Preservation Priorities

Dearest Rachel –

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the story in passing before, but I might as well retell it here and now; I’ll get to the ‘why’ in a moment. Your family, if I remember the story correctly, were among the first to get their hands on a video cassette recorder, back in the day. This was back when such devices were literally just coming onto the market, back in the early eighties (or possibly even the late seventies), so you were among the first adopters.

It seems so out of character for your parents to be on the cutting edge of new technology, given what I knew of them. They were, as you recall, intransigiently opposed to owning or even learning to use computers, for example, despite the fact that they’ve since turned out to be ubiquitous to the point of being absolutely necessary to understand and be able to use these days (guess it’s a good thing they aren’t around to have to deal with that anymore). So the idea of them being deeply invested in a new technology strikes me as particularly ludicrous.

But digging further into the story, it begins to make a bit more sense. When I say they were ‘invested’ in the technology, that’s exactly what I mean. This wasn’t something they ran out and bought for themselves, oh no. This was a giveaway from their bank, back in the days when, if you poured enough money into one of their investment products, they would give you the option of several gifts as both incentive to do so and a ‘thank-you’ for having done so. Your parents would have had no consideration for the incentive aspect of this program; they just wanted their money in a safe and reasonably profitable place. But who were they to turn down a gift offered as a thank-you?

As I recall the story, there were three things they offered as options; a microwave, a video cassette deck, and a third item that escapes recollection. Given the time period, each of them would have run approximately a thousand dollars on the market back then, so it must have been quite the investment your parents made. However, your family already had a microwave in their kitchen, so they saw little reason to select that option, and so they left it up to you to decide between the VCR and the other item – or maybe you lobbied hard for it, and they simply decided “well, why not, if she wants it that badly?”

And this is the part of the story that causes everything else to add up. It was you who was the real technophile in the family, and it was your choice – or your insistence, depending on how the story truly goes – that brought this device into your family’s life.

And it did become something of a fixture in your family’s life, as I understand it. While your folks weren’t much for television – parents generally weren’t, back in those days – you learned the functions of your new machine in order to record certain shows that you didn’t want to miss (or, if you were already watching something you knew you wanted to keep – and that happened often, both in your childhood and once it was you and I and eventually Daniel – you would record while you were watching a show, in order to filter out the commercials for future viewings). You built up a vast collection of every episode you could find of every show you were into, most of which we still have to this day.

And it’s not as if your parents didn’t join in on your enthusiasm. You may have been the one to persuade them to get it, and you were the one to study and figure its vagaries out at first, but there’s plenty of evidence that they got into it, too. Both of them already being shutterbugs (I may have complained about having relatively few pictures of you to work with in creating a LoRA model of the you I remember, but as I’ve gone back into the basement to retrieve media recently, I’ve discovered caches of photos from your childhood days. Not all of them are date-stamped by them, however, so it’s a challenging piece of home archeology to piece together, especially since the one person who could shed some light on the stories behind it all is gone), it was almost natural that they should add a video camera to their collection of gadgets, and I’m pretty sure that you found yourself on the other end of the lens more times than you might have wanted to, as a result.

But I’m stuck having to say “I’m pretty sure” rather than something more confident like “I know” because, among everything I’ve dug up thus far, I have yet to find much of any of their camera work. I know it exists out there, as I’ve just acquired new hardware and software for connecting a device to the computer and converting video to digital format (which I may yet use to re-work the camcorder material, as it seems to deliver a higher-quality image, based on my thus-far limited experience), and I’ve found a tape of theirs from 1997 that involves you and Daniel coming to see them.

I’m sure there must be more tapes and more footage, but I haven’t been able to find any of it yet. Most of the cassettes we have on hand are your recordings of this show or that, ranging from Doctor Who to Doctor Phil, from Star Trek (in its many incarnations) to the Twilight Zone (in its many incarnations). It was understandable at the time – how were we to know that so many of those shows would be available soon enough in higher-quality, more durable, digital format via DVDs, YouTube or just straight-up downloads? – but it means that most of this is just taking up space, and getting in the way of what I really want to find.

I suppose it may have been important to us to save episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos once upon a time, but that was because we fully expected to be able to enjoy watching them again together some day. As crazy as that sounds now, I think we actually did from time to time, too, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time and space. But now… I regret what we prioritized, to be honest.

If you were still here, I could ask you, and you might well be able to find the tapes I’m really looking for, the ones showing you guys down in Macomb or on the island. You know, something other than this or that show, which we could just as easily find in sharper, digital form online. You could also help give me background to the boxes of old photos that your brought back from your folks. But somehow, I wonder if I’d even be interested in them if you were still here; why would I focus on old picture and video, when I had the real thing with me? And these would be left behind, until they were all that were left. Neither of us realized that they might become the priority.

So, while I work on these, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.