“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
”
I didn’t have hair on my head until I was almost a year and a half old. Maybe that’s in part why it became so magnifique as I got older, or maybe I was just a dumb, bald baby. What I do know is that discovering a dusty pile of VHS tapes has led me on a bit of an emotional roller coaster this week.
The majority of my childhood is stored on just a handful of VHS tapes, and the only things recorded seem to be the few vacations we took as a family, neighborhood get-togethers, and annual holidays like Christmas, birthdays, and (occasionally) Easter. And what really interested me were the earliest recordings, because, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen that footage before. And it was pretty surreal.
As the project I’m currently writing is focused heavy on memories, I saw this as an opportunity for some serious research. But also as an opportunity to open up the oldest time capsule available to me.
So, age twenty-five, sitting alone on the floor of my study, I spent a couple hours watching videotape of me as a baby up until I was nearly four. And there was a lot to take in.
Growing up both my parents worked full time, which meant that my grandparents watched me five days a week, for several years.
My grandmother would always cook meals for me, and there was a surplus of toys to play with. And, from what I remember, my grandfather wasn’t much of a talker. But he was one of my favorite people when I was a kid. He and I would sit in my grandparent’s hallway and we’d race Matchbox cars, build tinker toys, and set up army men and try to knock them over with golf balls. God love him, he never let the oxygen tank he had to carry around stop him from spending time with me.
He died in 2000. It was comforting to see and hear him again, after almost twenty years of having not.
I also got to see my other grandmother, who died before I was three, for the first time outside of photographs. And hear her voice.
Also, I couldn’t help but notice how happy everyone looked. In all the videos. Including me.
There was a point when I was watching that I thought, “I don’t ever remember being that happy.” But I guess I was. But I was also four. And it’s interesting to see how a lot of that has disappeared nowadays.
Admittedly, family has been an area in my life that I stray from. For a long list of reasons that maybe I’ll get into someday. But I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy seeing my mother and father happy as they took care of me as an infant.
This blog could have easily been three times longer, but I’ll conclude by saying that it’s been therapeutic to see the way things used to be. It brought back a lot of memories, and helped me remember the ones I never got to keep. But my biggest takeaway is this:
Like all physical media, VHS tapes deteriorate with age. As all matter does. Which means there will definitively come a day when all the footage of us as children will be unwatchable; lost to time forever. And none of those recordings will matter unless you want them to. Because there will always be a tomorrow, and no matter how hard we try, we can never truly relive yesterday.
The only tangible connection we get to have to the past is ourselves; bodies built by all of our ancestors, who, directly, gave us the gift of seeing what tomorrow will hold.
And maybe someday, for some of us, we’ll get to pass along that gift. And to me, that’s a lot more valuable than any gift a camera could capture you unwrapping under the Christmas tree.
STH
