On the persistence of physical media

I beg your indulgence as I work through something here.  It may be triggering for some; read or don't read as you see fit.  I make no apologies.

I'm nearing the end of a significant undertaking.  In short order, I've had to clean out my mom's house, move her to Colorado to be closer to me, and push the house to market.  She's lived in this house for nearly 20 years, and, while not a hoarder, suffers from what I've been calling 'hoarder tendencies.'  So, the process has involved significant cleanout, trash removal, repairs, managing the financials, sourcing providers in an area I'm not overly familiar with, and an overall effort to handle all the... well, junk.  As the only child of a single mother, the burden for all the above has fallen to me.  I've had help, of course -- aunts and uncles who have been extremely helpful; even a few friends who graciously agreed to fly out from CO to assist in loading the moving truck.  However, the major lifting for two months now has been done by me, myself, and I.

Mom is OK, thank God.  A health scare precipitated this all, but she's recovered well enough for her age. I think we both took this as a sign that the moving process, one which we probably should've started years ago, needed to happen, like, yesterday. I say 'we' here, but that is more of a 'me,' with Mom eventually coming around to my thinking after persistent persuasion kind of thing.  Regardless, we're 99% down the road, and there's no turning back.  She's in CO now, anyway, and is finding that she rather likes it... or at least is telling me she is.  Mom has always been good about putting on a brave, stoic face.

This is not the house I grew up in.  That little two-story piece of mid-80s construction majesty was sold more or less when I graduated from college.  So, I don't have the emotional tie to this swath of early-2000s ranch-style that I could.  Still, in going through the, *ahem*, junk, I've been forced to confront some ghosts of my past.  Namely, the person who is conspicuously absent through the first couple of paragraphs here: my father.

I was born in April of '84.  According to the death certificate in the filing cabinet, he died in November of that same year.  A self-inflicted .357 shot, taken in a park nearby to the Meadville, PA home where I spent my first months on this planet.  Thanks for sticking around a few months, I guess.

He left a note, of course. Multiple, as I found out through this process. I had read one of them before, the one he had left for me.  It contains a lot of pain; I burned my copy years ago in a fit of rebellious teenage angst.  I don't mean to diminish his emotional distress, but I've never had a lot of time for his shaky script scrawled across those four pages.  Before this year, he'd more or less been a sperm donor in my mind, essentially a meaningless blank spot in my past.  I haven't really cared for him to mean more than that.  As I recently told my therapist, "I'm not sure I'm happy with the thought of being 'my father's son.'"

Mom, however, apparently had kept a lot of his stuff... er, junk.  The wedding album, of course (their 50th anniversary was two years ago).  A photo album of his life that my paternal grandmother left me. Those I knew about. But there were also about 25 different certificates appointing him (a urologist) as an associate member of various state and regional medical authorities (we found these with the wrapping paper, weirdly). What's more, some fishing stuff, his medical bag, a collection of 70s-era shaving equipment.  Oh, and an entire moving box full of his pipe and cigar paraphernalia.  Each revelation, each 'treasure' trove of paperwork and pieces of his past seemed to be following me around the house.  A haunting specter on my heels as I tried to empty this house.  It was kind of annoying, to be honest.

But something else caught my eye: a vintage VHS cassette tucked in the back corner of a cabinet.  Behind videos of Mom and I moving into my childhood home, my grandparent's 50th anniversary, and a few random snippets of holidays and vacations was one marked with just my parents' names.  There was an added description: "when you think you've come to the end, keep watching, there's more to see."

That one gave me pause.  Could this be a wedding video?  Not likely, given the wedding was in '72, unless transferred from some reel-to-reel thing.  Something from a vacation or later time, perhaps?  With his name on it, I have to assume he's in there somewhere.  I'd seen photos of my father before.  I've even seen photos of him holding me in the few months we shared this earth.  But I'd never seen him move, talk... *exist*. If a photo is worth a thousand words, what's video worth?  Raw curiosity and that damned history major's mentality of primary-source research with an eye towards storytelling pushed me forward to investigate.

So, after navigating moving my mom to CO, then bouncing back and forth from place to place for this and that, I finally found myself at home with the tape and time.  I even had a working VHS player.  Might as well give it a try.

I steeled myself for... disappointment?  No, that's not the word.  Hell, I don't know, 'failure to get the desired result, but in a benign way?'  Something in German, I presume. Regardless, surely, after all this time, nearly 40 years, it wouldn't work.  Some magnet would've wiped it, or the tape would be deteriorated or otherwise unable to wind.  Physical media, man.

Well, first I tried the video of my grandparent's 50th-anniversary dinner.  No issues, and the quality was pretty good.  Got some cool looks at my family from about 32 years ago.  Excellent!  I'll plan to digitize and send it around.

Having achieved proof of concept, I moved onto my main task: *the* tape.  I popped it in and hit the play button.  Immediately, my screen brightened up to show... nothing.  "No Input."  I checked the connection, no issue.  I double-checked that the VCR seemed to be working, and it was.  It seemed as if the tape lacked either video or audio, so my modern flatscreen was filtering out the lack of anything.  I tried re-winding it a bit, as it was a few min into whatever was on the recording, and it seemed to spool OK, but still no video.  I was about to give up, maybe to try a data recovery service when I rewound further and hit play one last time.  Suddenly, there he was.  Holding me, only a few days old. 

"Such big hiccups for a tiny boy," he mused.  "Such big hiccups, little Benjamin."

That was it.  The first time I had ever heard my father speak to me.  At the age of 40 years and one month, to the day.  

Even now, despite years of repressed feelings and disregarded realities, it brings me to tears. I don't even know why there are tears, but there they are.

This is probably 'work' I should've done sooner in life, wrestling with what it means to be to son of a father who was never there, could never be there.  One who had *chosen* to leave my mother and I, chosen the destructive escape rather than dealing with the stresses of his career, his marriage, his newborn.

Intellectually, I know I should be more sympathetic. That social considerations around therapy and mental health in the mid-80s are not even close to what they are today, and that he certainly felt closed off and at the end of his rope.  Him and my mother were in Meadville, a remote PA hamlet north of Pittsburgh some 8 hours from his childhood home of Champaign, IL, mostly because, as I've come to understand, his career wasn't going well.  In IL he had his family, friends, a cabin on a lake, a connection to the University of Illinois and his beloved Illini, and roots. In that gloomy Central PA town, he had... well my mom and I, but also a spiraling career and seemingly limited options.

In a way, I think my lack of sympathy is a defense mechanism. There is probably a latent fear in me that I am my father's son. That whatever mental fragility was in him could be in me. That my inherent rejection of him in total is a rejection of that choice, because I am unable to separate the one from the whole. That may not be fair to him, but it is what it is.

I think that's why the video hit me the way it did. Why the little pieces of his career or his hobbies uncovered in this process unnerved me so.  They were adding flesh to the blank spot in my history.  They were coloring in the gap I had wanted left vacant.  Forcing me to address the uncomfortable thought that my father may have been an actual human being.  One who, at my age, I can actually come to understand as more than just a name and a few photographs; maybe even come to understand a few shared likes and interests.  But one who I will never actually be able to connect with beyond those few, whispered words on a 40-year old VHS.

In that vein, I just wish he'd have left me alone, and allowed me to get down to business clearing out this damn house.  But, I have a feeling that I will treasure that tape all the same.  Those few brief glimpses of the father that could've been.