When I was young, my father grew his hair longer than the hair I have now. He sported those giant sunglasses, the kind Sly wore in the movie Cobra and the sheriff collects on his dashboard in Kill Bill Vol. 1, and he wore amazing shirts with extended collars. Some days I wish I owned a double-exposed Polaroid of me looking that good in those clothes.

Enough nostalgia. That version of my father lugged around this machine that weighed more than his dumbbells. Part of me thinks that neither weight lifting nor contracting that accounted for his massive biceps. Part of me thinks it was the camcorder.

Surely most of you remember these things. Pop in a full-sized cassette tape, mount it on your shoulder, suction the viewfinder to your eye socket and fire away. The Schauberts still own tapes upon tapes of me playing cowboys and indians with my brother. I’d like to say that I always chose to be an indian who fought off the rich white oppressor, but I was intemperate and violent in my youth. I probably wielded the six-shooter, but my brother always wore the leather chaps.

Again with the nostalgia, sheesh today must be international existential angst day. I can almost hear Pauly Shore saying something like Yield to the reminiscage, bro. Fine, Pauly, I will. In particular, I remember one cassette that started with this my father’s face filling the screen, as if he had just hit the giant red Action! button. When he backs up, you can see that the camera’s perched atop the highest shelf in our kitchen, poised to observe some seventy-five percent of our living and dining rooms. Minutes later, the babysitter enters and my parents leave. Don’t worry, she didn’t beat us or anything.

But she could have. She could have.

No seriously, my point is to say that whatever the content of the videos, whatever the speed setting we filmed them at (the two-hour quality or the eight-hour quantity), we still had to stop, hit eject, remove this honking tape, place it in the VCR, rewind it to the start, press play, slow-fast forward to the part we wanted and hit play again. And that was just to find our favorite part.

By then it was time for dinner.

A few days ago, Kiddo and I both babysat the three-year old and one year old of our good friends. The older one, the boy (we’ll call him Merriadoc Brandybuck), finished his dinner and sat down with Kiddo and me on the couch. Merry picked up our iPad and started messing around with the coloring apps we downloaded. After a moment, Kiddo switched it to the camera mode.  Continue reading →