When life gives you irony, make steel.
Nov. 25th, 2007 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seiberwingSince I decided to stay another night at home before driving back tomorrow morning, my parents and I spent a while watching some of the family tapes that Dad's been transferring to DVDs for posterity before the tapes disintegrate into melted plastic rubbish.
Around late August/early September of 1991, there's a scene of me and my little brother playing around with my old plastic dollhouse and riding about on a fire truck. My younger short-haired self rushes to the scene of the blaze and quickly evacuates the people and the "giant baby" doll while my brother gnaws on assorted bits of furniture. After the 'fire' is put out, I return the people to the house. This would be nothing special if it wasn't for the fact that we only have that tape because it was the one in the video camera when we went up to New York a month later for our annual Christmas trip to Granma's place--during which our house caught fire and burned down in our absence. It was a touch spooky to watch, and in a way morbidly amusing.
Of course, that bit of unintended foreshadowing's nothing compared to watching my little brother back before he was about a year and a half old. My mother kept sighing a bit every time my brother came crawling up to the camera, smiling and babbling incessantly in what my parents thought was crude speech and sounded to me like complete dribble (the quality of the tapes wasn't that great). Thing is, David's crawling and reacting to the world like a completely normal child and the rest of us, like your average group of college students in a slasher flick, had absolutely no idea what was going to happen.
Towards the end Dad kept fast-forward towards the interesting parts and the images were pausing and jerking the way they do when they go too fast to simply be moving very quickly. There was a half-second still as we went through a sequence of him in the bathtub of my brother's face, gap-toothed and staring out almost aimlessly into space. It chilled me down to the core because this was the point in the record where we could see the autism starting to creep in, the point where the actions of the world stopped affecting him and he abruptly stopped talking altogether. It felt as if we were watching a depressing movie for the second or third time since we all knew what was going to happen eventually--but instead of being it a movie, it was our life.
I turned around a few minutes later and saw Mom dabbing at her eyes. We decided right around then that we'd watched enough cutesy family videos for the day and went to have dinner before Hogfather started.
Around late August/early September of 1991, there's a scene of me and my little brother playing around with my old plastic dollhouse and riding about on a fire truck. My younger short-haired self rushes to the scene of the blaze and quickly evacuates the people and the "giant baby" doll while my brother gnaws on assorted bits of furniture. After the 'fire' is put out, I return the people to the house. This would be nothing special if it wasn't for the fact that we only have that tape because it was the one in the video camera when we went up to New York a month later for our annual Christmas trip to Granma's place--during which our house caught fire and burned down in our absence. It was a touch spooky to watch, and in a way morbidly amusing.
Of course, that bit of unintended foreshadowing's nothing compared to watching my little brother back before he was about a year and a half old. My mother kept sighing a bit every time my brother came crawling up to the camera, smiling and babbling incessantly in what my parents thought was crude speech and sounded to me like complete dribble (the quality of the tapes wasn't that great). Thing is, David's crawling and reacting to the world like a completely normal child and the rest of us, like your average group of college students in a slasher flick, had absolutely no idea what was going to happen.
Towards the end Dad kept fast-forward towards the interesting parts and the images were pausing and jerking the way they do when they go too fast to simply be moving very quickly. There was a half-second still as we went through a sequence of him in the bathtub of my brother's face, gap-toothed and staring out almost aimlessly into space. It chilled me down to the core because this was the point in the record where we could see the autism starting to creep in, the point where the actions of the world stopped affecting him and he abruptly stopped talking altogether. It felt as if we were watching a depressing movie for the second or third time since we all knew what was going to happen eventually--but instead of being it a movie, it was our life.
I turned around a few minutes later and saw Mom dabbing at her eyes. We decided right around then that we'd watched enough cutesy family videos for the day and went to have dinner before Hogfather started.
