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The Light On The Roof
Dec. 6th, 2012 08:54 pmCiro has very few family mementos - photos, home videos. Divorced parents, divorced grandparents, poverty, lots of early childhood moves between tiny apartments, floods, difficult breakups, etc. The things he has held onto, he has held onto because they are the things he holds, rather than because they were the most special things.
Tonight he was watching back a home video from 1992, which he hasn't seen since then, and which is maybe the only home video he owns. (There may be a second one.) Crushingly, it suffers from the usual home video problem - instead of filming the people, the adults with the cameras film the pretty scenery. You hear little Ciro and Antonio voices in the background, but all you see are Christmas lights out the window at night on VHS. It's not even Ciro's neighborhood. It's the neighborhood with the good Christmas lights.
Here's the weird part.
It's my neighborhood.
I can point to the individual houses and say "that's where my band director lives." "Those people always dithered about buying Girl Scout cookies from me." "You can cut through there to get to the park."
While they're driving around, 12-year-old me is right around the corner, probably reading a book. If they'd shouted out the window of the car, I would have heard them.
For all these years, Ciro has hung on to a home video that is essentially meaningless to him but provides a tour of my life.
Tonight he was watching back a home video from 1992, which he hasn't seen since then, and which is maybe the only home video he owns. (There may be a second one.) Crushingly, it suffers from the usual home video problem - instead of filming the people, the adults with the cameras film the pretty scenery. You hear little Ciro and Antonio voices in the background, but all you see are Christmas lights out the window at night on VHS. It's not even Ciro's neighborhood. It's the neighborhood with the good Christmas lights.
Here's the weird part.
It's my neighborhood.
I can point to the individual houses and say "that's where my band director lives." "Those people always dithered about buying Girl Scout cookies from me." "You can cut through there to get to the park."
While they're driving around, 12-year-old me is right around the corner, probably reading a book. If they'd shouted out the window of the car, I would have heard them.
For all these years, Ciro has hung on to a home video that is essentially meaningless to him but provides a tour of my life.
