little bits.

Tonight I was watching some of my boyfriend's families home videos. They were short little clips from 2001, and they were all of Christmas of that year. In them, there were snippets of a grandfather who had passed away before I'd come into the picture. It was an odd thing to see, in a pulling-on-the-heartstrings sort of way. I saw little bits of a man who influenced the life of someone I love in inalterable ways. Ever since I had heard of 'Grandad' (What the family called him), I really regretted never getting the chance to meet him. He loved to paint, and built the coolest toys out of wood for his grandchildren. There are still quite a few of these planes and boats in Peter's (my boyfriend's) room. Things like these, little bits of someone's life who is now no longer here, make me incredibly sad. As I watched these tiny clips of video (as the early 2000's couldn't do long clips) I was able to see tiny things that Grandad did. I saw him strolling on a dock with the rest of his family, one of his old film cameras hanging from his neck. The clip is only about 7 seconds long, but just seeing how he took things in, walked around, interacted with his family... Its a bittersweet thing to watch. Almost two years ago I started dating Peter, and the first time that he talked about his Grandad I realized how much this man meant to him, and still means to him. Ever since that day I've been taking in little bits of information about this man to try to piecemeal my way to understanding what he was like. Sadly I'll never truly know everything because I will never get to meet him. But seeing the videos of him just doing the simplest of things helped me understand just a little more.  


I wish that my parents had documented my childhood more. There were lots of pictures of me from birth to about three. After that, pictures of me became few and far between. There's no video of me, but there were some tape recordings that my dad and I unearthed years ago- sadly those most likely were thrown out. They were nothing special, I had only gotten ahold of a microphone and I was just babbling away about nonsense and pancakes. But that tape was extremely important to me, because it was from a time where life seemed so easy. It was most likely less than a year before my dad declared bankruptcy, and I would've been no older than four years old. But at that moment, I was so happy and I had no worries. I miss those times. Obviously you can't go back to that once you know the things you do, but there are days where I wish I could look back at my childhood, and everything would be documented. There are so many holes in the time periods between pictures. My mother, when I was born, bought a baby book for me and never wrote in it. I don't blame her, it's hard to raise a child. But now, when I ask her things like what my first word was or when I first learned to walk, she can't answer me. She tells me, "Your first word was something like 'Dada' or 'Mama'. Something really typical like that." That's something that I will never know now for sure. All of my infancy nothing besides pictures were recorded, and now all of that information is lost. Peter is so lucky that his mom thought that that information was important, because now we will always remember things like that Peter went through a phase where he wouldn't believe anything anyone told him. He knows his first words, when he learned to walk, and what he did for the first 12 months of his life. I wish I could've known things like that about myself. When I have kids one day, I'll do that for them. I'll take boxes and boxes of pictures and keep small things and put everything all together so that when they grow up, they'll be able to reconnect with their childhood. 


These tiny little pieces of information are so valuable, and sometimes they are the only things that we have left of the people that are gone. Things like a twenty second video of Grandad basting a turkey or Peter talking about guinea pigs... Those are things that allow people to remember the small things forever. Memories fade so quickly, but these little bits can last a lifetime.