REMEMBERING A NEW OLD MEMORY OF ANTSY LITTLE DANNY

Close your eyes and imagine a world from long, long ago. Back before Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs were ever spoken in the same breath. Back when Karen was just another girl’s name and ‘woke’ was what everyone did after sleep. Back when Pandora was known less for streaming music and more for her mythological box of human woes, and Apple was synonymous with produce, not phones and computers.

Okay… if you are thinking of wooden lance holding medieval dandies at a matinee jousting match, Greek philosophers lounging around not-yet-ruined ruins, or Stone Age neanderthal troglodytes dressed in the latest Caveman Dior animal skin fashions, you have gone back a bit too far.

Instead, let your mind take you back to a time before Covid 19, 16 Candles, Apollo 13, 12 Angry Men, September 11th, 8-Track tapes, The Chicago 7, Mambo #5, and Pope John Paul the 2nd…  back when the most important number was the one on the station dial used to tune into to your favorite shows on the large radios that sat prominently in most American living rooms.  In the pre-television days of the earlier 20th century, folks everywhere would gather around the radio at the same time to listen to live broadcasted news reports, music programs, preachers, comedians, and all the insanely popular scripted shows.

A few short years later, after TV sets became as ubiquitous in every house as a refrigerator, old timer traditionalists bemoaned the lost beauty and art of radio entertainment. They claimed radio was more creative and engaging because you used your mind to form personalized unique mental images attached to the audio-only broadcasts. And while most folks believed home entertainment was vastly improved after the waves of change pushed radio into a mostly background medium, those grumbling geezers did have a point when they lectured young TV watchers about them never knowing the simple interactive joy of radio. It became a sort of lost artform that had combined the best aspects of reading a book and watching a movie.

This all happened long before I was born, yet I’ve always understood the emotion and sentiment. I feel the same way about television from my childhood. Sure, I know it’s undeniably better to not be beholden to a small handful of broadcast networks and the schedule they choose to present things.  Nowadays I can pick from a zillion shows to watch at any time I desire. But with the advent of near unlimited options, there also comes a loss.

Being born in the pre-Streaming/DVD/VCR/cable era, when I was a little kid, the only way to see a film was during its initial theatre run, a special movie house revival, or the occasional time it was broadcast at a set-time on TV. I know the following makes me sound like one of those old radio-loving grumpy geezers. But young people today will never know the communal feeling of almost everyone you know watching the exact same show at the exact same time. But even more so, they will never experience the utter joy and unexpected glee of having your night vastly improved when flipping on the TV and accidentally happening upon a favorite movie just starting. There was no pausing back then. You could not just watch anything whenever you wanted. When you nailed it perfectly, you just canceled all other plans, dug in, and enjoyed the unexpected surprise because you never knew when you might ever see that film again.

Believe me, I am no luddite driving in reverse on the road of progress. I’m just pointing out that with every advancement, there are some little fun things that become lost to the next generation that grows up with the change.  

On a long automobile road-trip to a previously unvisited place, cell phones are a great lifeline in an emergency. Plus, they can help you gauge how far you can go till the next gas station, steer you to the best restaurants, help you research the cleanliness of a roadside motel, and keep you connected so you never get too lonely.  For those comforts though, you trade the sense of accomplishment through self-reliant independence and all the amazing, serendipitous adventures that come with an unassisted trip into the unknown. Some may have been good, and some may have been bad, but it is undeniable that a lot of wacky travel stories were never written because cell phones prevented the experiences from ever happening.

Another example of this technology trade-off concept can be found in the vast quantity of photos and video clips that exist of anyone raised in the cellphone era. As I desperately strain to not forever forget my treasured memories, I’ve become embarrassingly jealous of kids nowadays that are raised with nearly every moment of their lives documented, shared, and securely digitally stored in an easily accessible cloud. For the memory reminders of my youth, I have no movies or videos whatsoever and only a shoe box of arbitrary faded photos featuring a few occasional highlights. Without photographic reminders, I wonder how much of my past I have lost to wonky abused brain cells and shlocky tired synapses.

But the other side of that coin is, folks with that much documentation raised in the digital versus film era, will never know the crazy giddy excitement of happening upon a memory-triggering previously unseen photo or film clip of your past that you never knew existed. Because of how rare they are, those are like a gift of history being unexpectedly bestowed upon you. A brief step into a time machine that sometimes unlocks a hidden cache of previously lost experiences.

