Family Camcorder

The holiday season, to me, is like an etching–it gets its shape from all the things it’s missing just as much as all that it has. Scratched into my psyche are layers of past and present and here and gone until a picture emerges, looking something like Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but not exactly the kind they print on glossy cards or sell in glittering boxed sets.

The motion of placing ornaments on pine boughs always emerges from somewhere old, my arm a three-year-old’s reaching to hang a popsicle stick creation; my arm a 33-year-old's, straightening the golden bulb I found at Goodwill somewhere off the highway in Montana.

My place at my new family’s dinner table is novel too, not mine from years of claiming it–from being tucked “just so” between my brother and my mom–but welcoming, just the same.

I suppose life is just this way–an amalgamation of all that we used to have and all that we still get to create. And the holidays are like a time stamp; a Polaroid image of our place in the world; our families; our lives. The people in it always change. The person in it changes, too.

And despite all this handful of weeks at the end of a single year brings up inside of me, I simply like The Holidays. Mostly, because people remember to be nice to one another. They remember it is good to be kind and generous, to make time for the people in their lives that matter, and to temporarily lift the edges of the veil of everyday, finally peering into the liminal space that is knowing; that is perspective.

They look around a room dressed in twinkling lights and smelling like cinnamon, set to the tune of inside jokes and the low hum of a replayed TV program, and understand the truth above truths. This is what really matters. This is what I have been looking for all along.

**

I found our old family camcorder in a tattered box when cleaning out the attic of my dad’s house. It was nestled in a pile of mouse poop, and as I brushed aside the shiny little turd pebbles, I thought of the summer I put everything through my rock tumbler, transforming bits of gravel into brown and gray gems. Well, that, and I thought of hantavirus.

Months later, lungs thankfully still intact, I pushed play on the old device and found it in the middle of a Christmas scene, my family sitting around the all-blue living room at my grandma’s house–a room I hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years. [My siblings were at their dad’s, making us our family’s miniature, a group of 6 instead of 8]. Each of us was perched atop a small pile of presents–looking like hens squatting over their eggs–opening gifts one by one, holding up our wares to each other’s polite applause.

Peering into the small video screen, I was an oracle, a god of knowing, looking down from above, aware of how it’d all turn out for the small figures tearing open new packages of socks and underwear to a chorus of “oohs” and “ahhs.”

Pancreatic cancer would take two in the room, my grandma in her seventies and my mom in her fifties; leukemia would come for my grandpa in his eighties; alcoholism and depression for my dad in his sixties; and my aunt, meeting her end from something like loneliness and an inability to pay for overpriced heart medication at 61. And then there was me, ten(ish) at the time, now 33, the god of knowing, hunched on my couch with popcorn crumbs on my lap and an olive oil stain on my shirt, somehow still alive.

Emerging from somewhere deep inside myself, let’s call it “Survival,” I laughed, unhumorously. “Yikes,” I may have said.

But in addition to all-knowing sadness and a bit of attempted self-preservation, were flickers of other feelings and thoughts, too. Like the glowy warmth of pride at the gap-toothed girl, me, grinning unselfconsciously, looking like a jack-o-lantern–but perhaps one carved from shaky hands or a kindergartener with a butter knife. At ten, I was still four years away from the orthodontia that would correct for my playdough gums and seemingly too many and too few teeth, all the same time.

“I think that’s what they call ‘humble beginnings’,” I muttered to myself, above the screen. Although at the time I’m writing this, I have a tooth and a half-sized hole in my mouth, still months away from a dental implant; and a gap large enough to whistle through. *whistle*

I think that’s what they call “humble middles,” too.

The other emotion competing with grief (and pride) was joyful remembering. Like, I’d forgotten my grandpa waved his hands like that when he laughed, his liver spots blurring as he guffawed at something only mildly funny I said.

He always laughed when I made jokes, a beaming glow of love and adoration emerging when he looked at me; its light blooming large enough to shine on my dad, too, as if in awe that someone so mediocre to him produced something so bright: his jack-o-lantern granddaughter.

