1994
Our DVD player finally crashed and burned… for good… and because we are the type of people who CAN’T LIVE without a DVD player, we headed to Wal-Mart, grumbling, but prepared to buy a cheap replacement. Thirty something was the bottom dollar. I was stunned, to say the least. I mean, I remember buying a CHEAP VCR for a couple of hundred dollars… but I suppose that was a long time ago.
However, because we hadn’t looked in a while, we had to browse AND we discovered that Wal-Mart had at least a half-dozen models of DVD players/burners for sale! They weren’t AS cheap, but I kept thinking of all those VCR tapes on the shelf at home… home videos that are starting to play poorly because of age and popular viewing by the kids. It obviously didn’t take much to talk myself into spending more.
So the kids and I sorted through some of our older home movie tapes and selected 1994 as our “test” subject for our new DVD burning capabilities. 1994, coincidentally, was the year Rand and I bought our very first video camera.
The tape started with a trip “home.” At the time, I think I considered our efforts a little over the top. We had, quite literally, HOURS of tape – games played, conversations recorded, lots of people waving and saying “hi” to the camera. Twelve years later, however, I found myself mesmerized – unable to leave the television screen for even a moment. There was my mom, exactly the way I prefer to remember her, leading a tour through the old barn, swinging from the rafters, daring me to do the same. Horse-back riding, my dad driving his spotted horse and giving all the cousins a ride in his homemade buggy… memories came tumbling down around me.
We were all so young.
"When are you all having kids?" my brother asked. Rand and I laughed – no kids, no time, no plans to share. How little we knew then. It was only two years later the first one came along – born in Houston. Then there was the move back to Kansas. Was it really such a short time ago that we thought like that? Talked like that? Walked across the grasses of the place that would eventually become our home… clueless about the significance that yard would later have in our lives.
I am glad for the hours and hours of video. My sister making her faces at the camera. Grandma, my aunt, my mom – talking and sitting at the table drinking tea. My cousins, family my kids have never even met, playing games of cards (remember SPOONS!) and giving each other bunny ears for the camera.
I haven’t picked the video camera up in years. The kids play with it a lot, but I’m not sure we are very good at saving what they record. I think we had a tradition of shooting twenty minutes or so of the kids every Christmas… but I’m not sure that we even got around to that much this year.
I look around and see this house – this tiny little house that we are about to leave – and I think it’s time to pull out the camera again. I will remember it from photographs, my mind will always store a copy of what we have had here… but maybe years from now I could be sorting through old home movies and take an afternoon… to jump back in time and really remember…
2 comments:
I have often bemused the fact that for years we had no camera, that the only movies I have of our early years and of our childrens' infancy and toddler years, and of my grandparents role in our life are in my head. My FIL pulled out movies at Christmas. They have never been without a camera, but I had never seen his movies. I unabashedly sat there for 5 straight hours and let the tears flow. There were great aunts talking of their adventures as young girls in early America, my SIL & BIL trying to breakdance to Huey Lewis, our brandnew firstborn looking dwarfed by a doll on a fuzzy pink blankey, & a then teenage hubby making HE-Man shakes to bulk up his skinny frame. My favorite was one of my Hubby, 2 yr old chubby son, and FIL playing basketball at our hoop. Regulation height and mr. 2 yr old is giving it everything he's got to get it in the hoop. Hubby giving the play by play action, when grampa swoops in, grabs up the little fella, dribbles to the hoop hands mr.2 the ball as he raises him to the rim and he slam dunks it through with both hands! A look of unearthly joy crosses his face and grampa sets him down and they do the chicken dance together across the court. Priceless!
I was literally just using the video camera with the kiddos an hour ago.
Though I don't video as much as I used to, you've touched on exactly why I do.
Photos and memories are good but when you look at the video--and see what you forgot you shot...priceless.
I started doing more when my oldest was born so my parents and the hubbie's could see what she was up to. My hubbie is in the military and we've lived "far" [it's a relative term]from family for a while. Our siblings all live relatively close to our parents so I started the videos as a way to keep them all up with what our kids were doing. However, I'm so glad I taped them so I can look back, too!
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