I don’t love New Year’s Eve parties anymore. I never did, honestly. It felt like forced enthusiasm. I never really knew what the excitement was all about. And that moment when everyone kisses their spouse? Mine was almost never there. The champagne hangover? Ugh! All for what? Nowadays, I like using certain holidays for reflection and me-time.
This past New Year’s Eve (2022/23), I treated myself to a bottle of wine and movie time. At the urging of some friends, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time in my life. My favorite part was the opening credits. They were so old school that I laughed out loud. Instead of scrolling text, it was text printed fancy on large paper cards that were transitioned by a human hand. So freaking precious. I loved every bit of the movie. When it was over, I basked in the idea that I had caught up with a lifetime of rejecting that old classic movie. I was ready for another.
Now that Dad can’t reject me anymore, I feel safe connecting with him. In the old-movie spirit, I dug out the VHS he sent me 26 years ago. By dug it out, I mean I dug that external hard drive out of my tech drawer. I had digitized all the media in my possession, including VHS’s. Then I dug through all the folders of media files till I found To Amy From Dad. I uploaded it to YouTube and watched it on my big screen TV. I was looking forward to that moment when time stands still, that photo of little me happy in my dad’s arms. That wondrous moment that I wonder if it really happened. Yep, there is was again. I guess it really happened.
For the last 26 years, I thought that was the most important part of this video. Proof that my dad was a dad for me. But you know how you can watch a movie several times and see something new each time? For the first time in my life, I noticed an even more important part of that old VHS. A ghost passed behind the picture. What? What was that? I rewound ten seconds. Yes! There it went. A ghost.
As I said in my Amy’s Dad post, I was blinded by the rejection I felt from Dad. So very blinded. And now I was seeing ghosts.
A couple more rewinds had my mouth hanging open. The ghost was a person in a white sweatshirt. I couldn’t figure out who. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that there was room for a passerby at the edge of the video. It wasn’t a photomontage compiled by a videography service for the low, low fee of $49. It was a slide screen. It was Dad’s old slide screen. Those were not digitized pictures. Those were slides in Dad’s slide projector. How was this video happening? He must have been filming the projector screen with a camcorder. And someone walked behind the screen.
Even as I write this, I am sinking more and more into an awesome, awful truth. Dad hand-made that video. How blind, how stupid, could I have been? All these years, I imagined Dad pulling a few paper pictures out of a pile and taking them to Walmart or some other video service. Or maybe a mail-order video. When I never responded to the gift at the age of 26, I felt the guilt of not acknowledging a nice gesture. But the truth was much larger. I did not acknowledge an entire home-made movie.
I started the video back at the beginning. There’s that Disney silhouette of Ellan that Dad thought was me. Then a clear slide overlays my name. Then my birth announcement leans in, with the wall in the background. Betty’s handwriting says I was born at 9:40pm and I weighed 7lbs. Dorothy and Walter Pawlok were my godparents. Never heard of ’em.
Then more stunning truth. My whole life, I thought my childhood memories were lost with the farm. My teen memorabilia was reduced to whatever made it into the trash bag on Dad’s driveway. But here in the homemade movie comes an array of pictures and elementary-school awards which I thought had returned to dust. He had kept them. And now, he was propping them one by one against some dimly lit paneling and pointing a video camera at them.
My school awards were followed immediately by a view of the farm driveway, the same view I saw every day I made my way home from the bus stop. You can’t see in the picture, but that view was usually covered in three colors of azaleas.
Then another leaning picture – my school picture wearing my favorite oxford shirt that came in my very first batch of storebought clothes, all the way from the Sears catalogue. You can’t see in the picture, but the new pants are tan corduroys. I felt like a princess in that outfit.
Then there’s teen me and stepmom Suzanne. We liked each other at that point. Then teen me and my bestie Tina. We loved each other. Of all my friends, Tina was the only one who was perfectly welcome and perfectly comfortable in Don’s house.
Memories of that Ocala neighborhood cycled past in pictures propped against some white paneled wall at Tallahassee RV Park. The Ocala pool patio furniture before it got painted black to match the house. Tracy wearing my shirt and leaning into me, as if we loved each other. Did we back then? Maybe at Dad’s house.
Then he moved on to my adult life. There’s my son, Josh, in a pony picture I had sent to Grandpa Don. Then there’s Chelsea’s birth announcement, just like the one that started this video, but now in my own handwriting. Then another baby picture of me.
Then another big moment. A book. The World Book of Schlingers. It wobbled slightly on the screen. A hand. A man’s hand, holding the book. Another hand opened the book. It was like the credits on It’s a Wonderful Life, but with fingers that look like my toes. The fingers turned the pages and found my name’s origin: Amy, French, means Beloved.
By now on New Year’s Eve 2022/23, I was experiencing this video as a personal, guided tour of my documented existence, escorted by none other than my own fath… dad. By now, I was feeling like that little girl in the picture, sitting in her fath… dad’s lap, happy to be there.
Dad’s hands turned the pages some more. He showed me the address pages. Addresses of many, many Schlingers that I never knew existed. He zoomed in… no, he pulled the book closer to the camera, and found my name listed at the apartment in Tampa where I brought home my first child. Then, there I was, in my dad’s arms, smiling up at his whiskers, as if they had never shredded my face yet.
He closed the book and continued with all these cute childhood pictures of me. Will ya look at that? My nose used to be straight! And hey, the picture is zooming out. Wait, this time it really is a zoom function. This is his slide projector. He started the clip zoomed in on me, then zoomed out to show I was actually in a scene with other people. He literally edited this movie to pay the most attention he could to… me.
Excuse me. I have to go cry now.
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