed; she finished brushing her teeth. Then she said it was time. I started running around like a nut.

We jumped in the car, heading for Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. In the car, Moira’s water broke. I was a nervous wreck, but Moira was amazing, breathing through each contraction. We reached the hospital, and Moira stuck with her commitment to give birth naturally. It was very clearly painful for her, but she got in her room and began to push, entering an incredible, tranquil zone where she pressed through the pain. Our beautiful baby girl was born just after midnight, the early moments of November 9. We named her Sophia Ana Sinise and called her Sophie.

When we brought our new baby home from the hospital, we laid her on the bed and just stared at her. I looked at Moira, and Moira looked at me. So much had happened that year, 1988. We’d opened my first film, Miles from Home, and opened a great play in Chicago, The Grapes of Wrath. We’d been to Cannes. We’d had our first child. Together, we both looked back at Sophie.

Nothing compared to her.

In early 1990, Moira discovered she was pregnant again, this time with a boy. That summer I was acting on Broadway in The Grapes of Wrath, and Moira, now six months pregnant, was in Chicago doing a play with Steppenwolf called Love Letters. In multiple phone calls we discussed what we should name our son. One day the name became clear to me. I called up Moira: “We should call him Mac, after your brother!”

Moira was thrilled. Boyd McCanna “Mac” Harris—the Vietnam vet, Silver Star recipient, and West Point instructor—had passed away in 1983 of cancer, and we all thought of him regularly. When our son was born on November 10, 1990—almost two years to the day after Sophie—we named him McCanna Anthony Sinise—Mac for short. The Irish and Italian influences together sounded very American to us.

One of my favorite films at the time was the American Civil War epic Glory, starring Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderick, Cary Elwes, and Morgan Freeman. The movie had opened the year before, and I loved its soundtrack. Moira had labored throughout the night with Mac, and he’d been born early in the morning, about five thirty. I’d been up all night with Moira, so I left the hospital about seven o’clock to go home, grab a shower, and change. As I drove out of the hospital’s campus, I put on the soundtrack to Glory. Stopped at a traffic light and thinking about my new son while the sun came up in the distance, everything hit me. My son was healthy. Moira was healthy. My family was beautiful. The magnificent music filled the air.

I choked up. Tears came into my eyes.

Grateful didn’t begin to describe how I felt. I was so much more than grateful. Already I’d made so many mistakes in my life and so many times I’d chosen the wrong path, yet somehow a mercy was still being shown to me. Why did I deserve all this goodness? I wasn’t a believer in Providence. I never really thought about God. Yet something beyond me was so clearly involved in my story. Something unseen was pulling me along, never giving up on me, helping me find and fulfill my purposes in life. If all this blessing was an act of Providence, then that was okay by me, even if I still had a long way to go toward understanding what I was only then beginning to glimpse.

As I brushed away tears at the stoplight, I think I whispered a semblance of my first prayer. The prayer was hazy, but the intention was clear. Call it a longing perhaps. The first twinges of belief. Two words, layered with more than one meaning . . .

Thank you.





CHAPTER 7


Steinbeck Country


Long before the images ever became a reality, I visualized this:

A journey starts inside a boxcar, and you hear the clackity clack of the train going across the tracks. It’s night, and you see lights from outside coming through the boxcar slats. Opening credits roll as the camera moves across the slats of the car. Then the light breaks through the slats, and slowly it reveals something huddled in the corner.

It’s George, sitting in the boxcar in the dark corner by himself. Why is he there alone?

The camera cuts quickly to a young woman in a torn red dress, brightly lit by the California sun as she runs through a field of barley. Then it cuts again. George and Lennie are on the run, because Lennie has become too excited around the woman in the red dress. Lennie is a gentle giant, mentally challenged, who has the mind of a five-year-old. As an adult he’s harmless, but he’s a big puppy who can’t control his own emotions. And he’s always been taken care of by George. The girl has run away from Lennie, because she doesn’t understand. Frightened from the encounter, she runs, screaming and yelling, toward a group of migrant workers in the fields. Then we cut away from her, and see that George and Lennie are running in the opposite direction to get away as fast as possible.