The Memory Archivist

My son Carson as a toddler meeting his baby brother Ryan in the hospital for the first time.

Over the past few years, and in particular, during the last 17+ months of the COVID pandemic, I have been trying to be better about how I spend my down time. 

It wasn’t very long ago that I would waste away entire week’s worth of evenings tuning into Fox Sports Detroit to watch the Tigers or Red Wings almost nightly telecasts, or I would get sucked into series like “Curse of Oak Island” (and its equally addictive spin-off, “Curse of Civil War Gold”) on the History channel. But then the pandemic happened, and when all sporting events got suspended there for a while, I couldn’t justify spending upwards of $200 a month on our Comcast bill to continue supporting my once-a-week Lagina fix (a reference to Michigan natives Rick and Marty Lagina, the Oak Island treasure hunters who star in the long running reality show) so we did the unfathomable, we cut the cord and got rid of cable.

Now, its not like we went entirely off the grid. We did invest in a small digital antenna that picks up a handful of local channels, so we can still watch the evening news, or catch the occasional college football or NFL game. Our family also has Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions to fill those long, dreary February weekends with the rare marathon binge-watching session, when new seasons of our favorite shows like “Better Call Saul” or the “Mandalorian” are released, but even then, my personal TV consumption over the last year and a half has drastically decreased since making this change, and that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, the television wasn’t the only addictive, habit-forming screen that I had to worry about. I also found that I was spending way too much time watching YouTube videos on my iPhone, or trying to keep up on several weekly podcasts that I had started to work through the back catalogs of, so I knew I needed to try and limit my mobile intake as well. 

One positive habit that I formed after recognizing how much time I was wasting on all these non-productive activities, is that I have started to be more intentional about reading again on a regular basis. Since setting up my monthly Audible subscription earlier this year, I have already read more than eight audio books, including my friend Del Leonard Jones’ historical novel “At the Bat: The Strikeout that Shamed America,” the first two books in the Frank Herbert “Dune” series, the sci-fi classic “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” (on my colleague Chuck Severance’s recommendation, who incidentally, wrote another book, “Sakai: Building an Open Source Community” which I also read) as well as re-reading “Ready Player 1” before taking on its sequel, “Ready Player 2.” 

As much as I hate to admit it, reading, especially reading for pleasure, was just one of those things that I had considered a luxury, something that people with a bunch of idle time on their hands did, the type of leisurely escapism that I never felt there was enough time in my busy schedule to accommodate. Prior to completing the above-mentioned titles, and notwithstanding the voluminous Ron Chernow  “Hamilton” and “Washington” biographies that I studiously worked my way through during the height of our family’s Hamilton mania, I think the last book I had read (listened to) was probably Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” (which my former boss at Capital Area Michigan Works!, Doug Stites, had made required reading for all of his staff) and before that, the last book I would have probably  read for pleasure would have been something like “The Hunt for Red October'' by Tom Clancy. This would have been in the mid 2000’s, back in the days when a majority of RFB&D’s audio book library consisted of books recorded onto sets of cassette tapes, usually a dozen or more for a single title,  that you would play, one-by-one,  on these bulky four-track players that were about the size of an old Yellow Pages phone book. Now, with audio book services like Audible and Learning Ally, accessing digital copies of popular titles is as easy as bringing up an app on your smartphone and using built-in audio players that work seamlessly with your assistive technology, which has transformed reading into an activity that can be done most anywhere, at any time, so there’s really no excuse for someone like me not to read, not anymore.

While I certainly find reading a worthwhile and gratifying endeavor, it's nothing compared to the satisfaction I get from writing. 

Ever since starting “Tales of the Reluctant Blind back in October of 2019, my blog, probably more than anything else, has served as the best outlet for putting my limited time and energy to good use. When you start something like a blog, you create instant accountability, to your readership, to yourself, which is a powerful motivating force. There are a number of reasons why I started my blog. Part of it was to help market my new Accessiversity accessibility/usability testing service, part of it was to serve as this platform for helping advance the important conversation about different accessibility and disability-related topics. But if I’m being honest, mostly it was because I wanted to create this outlet for me to be able to tell stories, my story - yes, as a way to channel my  inner-writer/storyteller self, but also to begin creating this collection of stories and memories that I would be able to leave behind for my kids.