That same light would shine on me in the other kid-friendly places my grandpa would bring me to, like the VA bar or the dog track. I’d spin on the barstool, kicking my legs against the pleather cladding as he told his friends I was going to be a doctor or a famous writer. Well, Grandpa, here I am, self-publishing my writing for tens of people to read. How’s that for fortune-telling?

Peering into the camcorder’s screen, I was also reminded of the sweaters my Grandma always used to wear–the exact kind of sweater that pops into your mind when you think “Grandma.” That Christmas, she donned a cream turtleneck with a cross-stitched cardinal perched on a holly branch. She owned several sweaters with cardinals on them–one light blue, another soft peach, and another yet, pale rose–all grandma colors.

These sweaters were gently worn, in the uncaring way of a woman who spent years of her life picking tomatoes in the garden and adding another glob of butter to pans of rømmegrøt (her Norwegian husband’s breakfast staple). They were sweaters scraped from the bottom barrels of bargain outlet malls on closeout sales or day-after-Christmas extravaganzas. When people would compliment them (inevitably, another grandma with an eye for pastel), she’d nod conspiratorily and whisper, “JC Penney’s, $5.99.”

I watched on as the camera panned back to me, my aunt a few feet away nervously petting her dog, a shaggy black retriever mix, as she watched me open a gift from her. I unwrapped a small beige nailfile and clipper set and a book of My Little Pony stickers–the gift so perfectly, painfully, too old and too young for a 10-year-old girl.

I’m sure the smile I plastered on felt convincing at the time. But, in reality, it looked more like I was trying to fart, my lips pressed together in a tight line, one corner straining to bend upwards at the edge.

“What do you sayyy,” my mom cooed. “Thank you, Karla,” I recited.

Watching the scene broke my heart, as I could picture her standing in the aisle of Walgreens, wholly lost at what to get a girl wedged so firmly between childhood and adolescence, especially one she only saw once a year.

“Reach for the markers!” I wish I could yell through the mirage, or “Step away from the baby aisle!”

But instead, all I could do was peer down in horror as things played out–her face falling, mine straining; each a fun-house mirror reflection of the other’s disappointment. There was nothing to be done for it, me, the god of knowing, wanting to reach down to shake my little jack-o-lantern head, and ask, “Do you know what you’ve done?” “Do you know the lifetime of loneliness you’ve affirmed, you’ve perpetuated?” But no, 10-year-old me just sat there, struggling to pass gas.

The video then panned to my dad, crumpling a bit of wrapping paper into a ball and tossing it, playfully, at the camera, at my mom. It reminded me of what he looked like as a part of a family–a husband and a father, still imperfect, but totally convinced of his innate purpose in the world; in that room. And for a moment, I watched with eyes that couldn’t see how it would all turn out and witnessed two parents who hadn’t given up on each other yet. Who were still “working on it,” with something left to work on.

Finally, my mom stepped back into the frame and handed the camera to me, grinning cheesily into the lens now slightly askew in my hands. I’d forgotten the way she used to exaggerate her smile, playful, like a little performance, just for me. Her gaze lingered a moment, as if for an extra heartbeat or errant thought, and the god of knowing wondered what it was for.

Maybe my mom was thinking, “This, daughter, is how you fake a good smile. You need to work on it,” or perhaps it was something more like, “That gangly, serious child came from me, a burning star of light and life, of laughter and silliness…how strange.”

She ripped off the paper on a package from my grandma, revealing a bargain bin custard cardinal sweatshirt.

Warmly, and utterly convincingly, she gasped, “Oh, Mom! I love it! Thanks so much.” And just as everyone else moved on, she snuck a glance back to me, and winked.

**

The god of knowing unfolded her legs and pushed herself off the couch, popcorn kernels tumbling onto the floor. She stood before the baubled tree that looked like a Christmas card; one that wasn’t glossy, but one she thought she liked, nonetheless. She wiped what felt like tears, or maybe hot memories, off her cheeks, and looked around at the life she built; the home she made out of the fragments of all who came before her, and of the life she still gets to live.

This is what really matters. This is what I have been looking for all along.