Video Reminiscing

I’m slowing getting my cheerfulness back after the nadir of Sunday’s debacle.  Last night I was talking with my wife, who’s down in Panama.  In the middle of that conversation my daughter also called.  I put both phones on speaker (the one to Panama is over the internet) and mother and daughter had a nice conversation.  When these calls came in I was making my initial foray into transferring some of our old VHS tapes onto DVD.  A couple of years ago the family gave me a machine that allows you to do that as a father’s day gift.  With all the solitude I am currently assigned I decided this was a perfect opportunity to give it a try.  I was concerned that many of these tapes, now over twenty years old, wouldn’t still function.  Fortunately this first one did.  This was on in the background and my wife finally said, that sounds like our kids.  It was at the ages of six and eight coming home from their first day of school in 1992.  As I was talking with my wife and then my daughter I was telling them what was happening on the screen.  It was kind of cool.  I saw my kids head up for a day trip with their aunt from their grandmother’s house; a ritual they all cherished and still talk about.  They were accompanied by the aunt’s dog, now long deceased.  I also saw several scenes with my mother, who’s been dead for almost ten years now.  She adamantly refused to have her picture taken so we have very few photos of her.  Apparently she didn’t feel the same way about video because she was right there again, it felt good seeing her.  I realized that we took all this video but in most cases never watched it.  I’m really looking forward to seeing all of this unfold over the next few weeks.  I know watching home movies is kind of a cliché and a dreaded ordeal for some people.  Last night, seeing all these scenes from the early nineties (most of all seeing those magnificent children who grew up into equally magnificent adults), really touched my heart and lifted some patriotized feelings.