Memory

If you were a graduating high school senior, would you rather have a video yearbook, or a traditional printed one?

The question assumes, of course, that you would want any kind of yearbook at all, which may be a stretch for you to imagine at this point in your life.  I got one, to be sure:  a traditional printed one, as that was the only option available back then.  I can’t for the life of me now remember why.  I suspect it was at least in part to avoid the ire of my parents, who would have given me a mighty tongue-lashing for being diffident about yet another social norm if I hadn’t, abuse I didn’t need.  But in any event, my opinion of it was not terribly high when I received it.  My official Senior Picture was taken on a day when I hadn’t had a haircut for almost two months, and was attempting to compensate with extensive blow-drying and application of hair spray;  it made me look as if I had a cat on my head, and caused me to cringe when I saw it, even back then.  I was also pictured in the book about 16 other times, to only slightly better effect, a bizarre feat that became all the more remarkable when one considered that those instances did not include any photographs of me on-stage in the school play (of which I was the lead), or for having tied as the co-winner for Most Intellectual (a distinction I shared with the Noble twins.  They were photographed the morning of the Senior Breakfast;  I was not in attendance, as I couldn’t see the point of dressing up in a suit and tie to go eat powdered eggs and drink concentrate orange juice in the same room I ate lunch in every day.)  The logical thing to do would have been to light the thing on fire, or throw it away, but having failed at that, I keep it on the highest shelf of a tall bookcase, one which stands in turn on a nine-inch parapet over a six-foot drop.  The arrangement necessitates both a tricky balancing act and very long limbs to reach it–  an artifice which effectively prevents anyone from retrieving it or looking at it except me. 

The whole idea of a “video yearbook”, by contrast, was introduced to me only a few nights ago, when I found myself at a Recognition of Excellence dinner being given by the regional district of a major yearbook publishing company.  I was acting as escort for my older sister, the Empress, who is Yearbook Advisor at the high school where she teaches, and oversees the production of one such tome each year.  She’s won national awards for her designs;  she also consistently generates very high sales totals, both of which are factors that keep her in the publishing company’s eye, and thus, get her invited to said dinner pretty much every year.  She had invited me along because her husband Longstreet could not attend, and because I’m the only person in the family other than her who has any idea what putting together something like that entails.  It was a nice gesture on her part.  I don’t get many chances to support her rather than vice versa, so I readily accepted.

Standing in the basement of an Italian restaurant in the Garment District of the City of Mists, sipping run-of-the-mill Chardonnay and surrounded by a mixture of corporate management and high-school teachers, I might’ve been tempted to rethink my acquiescence.  But I needn’t have worried.  The people were friendly and talkative, managers and educators alike, and there were many attendees whom the Empress knew personally.  They were all equally delighted to meet me, whether I chose to talk or to listen.  (I, for my part, tried to do more of the latter than the former.)  Much of the conversation centered around (what else?) the current climate of economic woe, and the effect it was having on their publishing efforts:

“I lost twenty-four pages of advertisements,” said the Empress to her contemporaries, “as the companies that would normally take them ceased to exist.  And as the students and families that would normally take out a full page are now taking out a half page, or a quarter page.”  She tucked into a smoked salmon canapé.  “And we are getting the snot kicked out of us by Video Yearbook.”

I raised one eyebrow.  That’s new.  “Video Yearbook…” said the woman across the circle from her, in a slow, measured tone that failed to clarify whether she had heard of it before or not.

“Yes,” said the Empress.  “It is produced in the school, by the students of the Video Production class.  It is distributed for free, to anyone who wants it.  It is therefore an attractive alternative for those students wondering why they should bother to shell out for a traditional printed yearbook.”

Mmmmm, I thought, sipping my wine.  Now there’s an economics lesson.  “How do you counter that?” asked the other woman.

“Weeeeeeeellllll…” replied the Empress, “For one thing, you point out that it’s kind of difficult to sign a video.”  (Smiles and nods all round.)  “And for another,” she adds, “when the technology changes in a year, or two years, or five years, what do you do then?”

“That’s not an issue,” I said, shrugging.

All eyes turned to me.  Whoops.  “Why not?” said the Empress.

“Ummm…  because it’s not gonna be in whatever format it’s in for more than 10 minutes anyway.”  It has to be on CD or DVD, right?  “The first thing they’re gonna do when they get it is take it home, throw the disc in their desktop or their laptop and strip it to the hard drive.  Bang.  Pure data.  Then they can do whatever they want with it.  They’ll be watching it on their IPods that afternoon.  It’ll be on YouTube that night.”

Silence and glances among the couples.  “And what happens if your computer breaks?” said the Empress.  (Having known me too long to be fazed when I do this.)

