my roommate jon has been converting his parents' old family videos to digital. it kind of hurts my heart to watch them. they are mostly filmed and narrated by his dad, trying to catch snippets of his younger children- tess's 1st birthday, jon's first painting. they are all shaky and grainy, zooming in and out in strange places. it's really beautiful, but it pains me to see them for some reason. something in the way the children are so themselves and unrestrained, and the wonder and surprise and pride in jon's dad's voice as he talks behind the camera. i think seeing things that are closed off makes me sad, the door shut on the past, and the videos disturb me like out-of-date calendars. fiction isn't like that- stories exist across time, like the aliens in slaughterhouse five. but watching old videos of real people, as the possibilities and potentionals of their lives inexorably narrow down to one particular path of events, that makes me sad.
i wish my parents had gotten some videos of us as children. they took pictures like there was no tomorrow, but didn't go in for video. there are just a few isolated audio recordings my dad made. he played one for my brother and me when they were packing everything up to sell the house. my brother is talking and telling his little stories, and my dad tries to coax a sentence or two out of me. something about how i slipped in the kitchen and hurt my lip, and my dad makes a joke about how he got the recording so he couldn't be prosecuted for child abuse. there's no one around to get the joke, however, just my dad and two small children and the tape recorder.