Eula & Velma

I had one day off.

One day to prepare for the coming onslaught of change and recalibration that will shortly rip me from the freshly nested comfort of an unpacked house and return me to homework, school activities, PTA obligations, packed lunches, missing shoes, permission slips, and the general administrative burden of having produced children.

One day is plenty.

I woke up early and even squeezed in a little operations work for the firm. I don’t like to invest too much of myself into that place, particularly these days, but occasionally I get on a tear and become frighteningly competent. When that happens, I find it best to knock out the reports before anyone notices and gives me additional responsibilities.

After that, the day became a procession of bizarre little to-dos being crossed off the list.

There were the ordinary ones: meal planning, groceries, laundry. Then there were the other things. The mildly inconvenient things. The things I don’t quite know how to do and therefore keep moving to a later date, apparently under the assumption that future me will acquire specialized training.

This is how I found myself walking into a video-transfer store carrying approximately one hundred VHS tapes.

I had imagined this would be straightforward.

Then I learned it costs $25 per tape to digitize them.

I sat down.

There were tapes of third cousin Sharon’s high school basketball games. Someone’s “Trip to Mexico ‘83.” There was a church dedication, although I’m not entirely sure what a church dedication entails. It can’t be a baptism, and it isn’t a confirmation. Perhaps it’s something of a step in between?

Whatever happened, we aren’t finding out today.

Back in the bin.

There were, however, things I desperately wanted to see.

My parents getting married. A family trip to the coast with a very little me. Birthdays. Christmases. People who are gone now, walking around and talking and being completely unaware that someday their descendants will be standing in a video store deciding whether seeing them again is worth twenty-five dollars plus tax.

It also occurred to me how extraordinary it once was to make a home movie at all.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. Today this is easy advice because the camera you have with you weighs six ounces and lives in your pocket. In the 1980s, the camera you had with you was roughly the size of a municipal snowblower.

You didn’t casually document a vacation. You committed to it.

You boarded an airplane with a camcorder, batteries, chargers, blank tapes and enough electrical equipment to establish a regional television station, all because at some point you might want three minutes of footage of a toddler refusing to look at the ocean.

I think I would have been that person.

I’ve always liked taking photographs. At first I took them because I liked challenging myself to see. Then I took them for money. Later, I took them because I was afraid to forget. Now, mostly, I take them because I want to share.

I sorted the tapes into three piles: names I recognized, names I didn’t recognize, and tapes with absolutely nothing written on them.

The blank labels presented an interesting financial proposition. Some of the tapes themselves must surely be blank. If a tape is blank and requires no transfer, the company charges only a $5 handling fee rather than $25.

This meant I was now gambling on VHS tapes. Twenty-five dollars says Christmas 1991. Five dollars says absolutely nothing.

I left the store with my stomach in knots.

I hadn’t left all the tapes. Doing that could have pushed the total toward $3,000 after transfer fees, repairs and hard drives, at which point it would have been considerably cheaper to simply invent a new childhood.

Still, I couldn’t believe I’d finally started.

I’d attempted to save money by transferring some of the tapes myself. Unfortunately, because I am apparently governed by the instincts of a person in a Greek tragedy, I began with the most precious ones.

The ones I remembered. The ones I had wondered about for years. The ones for which there were no replacements.

I fed them into the player, and the player ate them.

Not metaphorically. It actually began destroying the tape.

The film came out mangled. The audio on the portions I managed to capture hadn’t transferred properly. Every attempt seemed to leave me with slightly less childhood than I’d had before.

I was devastated.

There is a peculiar kind of guilt involved in realizing that an object survived thirty or forty years in garages, basements, cardboard boxes and moving trucks only to encounter you, its final and most dangerous custodian.

Never again.

I knew professional transfer would cost a pretty penny, but after that experience, signing the dotted line suddenly felt less like extravagance and more like witness protection.

One tape in particular caught my eye.

“Eula and Velma.”

Those aren’t their real names, mind you. I’ve changed them for privacy. But they are the right kind of names.

Eula and Velma.

I hadn’t heard their names in years. And suddenly an entire part of my childhood came rushing back.

My grandparents were coulee folk. They hadn’t had much education and certainly weren’t born into wealth, but they possessed the sort of entrepreneurial instincts that cause people to look at a four-unit house and think, Why pay a mortgage yourself when three other people could help?

They lived on the main floor and rented two apartments for additional income.

When you entered their apartment, you had to walk through the kitchen to reach the living room. The living room contained an enormous stone fireplace with beautiful masonry that, in all my years of visiting, I never once saw lit.

To the right were enormous sliding glass doors leading to a deck I was never allowed to step onto because it was apparently constructed entirely of danger.

