Over the Thanksgiving break I sat with my family and watched home movies from the floating sinking past. Much of what we saw had already become the stuff of family legend. We’d wait for the funny lines, the heartbreaking moments, as one does with any favorite cinematic feature. So intoxicated by the nostalgia emanating from the screen, calling on our smooth and rounded memories that are firmly planted deep within like weathered ancient busts, we stuck around to see the back-end of a few VHS tapes we haven’t had the patience to observe before. The gymnastics and piano recitals, the Christmas morning that blessed my eldest sister with her first brassiere, and the time my three-year-old self roared a few innocent African-American children into hiding terror.
Without the shoulder-unit my father donned each time I was taped, I wouldn’t have these moving memories. And with their viewing, I was reminded of my longtime wish for the ability to cue life on pause. Long before the advent of DVD, I wanted to pause all things in an altogether DVD sort of way. Crystal clear inaction, memories sculpted in reality, without the slightest undulation or need for tracking adjustment. Progressive scan, HD. Into the suspended reality I would step, quietly walking from place to place, relating myself to the quiet unending theater. Not until now have I been able to accept the flickering obscurity that is inherent in the frizzy wool narrative of interlaced VHS cassettes without casual indignation. Because now they are no longer the only way. By simply holding one such black and cumbersome cassette, one is involved with kitsch and yester, whimsy even, rather than their previous frustrations. They are next in line behind intentional dust and scratches, sepia tone, and Western family portraits. And in their place sit laser-lined DVDs, hard drives, and nano eternal.
The old family tapes are slowly giving in to the dusty hungry air around them. The oxygen is fugitive. Entire sequences of recorded family history would shift and fuzz to complete obscurity, flickering in and out of clarity with a Morse sort of rhythm, while the sound remained essentially intact. Forcing us to wonder what that mundane moment might have looked like. Just what might Dad have been filming while the women talked about how the children aren’t close enough in age to be entertained by the same activities. It’s strangely better not knowing. For once, the least interactive form of modern entertainment was leaving something curious and real for every member of our family’s collective romantic imagination, spoiled and stilted as each may be by the luxuries of aught-five in America.
The individual frames of the reel scroll slow from top to bottom, and faster still, as the white dashes of electric age begin to wink and twinkle across the screen. And again the scrolling dying image begins to dance in a diagonal direction. Waggish, sad, and unstable. As the visual sensory escapes into the ether of an overheating VCR and our badly drawn memories, we sit tense and quiet, listening close to a nineteen eighty-five that we lived once before.
As some of the videos became dominated by their own slow disintegration, there were mumbles and whispers from the crowd that something beyond adjusting the tracking or choosing another ought be done. These dying memories needed saving. And yet, while assuring my mother that there is a trustworthy way to keep each reel, to myself I wondered if these dusty old black cassettes weren’t the finest compliments to our living memories ever to be invented. Because like our memories, time will do them in. In a matter of years, whether they’re played often or kept in badly marked boxes, they’ll turn from a flowing narrative to a rickety image or two – which may or may not be a truly accurate reflection of what took place that sunshiny Reagan Era day.
The old flat coffins will no longer have companion players, and the fuzzy images they save will no longer represent the living, or their seed. The oddly carved cassettes will be the remaining ephemera of memories no longer memorized by their long-dead keepers. Hidden in their badly marked box, they’ll say very little about the lives we led to the dispassionate kith and kin we’ll never know. But there will be nothing better to show from the time we spent here, on the eve of another century. A few short years before the future came for good, turning moments, memories, and hand-crafted declarations to digits, diodes, and liquid crystal zeroes.