From outside the box

I've never been one to watch old family videos or mull over photo's of days gone by, although I've always enjoyed taking the videos and photographs. I bought one of the first home video cameras available to the public back in the early eighties. It was a very cumbersome gadget. You had to wear a back pack full of heavy batteries with wires connecting over your shoulder to the camera and you only got about 30 minutes of shooting on a full charge. But I have to say, the videos I took over 25 years ago have maintained pretty good quality for sitting in a box in my closet all these years.

I have a family reunion coming up in a couple of weeks and one of my jobs will be to show some of the family get together's I filmed back then. So recently I bought a VHS/DVD player that also records VHS to DVD. So I've begun the long overdue process of recording from VHS to a DVD format. It's been a real trip down memory lane watching these videos, many of them for the first time. I am also reminded of why I don't like to watch old videos.... I was so young and skinny back then!

Just this morning I watched part of a family Christmas party from 1983. Right off the bat I counted four people in the room who are no longer in this world! There were kids who now have kids the same age as they were in this 1983 video. And the funny thing is, it doesn't seem that long ago! It really makes you aware of the cycle of life. It seems like I've watched a dozen generations go from baby to adult and each successive one happens faster and faster.

Time certainly seems to go faster as you get older, but I wonder why? Could it be the "theory of relativity"? I doubt it because I have too many "relatives without theory's". Maybe God does it as a mercy thing, so we can get thru old age quicker. I like to think it's because I'm enjoying my life more as I age. But then again, that could all be in my mind. I have a few relatives who like to remind me that life is not always as much fun as we think it is.

But still, do we really need those old videos to remind us of our youth? Deep down, on some hidden level, I think we all like to live with the illusion that we haven't changed that much over the years (I'm talking about baby boomers and older, not you forty year old squirts with all that natural color in your hair and those flat bellies). But if you really want to hold onto that mendacious apocryphal (it's a thesaurus thing, I'm not really that smart) self deceiving lie, fine, just don't look at any videos of yourself, past or present. The old ones will remind you of how different you looked then and the new ones will remind you of....well....what you look like. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

So for my middle aged and older nieces, nephews, and sisters who think they are going to enjoy a trip down memory lane by watching these old videos, I've got news for you friends....It's gonna burn! All of you looked pretty good back then. If you have any illusions that you haven't changed....hear me now and hear me good.... DO NOT ATTEND THE FAMILY VIDEO SEGMENT AT THE REUNION! Consider yourself warned.

Side note....you all still look pretty good....Sometimes I gotta make stuff up for the sake of dynamics.