To the left was an entire wall of sliding mirrored doors.

Behind these doors lay the hoard.

My grandparents loved estate sales, rummage sales and auctions, including the mysterious boxes of possessions auctioned off after people died. Consequently, opening one of those mirrored doors was like discovering the lost warehouse of a particularly indiscriminate antiques dealer.

Their bedroom was off-limits. The bathroom, however, connected the bedroom to the living room and was therefore unavoidable. And what a bathroom it was.

It was long and surprisingly wide, with a shower on one side and, across from it, a jacuzzi tub with actual jets beneath a skylight.

There were two sinks.

Two!

To me, this was the clearest possible indication that my grandparents had made it.

The entire room was carpeted in bright avocado-green shag. The carpet had long since stopped being shaggy in any conventional sense. In high-traffic areas it was matted into something resembling moss growing on the north side of a tree. In the less traveled regions it retained little clumps of softness, which you could locate by burrowing your toes into the depths.

I remember staring longingly at the jacuzzi. We were not allowed to use it. This was probably because it had fallen into disrepair, though naturally this only increased its allure.

Once, my siblings and I attempted to turn it on. The machine gave a deep, wounded churn. Then a gurgle. Then another churn, as though some mechanical beast beneath the tub had been awakened against its wishes.

And then insects began pouring out of the drain. We never touched it again.

There were also stacks of damp, wrinkled copies of Reader’s Digest on a wooden shelf Uncle Basil had made in his shed.

My father later kept his own Reader’s Digests in his bathroom on an almost identical shelf, before moving them to the green room. This is how traditions are born. Some families pass down silver. We passed down bathroom periodicals.

And then there was the potpourri. There was always a bowl of those little blue scented pomander balls that all grandmothers inexplicably keep in their bathrooms.

I would sit alone in there, my bare feet buried in the avocado carpet, one hand absentmindedly submerged in a bowl of perfumed balls, my nostrils filled with the competing aromas of artificial botanicals and stale urine, wondering how much longer it would be before we could go outside.

Outside.

Glorious outside.

We’ll have to come back to the outside another time, because I’m getting tired and I haven’t even gotten to Eula and Velma.

The fourth and final apartment could be reached from the walkout driveway or by taking the stairs near the mirrored wall. Down one flight lived two elderly ladies.

Eula and Velma.

My grandmother was their caregiver, which represented yet another income stream in the surprisingly diversified family portfolio. As children, we helped. And this is where I learned, politely and with great certainty, that I did not wish to pursue a career in nursing.

Eula and Velma required a lot of care. They needed help eating, walking and moving around. There were towels and seat covers to change when mild incontinence interrupted the football game. There were nasal cannulas to adjust. I already knew how to deal with those because of my siblings, but somehow it felt different when the oxygen tubing belonged to one of the elderly ladies living in your grandparents’ basement.

Later, when I was about eight, I began volunteering at the assisted-living center in town. I loved the residents. I loved listening to their stories and playing games with them. I liked their company immensely.

But I also learned there is an important distinction between loving old people and possessing the constitution required to professionally manage everything that comes out of them. Nursing, I decided, was best left to people of a disposition that I did not possess.

And now, decades later, there they were again. Eula and Velma. Written on a VHS tape. I cannot wait to see what’s on it.

Well, more errands followed.

By late afternoon, I was feeling extremely productive as I approached the checkout line for my final errand of the day: groceries.

Then I turned around. I knew the woman standing behind me - actually knew her! This may not sound remarkable, but it felt remarkable to me. It’s not so common here.

One of the advantages of living somewhere like this is anonymity. You can wander through the grocery store looking exhausted and purchasing six rotisserie chickens and nobody knows whether this is typical behavior.

We talked for a moment about her work. She’s currently an artist-in-residence (an actual one) specializing in tactile surrealism. I have seen some of her pieces and still cannot entirely make heads or tails of it, although I suppose that may be the point.

We said goodbye, and I slowly made my way home.

Tomorrow I am eagerly anticipating additional adjustments to my form, and then I get to be an aunt for most of the day.

I’m looking forward to it.

Furthermore, I’m looking forward to returning to all my ordinary duties.

The kitchen.

The bills.

The children.

For the last few years, so many of those responsibilities had to be shifted elsewhere. They ended up being put into a drawer while I had to put in more hours at the office, and some were neglected long enough that I began to think perhaps it didn’t matter very much after all. But it does.

There is joy in the ridiculous, repetitive, mostly invisible work of looking after one another. And maybe what little impact I make in my world is enough.

Although I reserve the right to revise this conclusion once the PTA emails begin in full force.