This is a realization that had first hit me in the early fall of 2019, when one morning before school, on a day that I was feeling especially sentimental, I found myself sitting around the kitchen table with the boys telling them stories about when they were younger. A few things struck me that morning. First, there was something different about how they were connecting with these particular stories. There was this natural curiosity, an almost palpable pride in being the subject of these funny tales that I was expertly recreating with the colorful prose and measured embellishment of the most skilled campfire orator. As I spoke, they intently listened, hanging on my every word, waiting for me to deliver the next hilarious detail. And then there was the pure, unmistakable joy of the moment, the spontaneous giggles that erupted from the boys as they snorted and belly laughed, and of course, my elated reaction, to having elicited this sort of reaction from them in the first place. 

But what really got me is that these were stories that hadn’t happened that long ago, events that I thought for sure they would remember, but they didn’t. And if they had no recollection of these things that had only happened a few years ago, what about all of these other memories from when they were little, stories from when their mom and I were first starting out, or things about our two families that I would want them to know about, what about all of those memories?

Even if my boys have not shown any interest in reading my blog (which up to this point, THEY have emphatically told me that they ARE NOT) that’s okay, because I know that one day they will grow up, they will have gained enough life experience and perspective to appreciate all of these special moments, all of these random points in time that I’ve attempted to capture, like individual frames of a motion picture, that when combined together, might provide their future self with some bonus footage, fill in some missing piece of their life highlight real.

So that’s where I come in – dedicated blogger, diligent parent, proud dad – why I choose to record all of these stories, serve as a curator of all of these life moments, to ensure that these memories won’t fade away, become yet another unsuspecting casualty of time.

Play Me A Memory  

“Son can you play me a memory, I’m not really sure how it goes, but its sad and its sweet, and I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man’s clothes” –Billy Joel, lyrics from his signature song Piano Man.

So, last weekend, when I found I had some extra time on my hands, I decided to pick back up on a project that I had actually set in motion way back in November.

It had started innocently enough, with me wanting to use some of the downtime around the holidays to deal with some of the clutter on our desk, specifically to organize the stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs onto which we had been burning all of our home movies and photos.

First, I ordered a 3-terabyte external hard drive from Western Digital, which I knew would provide more than enough storage space for backing up all of our digitized movies/photos, and then some. Next, I needed a peripheral CD/DVD drive since neither of my new lap-tops had come equipped with a disc drive, so on the advice of my nephew Brady, I purchased an inexpensive unit from a company called ASUS.

When the Western Digital and ASUS devices arrived in the mail in early December, I set to work converting some of our old Sony Handycam discs. But when I couldn’t get the CD/DVD drive to work with either of the computers, I got discouraged and eventually gave up, before stashing both of the external drives in the drawer of my desk, and that’s where they sat until this past weekend.

Photo of stacks and stacks of Sony Handycam discs that I have been working on converting/transferring to the computer.

Ironically, it came down to me wanting to find something productive for my son Ryan to do, to get him off his X-box, that would help breathe new life into my ambitious video conversion/transfer project. It was Ryan’s troubleshooting and his internet research that led us to the conclusion that we were still missing a piece of software for converting the video files.

So, after placing a call to my friend Justin, and downloading a free version of the Handbrake software he had suggested, we got one step closer to transferring our old movies over onto the external hard drive.

Photo showing a close-up of my lap-top with the Handbrake program running and the external hard drive and CD/DVD drives attached to the USB ports.

But we still needed to use another one of our lifelines, so we set up a Zoom session with my nephew Brady, who was working remotely in Seattle, WA at the time, and he was able to walk Ryan and I through the last few steps in the process.

And then, after almost ten months of waiting, we were finally in business.

Ryan helped me finish converting the first randomly selected video, and then I copied it from my local drive and over into a folder that I had created on my external hard drive. Ryan had already turned and walked out of the room by the time I clicked on the newly created file to play the video back on the computer.

I was in no way prepared for what I was about to see.

The video, as fate would have it, was of Ryan as a baby, taken in the hospital room, the day after he had been born.

There he was, this same scruffy teenager who had just been helping me figure out the Handbrake software, staring back at me through his infant eyes, his whole life laying out before him.

And then I heard a voice, it was my mom, she was holding Ryan, rocking him as Teresa shot video of her with her new grandson. For a moment I wondered whether this was the first time I had heard my mom’s voice since her passing, but then I remembered how I had listened to the message she had recorded for us on our wedding video, the one that Teresa and I watch each year on our anniversary, and I recalled how I had started balling that time too.

