A GENTLE TOUCH CAN SAY SO MANY THINGS
The old 8mm Bell and Howell projector is noisy, a protest against being called into service after
being abandoned in a remote corner of a shelf in a closet where it had collected dust for almost forty-five years. It grumbles like a bear provoked out of hibernation way too early. It was brought back to life after I found a cache of old films while rummaging about in, yet, another closet. I have a tendency to throw things into corners and then forget they are there until I stumble upon them a few years later and exclaim with great surprise, “So, that’s where you were!”
The old machine had not fared well over the years. In spots, the brown paint coating the
casing had worn away revealing the underlying gray metal. When I removed the half of the casing, which covered the working parts of the projector, I was immediately assailed by an indescribable foul smell beyond musty. I tried the motor, and was elated when it cranked to life. My joy turned to despair when I discovered that the projector lamp no longer worked. How would I find a replacement for a fifty year old machine?
I turned that job over to my son-in-law, a technical wizard who can fix just about everything. Using the internet, he found a small, specialty company that could provide a lamp which could be gerry-rigged to fit my projector. Once he installed the lamp, I was ready to go.
The reels, not long in length, fly quickly through the projector. The images on the wall are small but remarkably good considering that the film had been sitting around in a closet for so many years without any regard for preservation.
There they are frozen in time: the people I loved, love, and no longer love. Their smiles, their unadulterated happiness can never be diminished by age, infirmity, or even death. As I watch the films, I feel like Salvatore in Cinema Paradiso as he watches all the edited kisses that Alfredo had saved for him.
With the exception of a few reels, my daughter is the subject of most of the old film, but only for the first three years of her life. Why don’t I have film beyond that age? It’s a mystery to me. I certainly never lost my fascination with her. I used to think that each stage in her development was so special that I wished she could stay that way forever only to discover that the next stage was even better. There she is as a newborn, all pink and cuddly, the sweet smell of infancy radiating from her. Here she is walking on wobbly legs at her first birthday party. As I watch her tear the gift wrap from her presents, in my mind, I hear the encouraging voices of her mother and her grandparents. I see my father gather up the loose paper. He and my mother are always somewhere on the scene. In the presence of their first grandchild, the smiles on their faces are permanent. There are more birthdays and Christmases with beloved relatives long gone who are immortalized on film in the full beauty of their middle age, a middle age that, for me, was so distant a speck on my horizon that it did not even register at the time and which I now view in the rear view mirror of old age.
When she was young, my daughter used to love running around the house naked. One reel catches her, on an Easter morning, coming into the kitchen in her birthday suit. She discovers her basket on the kitchen table and proceeds to slowly dismantle it, tearing at the cellophane covering to get at her goodies. One by one, she methodically takes out the items and places them neatly on the kitchen floor like soldiers in formation. Priceless.
Here we are at a petting zoo. It’s 1975 or 1976. I am still rocking my Sergeant Pepper look: longish over the ear hair and a bushy handlebar mustache. I am wearing a brightly, multicolored Mexican poncho and tan bell bottoms. Cringe worthy as seen through my currently bi-focaled eyes. We wander around feeding the animals. At one point, we are surrounded by several alpacas who have learned from past experience that we are a source of food. My daughter is nonplussed rather than frightened. I assure her the animals are harmless, and she begins feeding them.
Another day must have been warm because I am only wearing a light windbreaker and my bright blue, stretch ski pants which have long gone out of fashion. I am trying to teach my daughter how to ski. I am not sure, but it might be her first day on skis. We go up and down the baby slope. Notably, she never cracks a smile. She is totally indifferent to the only sport I was ever good at, a foreshadowing of her total rejection of skiing several years later at the age of nine. Still, I can’t help smile at her walking about in her ski boots while she tries to balance the skis on her shoulder adult style.
Conspicuous is the absence of any footage of me and my then wife together, not even in one single frame, except for scenes from our wedding day. Maybe it was because either one of us was doing the filming or perhaps it was an intimation of the separate paths our lives would later take.
There was one scene in all the film that I watched, however, that touched something so deep inside me that I stopped the projector, stood up, and walked about my apartment unsuccessfully fighting back my tears. It is our wedding day. As we leave the church, my new wife and I are greeted and cheered by friends and family who line the entry to the church and the steps that descend from it. My parents are near the entrance to the church to my right as we are leaving. My father has a big, prideful smile on his face. As I approach him the smile grows bigger and brighter. Just as I am almost past him, he reaches up and runs his hand down the back of my head. A touch so light that I don’t remember feeling it.
If I had felt his touch would I have recognized it for what it meant at that time? Possibly not. That was over a half century ago when I was too self-centered to see beyond my own emotional life. It would take a marriage, a child, a divorce, a daughter’s marriage, and two grandchildren to understand that touch. It simply is the expression of a love so profound that it defies description.
I feel it when I hug my daughter and tell her I love her. I feel it when I enter her house and my grandson interrupts whatever he is doing to come over to give me a kiss while I run my hand through his unruly, curly hair. I feel it when my beautiful, blue-eyed granddaughter gives me a hug, and I stroke her long, blond hair.
A touch. I gently stroked my father’s thin, white hair as he lay dying in the hospital. That was a long time ago. Today, I wish I could envelope him in my arms so that only the top of his snowy head escapes the bear hug of my embrace.
I can’t, but I’ll always have that film, that moment, that touch.
Bio:
Roy Innocenti is a former secondary school English teacher. His work has appeared in Ovunque Siamo.
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