Making Memories
Not long ago, I came across a VHS tape from my mother’s surprise 60th birthday party in 1991. Holding the dusty old tape in its cardboard container, I recalled putting together the guest list for the party weeks in advance and needing to gather addresses, physical addresses, of guests, in order to mail invitations. Accomplishing this required me to stealthily remove my mother’s address book from her purse one night when she came to my apartment for dinner. I perused the pages alphabetically, jotting down phone numbers and addresses in another room, then somehow managed to get the address book back into her purse before she left that night. It was a whole “thing”, a big deal, and I was quite proud of my craftiness at the time.
I decided to convert the tape to an mp4 video so that I could share it with my brother and sister and other family members. As I sat watching the video feed from the VCR onto my laptop screen via the conversion software, I became acutely aware of how much life, my life, has changed in the past thirty years: The young man standing at my side became my husband; the young woman sitting on the floor sipping a beer became my brother’s wife, and she and my brother no longer live in the house in which the party was held. Everyone looked and sounded younger. The clothing styles were atrocious. The quality of the video, shot with a Sony camcorder I’m sure, paled in comparison to what you can do these days with an iPhone 12.
And, speaking of iPhones, I was struck by the absence of them in the video. In a living room filled with thirty or so people ranging in age from 24 to 72, there was, unsurprisingly, not one cell phone. No one’s eyes were downcast, perusing text messages or Twitter or Instagram. There were no hands pointing miniature screens toward other guests to individually record the scene. When my brother, sister and I performed a song parody we wrote for my mother, the sole recording device was the camcorder, dutifully chronicling the occasion, not to share with two-hundred “friends” or strangers in real-time, but to save for posterity.
The video revealed something more strikingly emotional as well. Many of the people at that party are no longer alive, my mother included. She died almost two years ago after a seven-year decline from dementia, which makes watching videos such as this one – in which she is animated, fully-cognizant and engaged – bittersweet and almost surreal. Though she died in 2019, she began losing pieces of herself beginning in 2012, and for the first several months following her death I felt as if I could not mentally access clear memories of her, pre-dementia. As time goes on, recollections of her and experiences we shared come back to me, often when I’m not trying to remember. Watching this recording was immensely helpful in rebuilding my mental stockpile of memories. It also served to highlight the trajectory of the last three decades of her life.
Finding this VHS tape in her belongings after she died was serendipitous. Fortunately, my husband located a working VCR in his parents’ house and I was able to buy an inexpensive software program to convert the video. This experience led me to consider how technological advances make the process of capturing memories ridiculously easy and, at the same time, I wonder if that simplicity may also contribute to a devaluation in the impact of viewing old recordings. Don’t get me wrong: I love what I am able to do on my phone in terms of spontaneity, creativity and autonomy. I am not looking back on the past with sentimentality where technology is concerned and I appreciate that I can share a photo or a video with a friend instantly no matter where either of us happens to be. Yet, when I consider my childhood in the 60s and 70s, I cannot recall even one video of myself or my family (other than one or two grainy 8-millimeter films of my sister performing at summer camp, with no audio, circa 1971). It would be so cool to see myself as a toddler interacting with my young mother, or as an 8-year old playing in the pool at our swim club. Perhaps videos like that existed in my family – I know my father owned a video camera – but they were rare and are now long-gone, likely having been swept up and lost with my mother’s relocations over time.
My adult sons have seen dozens of videos from their childhood because my husband and I, like many parents in the 90s, owned a camcorder and incessantly filmed everything from inconsequential conversations to family trips to special occasions. I know they are amused while watching the younger versions of themselves and being reminded of (or introduced to) whatever took place in the past. But I can see they don’t watch these video mementoes with the same kind of wonder and fascination I would, were able to see my past that way. And, likely, children growing up right now may someday view iPhone videos of their younger selves with a sort of indifference reserved for commonplace experiences. I could be wrong, but having scores of photos and videos that can be viewed repeatedly in real-time might eventually serve to dull sentimentality with the past.
What made viewing my mother’s party tape so special was that it was one, 90-minute linear recording of a single night thirty years ago, and it captured all the nuances and candidness of people’s interactions. It was not a two-minute snippet deliberately designed for posting somewhere as entertainment to people with no emotional connection to the event or the guests. Perhaps, with the exception of major milestones such as weddings, our desire to catalog the past for posterity has taken a backseat to our interest in sharing what is transpiring right now as quickly and extensively as possible.
I also wonder how, in the future, we might access old videos. Will we still have the Cloud to store our memories or will that be obsolete? Perhaps thirty years from now, holographic images and videos will be the de facto method of sharing memories, although the question remains: Will we be desensitized to the effects of viewing our past such that emotions have no connection to reminiscence?
I’m curious if my conjectures are shared by others.
