If you remember what it was like looking for something on a VHS tape, you’ll understand why I said “screw it.” and just let the tape run. It was the winter of 2015 and I was packing up forty-five years of my mom’s accumulations and twenty-one of my dad’s. I’m in the garage, it’s cold and very late at night surrounded by boxes full of things they’d decided to keep. I was going through unmarked videotapes to make sure there was nothing irreplaceable there. I thought there might be some of Dad’s Con Law lectures, but all I was going on was a half-remembered remark I’d overheard a quarter of a century ago.
There’s no chronology to their keepsakes, and each box is a jumble of things from various ages, which is what they’ve become as well. They’d always been a single age - now they were all ages. Enough time had passed where I was seeing them through the arcs of their lives. Their age depended on whatever I was holding, or whatever year was on the postmark.
There’s an abrupt bark from the TV/VCR then white noise, the end of a commercial and then a rising chime. My reaction is immediate and Pavlovian: my heart rate increases and my skin flushes slightly and for a moment I’m not cold. And then the chorus: “The Simm-psons…” That’s right. We used to do that - tape the Simpsons. The first few seasons anyway - I don’t remember ever watching the tapes, until now.
I’m not really watching, and barely half-listening. Too busy bouncing around my parents’ lives: hopscotching on touchstones and have decided on my favorite of mom’s: twenty or twenty-one years old traveling from Tokyo to London over land, on her own. Though rarely alone I’d imagine. Dad’s harder to pick - he had a hundred different lives. But I guess I’d have to pick this guy — the Geography Whiz Kid — Six years old: a scholar and a showman
Whomever was taping was slow on the draw when it came to commercials, and I’ve always found something supernaturally depressing, even frightening about old commercials on videotape — like I’m seeing something I wasn’t meant to. Late night used car dealers being the worst. I hope we can all agree on that. Even if you know they’re still alive and well it still feels like you’re staring at a ghost. The person taping caught it about halfway through. I’m guessing it was the 2nd or 3rd season as the characters were still transitioning. Lisa Simpson is standing still in the aftermath of some sports-related shenanigans, holding either a tennis racket, or baseball glove and a blank expression, blinking.over and over again. It’s an over-extended shot and even though it’s entirely by happenstance, makes for an absolutely perfect goodbye because then there’s a speaker-ripping sound and static and a woman screaming OH JESUS GOD NO! over and over again as the second plane hit the south tower. Then Dan Rather’s voice saying nothing important but he knows that and given the circumstances is hardly a failing. And then, like a demon harbinger of the chaos of the new era “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!”
For me, nothing captured the turn of the century like that jump cut.
If you were traveling or otherwise separated from your loved ones on that day maybe you remember it the way I do: that there was just one upside to being away from your family on September 11th 2001, and that was you never loved anyone so much as you loved them on that day. Surrounded by the ghosts of my parents and staring at the ghosts in the towers, but finding myself haunted by the ghost who’d grabbed the nearest tape she could find and began recording in San Diego what I was seeing in Farmington New Mexico. That was my wife: the woman I loved more than anyone just when I began loving her more than ever — and for the next 750 miles loved and longed for more than I thought was possible. If you were separated from your loved ones on that day you probably know what I mean… the way your arms felt literally empty, and on a day when nothing was right, nothing would be right until you were holding them. It was a privilege to get to love someone that much, and to be spared from the kind of helplessness that comes when there is nothing to be done.
The full count is something close to 11,000 signs posted on Freeways with zero arrests or fines. The first 8,770 are posted here on my blog, from 2003 through 2021. Below are the signs I posted during the first half of this year, shown before posting.