What Time Does
Twenty-Five Years in an Afternoon
I’ve been around long enough at this point to have outlived quite a few technologies. I’m pretty sure I still have some 8-track tapes, I definitely have some cassettes, and I walk by my CD collection every time I go down to the basement. Most of them are mere curiosities in this age of streaming.
There’s another medium that looms large if you’re a parent - the camcorder tapes, or perhaps VHS. You youngsters out there probably don’t remember, but your childhoods were captured on obsolete magnetic tapes.
My wife recently started to have those old tapes converted to digital formats so we don’t lose them. Over the past few weeks they’ve started to come in, and oh what a treasure:
There are birthdays.
Random silliness of two year olds.
Christmas mornings.
Holiday concerts at preschool.
Tiny people who are now adults.
I spent hours watching them. Smiling almost the entire time.
And feeling a deep ache that’s difficult to describe.
It’s not quite sadness.
Not quite happiness.
Not nostalgia, exactly.
It’s something more complicated.
I was seeing children who no longer exist.
Except they do.
And they don’t.
The baby is gone.
The adult remains.
And somehow both are present at the same time.
As strange as it sounds, I wasn’t only watching my children. I was watching a younger version of myself.
Just who was that person behind the camera? 25 years younger, I was worried about different things: having enough money, getting promoted at work, not repeating problems from my own childhood, figuring out how to be a good father.
I know things now that he couldn’t possibly know.
Most notably, that almost everything he was looking at would change.
The children.
The marriage.
The house.
His career.
His parents.
Even him. A lot.
At the time, it all felt remarkably permanent. Not consciously, perhaps. Intellectually, I knew children grow up. Of course they do.
But knowing something and experiencing it are different things.
Those tapes compress twenty-five years into an afternoon.
One minute I’m watching a toddler wobble across a living room. The next I’m looking at an adult with a career, an apartment, and opinions about retirement accounts.
The distance between those two people feels both impossibly large and strangely small.
It’s a reminder: nothing stays.
Memory is a funny thing. What you remember probably isn’t what really happened. The younger version of me staring out from the video wasn’t thinking “one day I’ll watch this in a daze of warm remembrance.”
It was probably “I need to get this kid to bed.” Or “why won’t the damn camcorder focus?” Or “I need to get up for work tomorrow.”
The treasure unfolding in front of me was just an ordinary day.
The younger version of me couldn’t see it because he was inside of it.
You don’t need to read science fiction to learn about time travel. This is the real thing. The person watching now and the person in the video are both me. Separated by decades.
And that ache I’m feeling?
It isn’t really sadness.
If it were sadness, I would have turned the videos off.
Instead, I kept watching.
Hour after hour.
Smiling until my face hurt.
Whatever this feeling was, I wanted more of it.
The strange thing is that none of this was hidden.
Those moments were always there.
The birthday parties.
The Christmas mornings.
The silly dances.
What changed was the person looking at them.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why these videos affect me so much.
Part of it is memory.
Part of it is change.
Part of it is seeing people I love at different stages of life.
Part of it is seeing a younger version of myself.
But honestly, I don’t think any of those explanations fully capture it.
There is something about watching twenty-five years collapse into an afternoon that resists easy description.
Maybe that’s why the feeling is so hard to name.
It contains gratitude and loss.
Joy and longing.
Presence and absence.
The knowledge that something is gone, and the joy that it was here at all.
Whatever it is, I’ve stopped trying to explain it.
I just keep watching the tapes.
Smiling.
And feeling grateful that there was something worth aching for.
-Scott
Read this as if you were sharing my story. Remembering the obsolete. Cherishing the present and past. Wondering about the future. You capture the moments so we'll with your writing. Thanks for sharing your gift and your journey.
Well said Scott!