Camcorder

In 2000, my dad bought a SONY handy-cam camera and a pack of multicolored video tapes to film his family on. I’ve always been intrigued with the chunky camcorder, its utilitarian buttons, how modern it must have looked in 2000 before the rise of digital cameras. Every few years I remember the camcorder and the tapes exist and have to ask my dad to teach me how to insert the tapes, which sequence of buttons to press, which switches to turn, and what wires to plug in to get the camera to show me pixelated footage of my family— our family.

I plug in the camera to the wall, pinch the eject switch, and wait for the mechanical whirring to push the compartment up and out so I can insert the video tape gently into the slot. The gaping slot says, “DO NOT PUSH IN THE COMPARTMENT,” so I wait patiently for it to consume the tape on its own and pull itself back down.

My favorite video is on the dark blue tape. It’s my extended family celebrating New Years Eve at my great uncle Wadie’s apartment in Canada. It must be 2001 because I look about two years old. My sister and I are wearing matching Christmas Elmo sweaters and we look into the camera disinterested (her) and shy (me). Wadie is wearing a red and white yarn cap stuck to his skull and smiles at the camera as his son (age 12) films shakily, zooming in randomly onto noses, fingers, teeth. Wadie holds a large moonshine jug full of dark wine in his tiny apartment kitchen. Everybody implores him off screen, “Film farther away!” “Back up a little!” but he continues to misuse the zoom button, narrating what’s going on to the viewer of the tape.

As I watch these tapes, I gasp whenever I see anybody who is now dead. One third of the people in the video are now dead. How rare to see somebody moving, talking, laughing, walking, living. The camera zooms in on my grandpa. He looks fatter, wearing a flannel shirt and a winter coat indoors, always a little chilly. He has a moustache, and his front tooth is missing. He smiles at the camera, displaying the gap in his teeth, and loudly kisses the air, kisses the viewer. My grandmother covers her face with a wrinkled hand, her thin wedding band visible. I gasp again because over her years of illness and death I forgot that, yes, her hands were once able to move freely. Her hands weren’t always skin and bone or swollen with liquid, they weren’t always unable to grip cups or hold hands. I am even shocked how their voices sounded two decades ago, not ragged, but smooth and alive. I rewind the video over and over again to see the snippets of my grandparents, smiling and talking. My two favorite people.

What I appreciate most about the New Years video is how perfectly it captures everyone. My great uncle Shafik, aloof to the point where the viewer questions if he wants to be here or if he’d rather be in his own apartment with his European wife (where was she when this video was filmed?). He smiles when the 12-year-old cameraman kisses him on the cheek because he always loved children despite never having any of his own. My mom covers her nose with both hands when the camera pans to her— always self-conscious about her Egyptian nose. You can see her fingernails chipped with dark red nail polish and her wedding ring glimmering in the sepia-toned film. My great uncle Shouky and Tunt Wedad smile, friendly and quiet as always. Claire is holding me and bobbing me up and down, my tiny bare feet the only skin the camera can see. She looks very maternal even though she is probably only 16. She has her own children now and a husband and a nice house in Ontario. She’s wearing a light purple sweater and her wavy hair is glossy and thick, swaying as she walks away from the camera. Even Mina, the 12-year-old cameraman, shows his own exuberance and friendliness as he focuses on each family member sitting around the room, laughing, talking loudly, debating each other. And there’s also me, shy, unsmiling, and crying.

I’ve never enjoyed being around people in large groups and as a child I always dreaded family gatherings like this. I was painfully shy and didn’t like talking to adults. I didn’t like talking at all. I have a vague memory as a 3-year-old getting into an elevator with everyone and looking up at their smiling, wrinkled faces and bursting into tears, unable to locate my parents in the forest of pant legs. I would have been perfectly content to stay home with my parents and my sister forever, to never have a play date, to never see anyone apart from those three people and to have months long visits from my grandparents.

In another video, we are all at a wedding in 2007. I’m sitting in my mom’s lap crying while everyone dances in their brightly colored dresses and gel-curled hair. The video cuts away and then I am sitting alone, eyes wide watching everyone dance from a seat against the wall. Whenever I’m at weddings now, I still sit down, still stare at the people brave enough to dance, still watch and watch and watch, and still I don’t dance.

