The Family Videos (Round 2)

Last summer I blogged about how I had barely scratched the surface in the epic project of digitizing my family home videos.  For me last summer, it didn’t work out.  Now, thankfully, my brother has taken over the helm and he is taking care of the massive endeavor to move all of our analog tapes to a digital format.  He has been giving our family updates regarding his progress, and it is simply incredible how much work there is for him to do.

As he digitizes them he’s finding little clips to upload on Youtube to showcase particularly funny, important or peculiar moments from the collection.  He’s been sending these to the family for the past few weeks now and as he is working chronologically I’ve been receiving videos starting from the mid 80s to the late 90s, roughly from when I was six years old right on up to around eighteen.

Watching the videos has made me look at my family and myself a bit differently the past few weeks.  The videos aren’t just sentimental walks down memory lane, but intense experiences fraught with waves of emotion, from embarassment, surprise, longing to even shame at times.  Here are few observations and thoughts I’ve had as I’ve watched these videos:

– I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my father.  That he committed to making so many videos through important and dear moments shows how thoughtful and prescient he was, seeing as how much of a treasure it is to have these memories available to us now.

– My family was such a healthy, happy bunch, or at least it looks that way on film.  I’m talking in particular during the halcyon New Jersey days when all four of the Shiozawa kids were at home, before anyone went off to college.  I’ve seen enough footage of us playing together, doing yard work together, chatting and joking around with one another to realize that my parents really provided for their children in the best way possible, to enable us to be kids and enjoy ourselves.

– My mom is truly the rock of the family.  She’s often a presence in the videos as the one arranging and organizing the event that my father is recording — for example, birthdays, meals, getting us through the airport.  The videos that I love best of her are the ones that show the moments when she’s just doing her own thing oblivious to the camera like when she’s playing with my cat Dusky when he was a kitten or when she sweetly opens the door wider for Belle, my other cat, even though the door is already wide enough open for her to get through.

– My brother already looks grown up to me in these videos, even though they start when he’s fifteen — he’s tall, he’s built, he’s mature and his voice is absolutely the same as it is now.  It’s too bad there isn’t the opportunity to see him in an earlier phase, as truly just a kid.  I am the most fortunate in the family in this regard as I’m the youngest in the family and my dad started recording while I was pretty young.

– My oldest sister is such a confident and self-assured individual now, and as we can see in these vids, she was even then.  In many clips often she is front and center telling a story, explaining something or just clowning around while the rest of the people in the clip are simply watching her.  This is still the case today, I guess I always assumed that it was something that came over time and not something that was innate in her personality.

– My other older sister comes off as very sweet in these videos.  She’s always acknowledging my father as he films (which the rest of us don’t do very often) and she is frequently shown helping out my mother and father in some way.  She’s much more talkative and outgoing than what I remember as well.  I always thought she was shy as a kid, but from what I can tell she doesn’t seem shy at all, she just doesn’t demand to be the center of attention, unlike some people, specifically myself.

– As for me, I can say that I had a very happy, comfortable life growing up.  Of course I’ve always known that but it’s something to watch it all now — how lucky and fortunate I was.  Watching myself as I get older, in to high school is also much harder to bear than the earlier videos when I’m just an active, excited kid.  I can see in the later clips how I become a typical insecure, self-centered teenager filled with big aspirations and perhaps some inflated self-delusions.  It’s strange — at the same time it’s heartening and disappointing in a way, to see how much of an average teenager I was.

My brother is putting all of these videos on a huge hard drive and I think ultimately it will become the most important physical object our family posesses.  It’s essentially the full record of my family, my wonderful family.