Sunday, December 27, 2009

watching old home videos



and I noticed we mostly take videos on birthdays and christmas. My daddy o gave me the best Christmas gift ever! He had taken a bunch of our old family videos and my sisters videos and all of OUR videos and put them on one external hard drive thingy. So we have one place to save our movies and we can watch them all at home.

So Danny and the kids and I have been relaxing away our Sunday watching videos we took when Addie was a tiny baby. It's amazing how seeing your child on video is so much more real than my hazy crazy memory.
I'm hoping I'm like Brother Harmon in our ward. Danny is his home teaching companion and he is this amazing woodworker. He has a huge shop and he has helped Danny build my christmas gift of built in bookcases by the fireplace. He is this tiny old man and as sweet as can be. He has absolutely no short term memory though. But he has a very vivid long term memory. He will tell Danny all these stories about how he met his wife and took her to disney land on their first date, and how he had a huge workshop at his old house, and how he started building things because during some war they were rationing everything. I'm hoping as I get older the details of my life start to come back as vividly.
We went and visited him 2 nights before Christmas as he was watching "This Old House" and he welcomed us in and showed us all his wooden cars and trucks and birds he's built and then I played his old organ, from a book of folk American songs, that was sitting in his living room which he says he plays just for himself. He had a huge grandfather clock sitting behind him. On his fireplace mantel was a picture of him and his wife, and his son, who was his wife's son that he raised as his only child. As we talked he told us the story of when his wife died. And he cried....and we sat with him. The girls wiggled and marveled at the carved blue jays and cardinals. Then we had to go, and said goodbye, and he walked us out....

Today at church as Eva sat on my lap and squirmed and chatted, she stood up on my lap and looked to the very back of the church and said really loud...."HI BROTHER HARMON!" and waved.

I didn't have a camera but I hope I always remember that little moment in his home.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This almost made me cry