interview your oldest family member, ask them the names of the oldest
people they knew, it's surprisingly informative!, anyway, dayjob camera
store
via https://ift.tt/36jEPBm
So at the camera store one of the things I’ve been doing a lot of is the
8mm film transfers. And the thing about 8mm film is that it was popular
from about 1950-1975, and I’ve seen reels as old as 1942 and as new as the
late 80s. (Oh, this one’s dated 1939! That can’t be right though, the reel
inside has clearly got 50s fashions and it’s in color. Someone switched
containers, sometime.) The girl who was doing them while I wasn’t here is
not nearly as interested in history as I am, but I’m a little prejudiced I
think because my own mother sent me her 8mm reels and we did them, and so
the fact that basically every reel looks the same means that I’m seeing my
mother’s childhood.
(They do all look the same, for the most part– it’s 1963, here comes
Grandma with the turkey, a jovial balding man in a white dress shirt is
going to carve it while a bunch of generic-looking white kids sit around
the table, the house has wood-paneled walls, there’s an old car, probably
an old man has a pipe. There are exceptions– sometimes the ladies have
beehive hairstyles, sometimes there are plaid bellbottoms– but only very,
very rarely are there any people of color. I love those orders.)
And the thing that’s really getting me at the moment– I’m doing an undated
reel at the moment, it was Thanksgiving and then it was Christmas, a lot of
people in bathrobes were delightedly watching children tear paper, and then
it was evening and they were in party dresses on the couch with cordial
glasses– is the old ladies. Specifically the old ladies, and I’m not sure
why.
The old woman there patiently holding the turkey while the slightly younger
woman dumps stuffing into it– she’s in a calico apron with frills on the
shoulders that covers her whole dress except the sleeves, her hair is
carefully styled, she is smiling indulgently– it’s sometime in the early
50s, from the look of the party dresses. She’s in her 60s. She was born in
the 1890s. She’s surely dead now, but what things her life included! I
think of my own grandmother matter-of-factly describing her chores as a
child, how things worked without electricity, the way she could type 110
wpm but never was great at double-clicking a mouse without dragging it.
I don’t know why it’s the women so specifically, maybe because women’s
fashions change so much more obviously than men’s in this time period, and
in the later reels I can see my own childhood, I can see things that now
are hilariously dated but that were perfectly normal when I was a child.
The brown checkered linoleum floor of my kitchen, where I learned to crawl,
that my parents installed new in 1978, that we ripped out in 1991 because
it was so old and grungy.
So I just think about that, and think about how funny we’ll all look in 20
years, and I don’t have a punctuation for this, I’m just on my third reel
of this order and I want one of those calico aprons that go all the way
around.
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