Somewhere in our family archives there’s a scrap of videotape that my Uncle Bob shot in the Seventies.
It captures a few minutes of a Christmas scene in a dark living room.
The camera jogs around a bit, but there’s a flash of golden hair (me, at 7), and several times we see a pair of hands entering the frame to proffer wrapped parcels. Mainly, though, the lens is focused on two inky-haired toddlers, my cousins, who, as the youngest in the extended family, were the center of adoring attention.
That’s the effect young children have on family gatherings: They’re so pleasant to exclaim over, with their freshness and innocence and the endearing way they mangle the English language! Their fleeting youth is what we most want to capture with cameras. So in concentrating on his boys, my uncle was only acting as any tenderhearted father would.
Yet when I think of that fragmentary videotape, it gives me an almost physical pain. Sweet as the boys were, I wish I could turn the camera away from them. I wish I could make it show me the people who, at the time, seemed the least important. I wish the videotape showed the faces of my grandparents.
It is their lightly wrinkled hands that we see reaching toward the toddlers, bearing gifts. They seemed impossibly ancient to us children at the time, but I now realize that they were hale, full of life, only in their late 60s.
If young children tend to attract the cameras, old folks practically repel them — not that anyone means unkindness by it, of course not! — but, well, they’re not new. We know what they look like. If we stopped to ponder it, which we mostly don’t, we’d recognize that time changes the faces of the elderly just as inexorably as it does the young. Unfortunately, these alterations are not necessarily as attractive, and so, without really thinking about it, we turn away.
At Thanksgiving, everyone squeezes into the group photo. Maybe someone will snap a spring-winter shot of a grandmother reading to a small girl, or a grandfather challenging a teenager on the chessboard. But in the main, family photographers direct their lenses toward the young and pretty children and take the old faces for granted. And that’s too bad.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. This is going — well, I am going, and I hope you’ll come with me — toward resolving this oversight well before the New Year.
The Christmas tree and menorah that just sprouted in downtown Bethesda (ugh, I know: already!) mark our closeness to traditional family-oriented holidays. This year, let’s take as many photos and videos of the old as we do of the young. When the children are squealing over gifts, let’s make sure we capture the reactions of their elders. Someday, when the children are showing their first wrinkles, they may want to take a closer look at faces that once seemed too old to be interesting.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
