Nostalgia

Last night I watched my life pass before my eyes. Well, at least seven years of it. And actually, some of those bits were really not my life, as they took place before I was around, in the strange netherworld that is Your Parents Lives Before You Were Born.

As a very belated joint birthday gift for my parents (really now, an early Christmas present, as the birthdays were last summer... aren't I a great daughter?), I had 36 reels of Super-8 home movies transferred to DVD. 1972-79. Silent movies of my parents before they had kids, going on camping vacations with their new puppy. My dad working on his Volkswagen squareback in the driveway of our old house. My grandpa on the farm in Illinois, my mom's dad, sitting around at Christmastime, while my aunt floated in and out of the scene, pregnant with the first grandchild. The life of people and things who are hazy in my own mind. My only memory of that dog is that she bit me when I was four, right before she died. My only memory of the VW is sitting on the hood, drawing in the ash that settled on it when Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980. My aunt had two more kids, my three cousins, and they've produced 9 of their own offspring in the last 4 years -- the 10th is due next May. I never met my grandfather, he died the summer before I was born.

So maybe it's just the romantic nature of Super-8 - even watching the DVD brings up memories of the rhythmic clacking of the projecter, and smell of the warm film as it passes in front of the lens - but watching the early years of our family filled me with the overwhelming understanding that I had a really wonderful childhood. Yeah, sure, so of course the only scenes in the movies are when my family was actually all together, playing in our backyard or clamming on the Oregon coast, and everybody's smiling and waving at the camera and since there's no sound, you can't hear my brother and I screaming at each other (though, circa 1978, he was caught on tape trying to run me over with a Big Wheel). But man, there's something about watching us run around in our backyard, swinging and rollerskating and learning to ride bikes, completely oblivious of the havoc that the Teen Years would wreak upon our rosy memories...

I could hardly believe that the family I was watching was my own. Not because I didn't have a good childhood (I did) and not because my family doesn't get along now (we do), but because that family is sealed off in Super-8 happy-ending land, and my family has been through so much since then. We are not without our happy endings, of sorts, but we're tempered by reality, by years of bickering with each other and accomodating each other and sticking by each other through life-threatening illness and adolescence and all that jazz. But I love revisiting that family, and finally beginning to understand how much my parents sacrificed to give my brother and I a good life, and watching everyone wave at the camera as the picture begins to flicker and the screen goes white. I can almost hear the end of the reel going thwap, thwap, thwap.