As I Write This...
As I write this entry I am watching a weird DVD of a converted reel-to-reel movie from I-don't-know-when-exactly. My mom and her girl cousins are waddling around in dresses with big wings on the shoulders, and the little boys are wearing blue pants and striped shirts. In one shot, a little girl carries a flat birthday cake with burning candles; in another, all the kids play with fluffy, white puppies. The scene changes to a beautiful, two-story retro vacation house on a hill. How well kept! How crisp! I've never seen an old house like that look so new. Wait, this place ain't retro in this movie. This place IS new, crisp. This is my grandparents' old lake house, built in the forties.
This is my mother and her cousins; my grandfather and grandmother, long dead and separated since the eighties; my great aunt; my uncle, dead since '97; his ex-wife, a teenager whom he grabs and kisses for the camera; great grandparents I never met; people I don't recognize. The person with the camera, the person who did not know that I would be watching this converted movie from the basement of my house in Baltimore in 2011, pans the camera to a spot of clear-cut trees. I see several shots of some animal flitting around in the grass, then it disappears behind the felled trees. Some wild animal that lived some short life some time in the forties, immortalized on this reel-to-reel. Then, I see the lake house again, up on the hill. At the top of a steep flight of steps leading down to the dock stand two women in pink dresses, posing. They stand there with their hands on their hips for a moment, until they know they are in focus, then they run back to the house. I have no idea who they are. The scene changes to an upturned yellow canoe, and a slim, wooden, racing boat, docked at shore. Next scene, the boat speeds across the lake. Some relative of mine was proud of that boat, probably my grandfather. He was a peacock. Then the house. Then darkness. My grandmother emerges from the shadows in one of those poofy, white, shoulderless dresses that women used to wear for every special occasion; a huge, pink flower pinned to her left breast. My grandfather, in his dark suit, is not so conspicuous in the shadows. I guess there was no proper lighting available for our fly-by-night cameraman. Then two children running. Then grainy blackness. Then sailboats on the lake.
It goes on like this, this crazy movie from the forties that my mother salvaged and sent to Walgreens some time after her last aunt died last year, or the year before (I didn't go to her funeral, and I will always regret that). She hardly remembers the array of folks gathered around that summer to celebrate her parents' 25th wedding anniversary. She struggles to remember the people in their bathing caps and their swim trunks jumping off the dock or waving to the camera from their canoes. She was a late baby, born to parents in their late thirties. Her brother, in these scenes, is ready to marry that beautiful teenaged girl. Mom is under the porch playing with puppies.
Grandma and Grandpa are in their casual clothes. She's wearing a navy sundress. He's in a striped golf shirt. They wave and disappear into the shadows. The camera pans to a screened porch full of people on deck chairs. One man is reading the paper. People in shadows, people in shadows. My mom and her three cousins raising their hands up in salute. And old woman feeding one of my grandfather's hunting beagles. My grandmother looking on with an expression I can't read. Then the jamboree. After the cardboard sign I can't read and some remarks by a man I can't hear and don't know, the women and the men break out the washboards, the mixing bowls, the harmonicas, the banjos, and the instruments I've never seen before, and they play a raucous, silent tune.
Walgreens added sound to this movie. I can select "video" in the menu if I want to see and hear a canned, pathetic rendition of this ancient event. It's made for TV with cuts and clips and sappy sound designed to make me feel some kind of canned, commercial emotion for my own family history. I won't fault the Walgreens employee for doing this, although I'd punch her in the face if this "video" were all she left me with with. I prefer the weird, silent, uncut version of my grandparents' anniversary (and some cousin's birthday), the moments in dark shadows, the scenes of the wild animal darting into the woods. We may delight in videotaping ourselves at every moment of the day these days, but this is all we have of the past. Those choices about what to film were crucial. A random fox or bunny or woodchuck is memorialized along with a boat, and my grandmother wearing a huge pink flower, and my dead uncle kissing his teenaged bride.
This is my mother and her cousins; my grandfather and grandmother, long dead and separated since the eighties; my great aunt; my uncle, dead since '97; his ex-wife, a teenager whom he grabs and kisses for the camera; great grandparents I never met; people I don't recognize. The person with the camera, the person who did not know that I would be watching this converted movie from the basement of my house in Baltimore in 2011, pans the camera to a spot of clear-cut trees. I see several shots of some animal flitting around in the grass, then it disappears behind the felled trees. Some wild animal that lived some short life some time in the forties, immortalized on this reel-to-reel. Then, I see the lake house again, up on the hill. At the top of a steep flight of steps leading down to the dock stand two women in pink dresses, posing. They stand there with their hands on their hips for a moment, until they know they are in focus, then they run back to the house. I have no idea who they are. The scene changes to an upturned yellow canoe, and a slim, wooden, racing boat, docked at shore. Next scene, the boat speeds across the lake. Some relative of mine was proud of that boat, probably my grandfather. He was a peacock. Then the house. Then darkness. My grandmother emerges from the shadows in one of those poofy, white, shoulderless dresses that women used to wear for every special occasion; a huge, pink flower pinned to her left breast. My grandfather, in his dark suit, is not so conspicuous in the shadows. I guess there was no proper lighting available for our fly-by-night cameraman. Then two children running. Then grainy blackness. Then sailboats on the lake.
It goes on like this, this crazy movie from the forties that my mother salvaged and sent to Walgreens some time after her last aunt died last year, or the year before (I didn't go to her funeral, and I will always regret that). She hardly remembers the array of folks gathered around that summer to celebrate her parents' 25th wedding anniversary. She struggles to remember the people in their bathing caps and their swim trunks jumping off the dock or waving to the camera from their canoes. She was a late baby, born to parents in their late thirties. Her brother, in these scenes, is ready to marry that beautiful teenaged girl. Mom is under the porch playing with puppies.
Grandma and Grandpa are in their casual clothes. She's wearing a navy sundress. He's in a striped golf shirt. They wave and disappear into the shadows. The camera pans to a screened porch full of people on deck chairs. One man is reading the paper. People in shadows, people in shadows. My mom and her three cousins raising their hands up in salute. And old woman feeding one of my grandfather's hunting beagles. My grandmother looking on with an expression I can't read. Then the jamboree. After the cardboard sign I can't read and some remarks by a man I can't hear and don't know, the women and the men break out the washboards, the mixing bowls, the harmonicas, the banjos, and the instruments I've never seen before, and they play a raucous, silent tune.
Walgreens added sound to this movie. I can select "video" in the menu if I want to see and hear a canned, pathetic rendition of this ancient event. It's made for TV with cuts and clips and sappy sound designed to make me feel some kind of canned, commercial emotion for my own family history. I won't fault the Walgreens employee for doing this, although I'd punch her in the face if this "video" were all she left me with with. I prefer the weird, silent, uncut version of my grandparents' anniversary (and some cousin's birthday), the moments in dark shadows, the scenes of the wild animal darting into the woods. We may delight in videotaping ourselves at every moment of the day these days, but this is all we have of the past. Those choices about what to film were crucial. A random fox or bunny or woodchuck is memorialized along with a boat, and my grandmother wearing a huge pink flower, and my dead uncle kissing his teenaged bride.