As Easter approached during the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, and with a boatload of time on my hands, I found myself rifling through an archive of 25 MiniDV video cassettes that have been sitting on my desk for quite some time. I had immersed myself in a quasi-compulsive search for the 2007 tape of a family trip to Spain. Specifically, I was hunting for the tape of Easter morning in Espinoso Del Rey, the town where my mother-in-law Herminia had grown up. I found a few Spain tapes but was then left to figure out how to view and acquire the footage.
That meant dusting off our Sony Handycam, a DRV-TRV70, that had been sitting idle on a basement shelf for at least 10 years. Then I had to find the camera’s charger and its FireWire 400 DV cable that would enable viewing and importing footage to my computer. A bit more trickier was configuring a FireWire-400 to FireWire-800 to ThunderBolt-2 daisy chain to connect the camera to the iMac. Finally, I had to cross my fingers that not only would I remember how to operate a 16-year-old video camera but that the software I use to edit video, Final Cut Pro, would allow me to import clips from from it. The question of whether or not the cassettes themselves would work, which were recorded during the George W. Bush administration, never entered my mind.
Surprisingly, everything—the camera, the tapes, the daisy chain, and the software—worked. Thanks to my archival best practices, no doubt.
Having found the Espinoso tape, I did a quick edit of the priest blessing the crowd then leading a small procession to the church in a light rain. In the clip, there are various Sanchez-Ampuero family members in la procesión: Monica and her cousin Mari Carmen, Monica’s sister Laura and her husband Jon, Monica’s other sister Christina with her daughter Julia, and finally Christina’s husband Kirk along with their daughter Anna with Herminia,and Herminia’s sister Maria. I shared the video with family via text message Easter morning.
Of course, with the success of the Espinoso clip, others soon followed. I ran across a tapes of Jon and Laura’s wedding, Enedina graduating from Middle School and a few other gems. One my favorites documented the remodeling at our newly purchased home on Van Buren during the summer of 2004. It features three generations of Sanchez women: Herminia, Monica, and Enedina.
Among the stacks of tapes was a 2005 trip to Santa Rosa. There’s one nugget that stands out among the rest, a clip of my then three-year-old nephew Marcus Paulson delivering a classic one-liner (with a bit help from his mom, my sister Anne Marie) that stilll makes me laugh fifteen years later.
Marcus just seems so pleased with himself, having brought the house down with Dixie Riddle Cup humor. And I love that.
The Handycam has once again found its way back into storage. But this time all its accoutrements–cables, batteries, adapters, and charger–are now packed away with it. So the next time a pandemic strikes, and I’m looking for something to fill the hours, I can fire up the camcorder and take a trip down memory lane without having to turn the house upside down.
Treasures!