Matt Weston spent his childhood on video, and then his dad made a decision that would forever change what was recorded.
There’s little wonder my dad committed so much of my early childhood to videotape. The first generation of camcorders—bulky devices that sat atop fathers’ shoulders like bazookas all over suburban America in the 1980s—dovetailed perfectly with my formative years. If you scanned the crowd at any t-ball game or school play in my Detroit suburbs during this period, chances are you would have seen my dad cradling one.
Long fascinated by gadgets, my dad kept the camcorder right in his wheelhouse. As a bachelor, he had outfitted his apartments with hi-fi’s that took up more space than a table and chairs. He brought home his first camcorder from Radio Shack, loaded the batteries, slipped in a fresh tape, and hit Play. The camcorder soon seemed welded to his body, a black growth with circuitry. He shared Doc Brown’s awe in Back to the Future as Doc watched Marty McFly program his huge JVC-GR camcorder before the DeLorean’s first run at time travel: “A portable TV studio. Remarkable!”
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Making a time capsule requires a certain brew of arrogance and foresight, particularly if it is filled with footage of your family’s minutiae. My dad was no visionary, but he had a plan: give the boy a role to play. This was clever. He cut out the serious stuff of posterity and handed me the stage.
One video, titled “Matthew and Jaime” (my sister), opened with our family lounging in the living room late in the morning. Heavy shades were drawn, yet bars of light fought through them, flooding the lens of that primitive machine. The squeaks heard out of frame were my new Buster Brown’s patting the kitchen floor, and the taps were my 3-year-old tongue clicking in my mouth.
“Now,” my dad said, stopping me. “How do the wheels on the bus go?”
He put me in the viewfinder. My arms wound big circles in the air.
“That’s right, Matthew. Round and round.”
Repeated viewings of that scene and many others like it papered over my hope, however remote, of remembering how it felt to live it. I started to wonder at my dad’s intentions for filming us, whether he did it out of mere obligation, a check in the fit parent column. Sure, the videos provided the thrill of seeing myself as others saw me. But the more I watched, the memory of watching the video trumped all. My displacement from the experience grew. The kid in the video could have been anyone.
An exception: my first memory. My dad sat next to me on the floor in front of our fireplace. He let me stay up late to watch King Kong. We balled up sheets of newspaper as kindling and tossed ball after ball into the flames as Fay Wray screamed from inside Kong’s fist. Cross-legged in front of the TV, mesmerized, I held a gym bag in my lap and ran the strap between my front teeth. That bag reappeared early in the “M and J” tape, and whenever I watched the video and saw it, in a heap on the couch, my mouth sang like it had that earlier night, the same crosscut saw to the enamel. Here video awakened a memory for me, kept it in play, gave it depth, form, and texture, forever accessible at the click of a button.
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Time passed. When I turned 16, my parents divorced, and my dad moved into an apartment in the next town. Although he took many of his possessions—an antique snowshoe, a little league baseball trophy cast in bronze—he left all of the videocassettes. For months, I cued up the “M and J” tape and searched for clues, evidence of rifts in the marriage, an uptick of tension in the air. Nothing. Instead, as the tape rolled, Jaime and I, moment to moment, showed glimpses of our future selves. From the backseat, my dad filmed my first shaky turn behind the wheel—timid braking followed by a thrust as the car righted itself. We both cheered. And from the stands at an arena, my dad filmed extended shots of Jaime’s horseback riding lessons and shows, the bar literally being raised for her and her guided horse to overcome.
My dad could not have known it at the time, but by watching us, through the small virtues of being there and keeping track, he recorded on the tapes proof of our potential, a testament to our strength in carrying on without him. If only we knew where to find them.
—Photos, top to bottom: philcampbell (Main), Elsie Esq., yogma,
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