“That’s-” I stammered.  “That’s…” I said again, and dwindled off, my mouth still open.  Like asking what happens to the printed yearbook if your house burns down, I would think much later.  Neither one is under your control.  And it’s a lot easier to retrieve backed up data than it is to find another copy of a limited print run!  But in that moment, all I could think was, They’re educators.  They must know this.  How can they not know this?

“It’s not an issue,” I repeated, shaking my head and starting to laugh.

“OK, do not go there with me tonight,” replied the Empress, starting to laugh herself, but also holding up a finger that was impossible to interpret as anything but cautionary.

Bite not the hand that feeds thee, I thought, and I drained my wine and we left it there.  But it continued to fascinate me for the rest of that night, and has occupied my thought for a great deal of time hence.  For one thing, it touches squarely on an ongoing saga that is dear to my heart and never far from my mind:  the story of how we as humans adapt or fail to adapt to new technologies, and of how the choices we make when doing so shape our world.  I am intelligent (or consider myself to be) and have a nominal amount of technological savvy;  I probably have as good a working knowledge about this stuff as any of the teenagers in the Empress’ classes.  The same is true of the Empress herself, and her contemporaries (there’s no publishing left outside of museums and RenFaires that isn’t in some wise digital).  But for us these lessons are adaptations, layerings over a core that preceded them.  For the teenagers weighing the choice between a video yearbook and a printed one, those lessons are their core;  they come to such a choice with a fundamentally different mindset, unburdened by our preconceptions about knowledge and the role of media, simply because they’ve never lived in any world where the possibilities have been otherwise.  The same is true of my son.  I love books.  I want to share that love of books with him.  But no matter how much I read to him, or with him, or encourage him to read himself, he will probably never have the same relationship with books that I had at his age, simply because he doesn’t have to:  he can watch almost any book that might catch his attention in movie form, sometimes before the ink has even dried, or turn on his Nintendo DS and play through a story, with less effort on his part and more excitement. The paradigms keep shifting.  The clock is ticking on us and our way of seeing, like it did on our parents, and their parents before them.  And as it someday will on them.

And then, perhaps contrarily, I wonder if it isn’t more about personal choice, about personalities.  In college I worked for the better part of a year as an assistant to a videographer, taping people’s weddings.  I attended Jamaican weddings and VFW weddings and Filipino weddings and Mafia weddings, and accumulated a great store of knowledge about how such ceremonies were conducted and the craft of recording them, so much so, that when the time came many years later for me to get married, the one thing that I was certain about (other than the inclusion of nachos at the appetizer bar) was that I didn’t want a videographer there, under any circumstances.  I knew enough about myself by then to know that I didn’t want to remember it how it had really been.  I wanted to remember it the way I had perceived it, and through the prism of photography, via small pieces of art forged not only to record the event, but to honor it.  That choice might be indicative of a generational outlook.  It’s more likely that it’s just me.  I received enough paychecks based upon other people’s willingness to go there to believe so.

And then, too, if I let myself, I go to an even darker place where I wonder what the point of memory is at all.  It seems when I reflect upon it that I have very few good memories, if by “good” one means, “purely happy, unmitigated by regret or stained by context”.  Every moment I can recall cherishing with a loved one is mirrored by a different moment I recall just as clearly, when that same person tore into me with anger or hatred or derision.  Every time that I have thought of as blesséd, I have found out later was thought of as curséd by someone who shared it, and vice versa.  Every place that I have stayed to see flourish, I have in turn watched fall into ruin;  all my joys are mixed with sorrows, and my successes, with failures.  I try to take the long view of that:  to say, “This is Life.  This is the Story,” and to perceive it as divine, the pattern of the Everlasting Yea.  The only alternative to such acceptance, after all, is not to be:  not to do or act or have experiences, not to exist at all.  But I get weary, and I feel the weight of age upon me, too soon.  I wonder how people who are older than I am deal with it, that terrible spectral web of ever-deepening context.  I wonder how my father dealt with it.  It’s too late to ask him now.

In the end, I balanced on the 9-inch parapet above the six-foot drop, and with my very long limbs, I took my high school yearbook down and opened it again, flipped briefly through its pages.  I looked at the photo of one of my best friends from back then, a girl I slowly fell in love with and never told, the one who for four years I had wanted to ask to the prom and then didn’t, because I was dating someone else at the time, and I didn’t have the guts to send that person packing to make my dreams about her come true.  I remembered how she told me that her kids were going to play with my kids, and how I laughed when she said it, because I knew that even then that it wasn’t going to be true.  And how her mother died untimely, and how her father became sad and sullen, and how I wasn’t there for her then because I was mad at everyone, mad at the world, and I couldn’t be bothered.  And how she met someone else during that time, and he was there for her, and he helped her get through it, and how in the end she wound up marrying him.  And I smiled.  In spite of it all, I smiled.  I suppose, at that moment, the book fulfilled its purpose.

I imagine, for them, the video will do the same.