I decided last week to finally enter the 21st century.  I know, I know.  I tend to procrastinate.  But I'm here now, and it's all due to my VCR.

Not that I own a VCR, or, more specifically, one that works.  I think maybe there's one in the basement that gave up the ghost a few years ago; there's a lot of stuff down there, including old furniture, stacks of clothing that needs to be given away, and a treadmill.  I should probably find out if that works, too.

What I do have, though, are videotapes.  Many, many videotapes, including every title Disney released on VHS through the mid-1990s and a few sacred ones from the 1995 Mariners season.

And, of course, home movies.  I bought my first video camera 22 years ago, when my daughter was three months away from making her mighty presence known in this world.  This was a bulky unit, archaic and laughable when compared to today's tiny models, but it preserved moments (and occasionally waistlines) that will not come again.

We were told, back in the 1980s when the video revolution started, that we were dealing with ephemeral things, that the combination of moving parts and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, not to mention accidents, would degrade our precious videos over time.  About eight years, as I recall, was the projected lifespan for our tapes.  Hopefully technology would come up with a solution.

Technology did, although it took longer than eight years, and somehow videotape proved to be a little more resilient than expected.  The time has come, though, for some archiving.  The future mustn't miss out on those multiple hours of video I have of my baby daughter sleeping.

So I bought a DVD burner, a stand-alone, bare-bones, discontinued and inexpensive model that soothed a little of my guilt over spending money on a piece of equipment that only serves one purpose, a job that will (one hopes) eventually be done, leaving me with something else to haul downstairs for dust-gathering fun.

Uniting technology separated by 20 years was a simple procedure: stick a blank disk in one side, a tape in the other, press the dubbing button, do something else for a couple of hours, and try not to watch as memories flicker back into life.

You can try, anyway.

Because there are things waiting for you there, in the world of magnetic tape and meshing gears.  Things you've forgotten, things that have disappeared into the years, things you liked, things you miss.  Former cars and furniture.  Former hair, in some cases.  Fun times.  Friends.  Fathers.

I'm a disembodied voice on most of these, an obnoxious cameraman, asking dumb questions and poking my lens into faces that obviously wished I go poke somebody else.  So I was seeing double, in a sense, re-viewing.

There were my friends, a group who went to college together in Arizona and somehow all wound up in the Pacific Northwest in those first few years of real life.  Our "Big Chill" days, sort of, and we stuck together back then, gathering on holidays and weekends, them and me and my camera.

Everybody seemed to be smoking.  And eating.  And drinking beer.  And tossing Frisbees.  And laughing.  And young.  Oh, so young, and beautiful and full of hope and life, it would break your heart.  It broke mine, for an afternoon, just watching.

There were nine of us – Julie and me, Paul and Becky, David, Dana, Janice, Kenny, and Amy, and we braved the Seattle dark winter together that first year in small apartments, encouraging each other and hanging on for dear life, and then they went away.

We reunited in 1992, back in Arizona at the retirement party of a mutual professor.  I had a new camera by then, smaller and more efficient but no less intrusive, and so I have a coda of sorts, but that was it.

David now lives in Tucson, and Janice in New York.  Paul and Becky moved to LA for a few years, then back up here, to Arlington.  I get Christmas cards.

I have no idea what happened to Kenny and Amy.

Dana has lived in Albuquerque for 18 years, and over Christmas, when my daughter was trying to reach Santa Fe by way of Denver and was stranded for a night in New Mexico, we had a nice phone conversation.  Beth had managed to find a hotel and so didn't need Dana's couch after all, but we laughed and reminisced, and marveled at the years gone by and our college kids, and then we said goodbye and promised not to be strangers, when of course we are, now.

I should have mentioned that I have something of hers, I guess, a shadow, preserved now in digital form.  I can't imagine that she'd want it back, but I suspect that she might appreciate, after all these years, that somebody is keeping it for her, just in case.

Dana