As the video played on you could hear us joking about all of the hair Ryan had on his body when he was born, how we used to joke that he must be part Muppet.

Ryan was born on April 26, 2008, in the midst of what would end up becoming another one of the Detroit Red Wings Stanley Cup championship runs. We still hadn’t decided on a name, right up until the moment that he arrived, other than on the day before, when Teresa started going into labor and I half-heartedly suggested that we could name him after whichever Wings player was named the number one star during the play-off game that day. When Teresa seemed less than enthusiastic about the idea, I just shrugged and said, “Oh, come on, we could have a little baby Johan” (after Detroit Red Wings winger, Johan Franzen.)

Well, right on cue, Johan Franzen scored a hat-trick in the Wings’ game 2 victory over the Colorado Avalanche, which is why we nick-named Ryan “baby Yohan” (opting for a slight variation of how Johan Franzen spells his first name – so that we could incorporate the “y,” “a,” and “n” from Ryan’s own name).

Also on this video are my sister-in-law Tina, my brother-in-law Jason, and their son Carter. At one point, you can faintly hear Tina and Teresa talking in the background. At first I didn’t realize what they were saying, but then I realized that they were talking about  Teresa’s good friend Katie, and it hit me that it’s been almost an entire year since Katie passed away from pancreatic cancer, and I instantly started to tear up again. In a weird case of association, I actually think about Katie every time I go to convert another one of the home videos in the stack, because the oversized yellow Post-it notes that I am using to temporarily label each disc are ones  that Teresa had picked up for me on one of her trips down to Dexter to visit with her friend, when the two of them had stopped into the local Office Depot to pick up a dry erase board and a few other supplies.

And if I wasn’t already an emotional wreck because of everything else I had seen up to that point in the video, my in-laws Dave and Paula show up with my other son Carson, and there, captured on video, is yet another magical scene, the exact moment that Carson sees his baby brother for the very first time.

I spent the rest of the weekend transferring dozens of other videos over onto the computer. It proved to be a huge undertaking. Ryan was a tremendous help, because it turns out that the Handbrake software wasn’t completely accessible, so I would have to have him click on the “Open this DVD or Blu-Ray Drive'' and “Start Encode” options each time I would go to start a new disc.

Then, twenty minutes or so later, the program would finish converting the video and save a copy to the “Videos” folder on my local drive. I would open “File Explorer” and navigate to my “Videos” folder, find the video that I had just created, and then I would copy the new MP4 file over into the folder I created on my external hard drive.

I even made an Excel-based “key” where I listed out all of the default timestamp file names, and created a  description field where I would start to write out short-hand notes about some of the things that happen in each video, so it would be easier for us to locate certain events, or find those videos that include specific people.

The final step in the video conversion/transfer process involved me doing a quick quality control check, which consisted of me clicking on the newly created MP4 file to verify that the video would actually play.

I would only play each video for a few seconds, just long enough to make sure that everything was working properly, but in those momentary glimpses of our not-so-distant past, I discovered a treasure trove of special memories.

There were videos of the kids’ birthdays, of Christmas mornings at our old house on Riley, and of our first Christmas at our new house in Holt. There was a video of my grandma Day, of our old yellow lab Murphy, of  Teresa’s dad Mick. There were videos capturing many of the kids’ first – Ryan sitting in a high chair for the first time, Carson’s first day of first grade, Ryan crawling for the first time. There was video of the kids playing with their cousins back when they were all still so tiny. There was a video of the Dunn’s River Falls excursion that Teresa and I did during our trip to Jamaica back in 2013, and of course, there was the wedding video that Teresa and I watch each year on our anniversary.

I’m not exactly sure what else I might find when digging through the rest of the video archive.

I’m guessing that there will be lots of footage that will bring a smile to my face, and other videos that will probably make me cry. But I’m excited to see what is there, priceless images hidden away all these years on these small compact discs, long-forgotten chapters of our life, like some family heirloom, that had been placed on a shelf for safe keeping, only to be rediscovered, and enjoyed again, and eventually passed onto the next generation.

And ultimately that’s my wish for Carson and Ryan – some stories on a blog, some grainy video footage – my only hope is that one day, this will all become part of their narrative, the story about their life that they will choose to tell.

As for me, I’m going to just keep on doing what I do best.

Dedicated blogger, diligent parent, proud dad.