The Camera Caught My Own Family

The birthday

The timing did the work for me. My mother’s sixty-fifth birthday was that Saturday, and she had been planning the party for two months.

It was at the VFW hall out on the county road, the big one with the flag poles and the gravel lot, the one where our family had marked every graduation and every anniversary and every funeral lunch for as long as I could remember. My mother loved that hall the way some people love a cathedral. Long tables with white paper cloths. The coffee urn the size of a water heater. A sheet cake from the grocery bakery with her name in blue gel. And, most of all, people. Eighty of them, maybe ninety. Church friends, the ladies from her canasta group, the neighbors, my father’s old buddies from the plant, Cody and Kayla, the whole slow warm net of a small town that my mother had spent decades tending so it would clap for her at the right moments.

There is a projector at the VFW hall. There has been for years. My cousin Dana always runs a slideshow of old photos at these things, sets her laptop on the folding table by the wall and lets baby pictures and wedding pictures fade into each other on the pull-down screen behind the head table while everybody eats.

I knew all of that. I have been to forty parties in that hall.

So when I finally drove back into town Thursday night, I did not go home. My brother’s truck was in my driveway and there was a light on in my bedroom window, and I looked at that light for about four seconds and then I kept driving. I got a room at the little motel by the highway, the one with the fish restaurant attached, and I texted my mother something calm.

“Made it back safe. Staying near work a couple nights to wrap up the project before the weekend. Wouldn’t miss your party. See you Saturday.”

She wrote back inside of a minute.

“Wonderful!!! Can’t wait, we have such a happy surprise to share. Love you sweetheart.”

Three exclamation points. I looked at them for a long while.

On Friday I called my cousin Dana, who has never in her life been able to keep a secret and who I love anyway. I told her I had put together a little video tribute for Mom’s birthday, some clips, something special, and asked if I could be the one to plug my drive into her laptop and cue it up when the moment came, right after the toast. Dana about cried. She said of course, she said Aunt Sharon would just love that, she said she would set it up so all I had to do was hit the space bar.

I thanked her. I meant it. Dana had no idea what was on the drive, and I made very sure of that, because Dana did not do anything wrong and I was not going to make her part of it beyond the space bar.

Then I went back to the motel, and I sat with the footage one more time, and I did something I had not let myself do all week. I cried. Not the loud kind. The slow, tired kind, the kind that comes out when you finally admit that the thing you suspected your whole life is not a suspicion anymore, it is a recording, and you can play it back.