It was terribly sad when my old high school friend Jamie unexpectedly died a few years ago. She was estranged from the little actual family she had, so a mutual friend of ours was tasked with cleaning out her place. I helped out too.  Besides her clothes, furniture, and kitchen stuff, Jamie did not really have a lot of possessions. But it quickly became obvious that the things she had saved must have been important to her.

In a drawer I found a small stack of envelopes containing carefully sorted photographs. Most of the people and images I did not recognize, but one of the envelopes had pictures from an evening back in high school when a group of us went to the Dade County Youth Fair together. I already had a small handful of wacky pics from that night that my girlfriend and I took with a small crummy camera, but here was a whole new collection of different angles and events that triggered a slew of forgotten memories from those fun carefree days. It felt good knowing that my fallen friend had treasured that night and our little gang of goofballs, as much as I did. I kind of looked at those pictures as a thank you for helping tie-up the last of her life’s loose-ends and a final gift of good memory reminders from an old friend I would sadly never see again. 

A few years ago, I tried to surprise my wife by digitally copying her family’s old deteriorating Super 8 movies. When we watched them, she recalled previously seeing a lot of the short films her father had shot of them as babies and little kids. But there were several longer unfamiliar reels of footage that her grandfather had taken. One of them contained mountains of pretty boring footage, mostly multiple exterior street shots of the church a minister relative had recently moved to. But like an amazing unexpected shocking gift, at the tippy end of it was a thirty second shot of my wife’s parents stepping out of the chapel just after their wedding ceremony. No one in the family remembered ever seeing it before, or even knew of its existence. But there it was, a memory gift from the past, unlike anything else the family had. Certainly that is an experience that would be hard to reproduce in today’s world.

I was able to have fun being the ‘sharer’ of one of those moments this past weekend. For many years. I was the only one in my family with a video camcorder. Well, actually my sister’s ex-husband had one first, but he was more concerned with making ‘art’ with his family used as carefully placed curated props, versus annoyingly shoving the camera in everyone’s face capturing their goofy real-life selves like I did. He was one of those guys that had to have the latest, greatest, newest electronics, and during one of his many upgrades, I bought his old camera off him at a reasonably good price. So I guess everyone can blame or thank him for my constant intrusive filming.

For several years I dragged that giant oversized camera everywhere and shot mountains of footage at family get-togethers. Eventually, I heavily edited the better moments into a wacky “Family Videorama” compilation that I gave my parents on a VHS tape. Years later someone else digitalized it and gave everyone in the family a copy.  In my head this all does not seem that long ago, but the clothing styles and amount of hair everyone has certainly proves otherwise.

Last week, when one of my nieces came to visit Texas for the first-time, I dug out some of the raw unedited footage of her family and childhood that did not make it onto that old passed around family tape. Though much of it was long, boring, and poorly shot, I think she really enjoyed viewing the previously unseen images from her childhood, catching glimpses of her room, basement dollhouse, and scurrying childhood cat. I was happy to give her that fun gift of memories.

Last month, that same niece had put together a montage video of greetings from different family members to give my parents for their 75th wedding anniversary. For the project, a much older cousin of mine shared a few dozen photos of my family that I had never seen before. In the mix was a picture of me playing the upright tuba, an instrument assigned to me for a couple of years in elementary school because of my physical size rather than musical ability. Many stories have been told about me torturing my family, and the entire neighborhood, with my loud ridiculous tuba playing. I once rang in the New Years blasting echoing blurts out my window at the stroke of midnight. But I knew of no photos of me with my old tuba… until now.

Another even older shot from a holiday dinner features my big family all clad in the popular garish polyester outfits of the day. Seeing it was like a splash landing time capsule off a rocket-ship from my distant past. As photos go, its actually pretty bad. If someone shot it today, it would have been discarded and others taken till they caught a better composed image of everyone. But I love it, just the way it is. There is something beautifully perfect about the photo’s gross imperfections. 

You really can get a feel for everyone’s personality. Some folks are politely paying attention properly posing, while others are making halfhearted forced smiles or ignoring the camera entirely. My sister is completely distracted reaching for something outside the shot (maybe our big fluffy family dog?). As usual, little boy Danny looks bored, anxious, and antsy in an ill-fitting dress shirt, with his elbow impolitely propped in the middle of an empty dinner plate and fidgeting with a spoon. I guess some things never change.

Maybe it sounds like I am overstating things, and to someone less sentimental I might be. But to me, this never before seen photo opens a new window into my past, unlocking a hidden vault of memories. So maybe I am turning into a past-looking grumpy geezer, but I cannot deny enjoying the unexpected discovery experience I likely would never have had if I grew up in today’s world.