Legacy MattersRachel Lucas, one of my favorite bloggers, in Saying Goodbye to Grandpa (sorry link no longer works and Rachel only blogs occasionally now)
He did more than that, of course, but the story of the old home movies shows what kind of man he was: kind, gentle, quiet, stable, funny. In the end, the comfort comes in knowing that he had a good long life and was surrounded by people he loved when that life ended. It's what we all hope for, and he had it. And for that, I'm happy.
The tape was full of old movies of myself and my siblings that I'd never seen before, movies of our early childhood, of our parents as very young newlyweds, of my mother pregnant with her first child. I had no idea these movies existed.
You see, Grandpa had a camcorder in the 1990s, and at family gatherings, he was always there in the background, silent, recording little snippets of our lives. What I didn't know was that he also used to have an 8 mm movie camera (sans sound) in the 1960s and 70s. Unbeknownst to me, he'd taken reels and reels of footage of my siblings and me when we were infants and toddlers.
So, late in his life, he decided to put all the footage he'd ever taken onto one VHS tape. He sat down one day and set up his 8 mm projector to play the movies on a white wall. Then he put his modern-day camcorder on a tripod and aimed it at that wall. While he played the old movies, he recorded with the camcorder. The best part is that as the silent 8 mm movies played on the wall, he narrated into the camcorder.
Then he used two VCRs to transfer all the VHS footage he'd taken in the last decade or so onto the same tape with the 8 mm movies. Thus did he compile one master tape with every bit of movie footage he'd ever taken of our family. He then made copies and gave them to us. My copy is now one of my most prized possessions, and I watched it last night after my dad called to tell me Grandpa had died.
There are six of us grandchildren, and when most of us were born, Grandpa was there with his 8 mm camera. His narration for these portions of the tape go like this: "Well, there's little Ricky. Hey there, Ricky! There's his mama now, Linda...this was in 1967 in Irving, Texas." At one point, it goes from footage of Rick (my older brother) as a newborn to Rick just learning to walk, and Grandpa narrates: "Why, looky there! Little Ricky learning to walk. There ya go, boy!" His comments are funny and sweet, just little observations about his grandchildren. Years of our tiny lives, captured on film by our Grandpa.