I always thought it was annoying when people went on and on about their families, their endless streams of cousins and aunts and uncles. Everybody thinks their own family is special, but nobody wants to hear about another person’s family. Nobody wants to hear about how my grandfather tried teaching me to crawl by crawling in front of me on the carpet. Nobody wants to hear about how much I liked eating Italian sausage and watching Tree House in my grandparent’s tiny Mississauga apartment; but I want to tell everyone about it, about how special my family is because they are really special, much more special than any other family, and I feel proud to share their genes and be part of this tiny tribe of brown-skinned Coptic people. I know thousands of stories about them, but there are two thousand more that I will never know, and that kind of breaks my heart.

My grandpa had four siblings, three with spouses, and two with children. In the New Years video almost everyone is present.

Mina asks my grandpa to come to the lobby of the apartment to play billiards.

“In ten years,” my grandpa says.

“No, five,” Mina says.

“Okay, five. Bye-bye!” Mina pans the camera over the over-stuffed couch and the people crowding it. In the background of their conversation there’s a cacophony of people talking over each other in Arabic, a few voices calling out for Mina to zoom out already, step back a little, you won’t be able to see anything if you’re too close.

I wonder what happened five years later? Ten years later? When did the apartment management move the billiards table out of the lobby? Did they get to play billiards?

I feel very nostalgic for the early 2000s, and I feel a sense of regret for having been too young to remember all this, all these people and conversations, and moments. Everybody in Canada, everybody alive, what was that like? I see this time as a golden era that I am too young to remember, but still somehow miss.

Though the New Years video is my favorite, I like the other tapes enough, but they are less full of people. My dad behind the camera filming my sister and I as toddlers and my mother, her hair full and dark, her skin smooth and untouched by age. Here are the three of us in Turin, Italy where we all lived for one searing August. Here are the three of us at the beach, my sister splashing in the water in a ruffled bathing suit and me sitting in my mother’s lap sifting sand in my fat, baby hands. Here is my sister putting stickers on my bare belly, my mother visible in the background, cooking dinner.

My dad appears in nearly none of the videos, but his voice appears. His accent is subtle, not quite American. He suggests that my sister recites “Our Father” in Arabic or that she sings “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” while I sit down and stare at the camera or my sister. My sister is natural in front of the camera, smiling and singing and I am quiet, sometimes repeating what she says in the slurred way that toddlers do. In one video I’m holding a spoon in my fist and eating out of a pudding cup, my eyes gigantic, looking around the living room.

Watching the videos of my nuclear family, I feel a rush of warmth for my father. All of these videos are him choosing to film his family in even the most mundane moments— there are videos of my mom feeding me Kraft macaroni and cheese as we sit on the floor together, videos of my sister and I sitting on swings in the backyard. He is filming his little family in a house he bought with money he made through his art. I imagine that feels really good. I imagine the accumulation of milestones felt like victory after victory: getting married after years of a long-distance relationship, having a child, buying a house, having a second child (Hi, dad). I can relate most to the endless wait for marriage and the never-ending longing.

In one video, my parents are on trampoline together. My dad is holding the camera, sitting down and laughing as my mom jumps in the air, silhouetted by the midday sun, speaking Arabic and smiling. “I think this is really good exercise!” she says. The video is wobbly, and my mom looks very young in happy in a gingham shirt and bright blue pants. My sister calls to them off screen, she sounds maybe 4-years-old, and they both move to get off the trampoline, still giggling and happy and warm from the hot sun.

My dad never wanted to have children, but as my mom says, “When a baby comes, it comes.” I don’t blame him for not wanting kids. He had a lot of problems with his younger brother and was always afraid his own children would turn out like him, erratic and rotten. When he first held his own children, my dad wept and wept and wept and decided he did want kids. Actually, he really liked us. He says we turned out better than he ever could have imagined.

Once I told him, unprompted, “I’m glad you’re my dad.” And he said, “Really?” I imagine that every move a parent makes is improvised and you can only hope you’re doing the right thing, making a series of correct decisions that will lead you to creating a morally acceptable person, a person you like and one who likes you as much as you like them which sounds unbearably stressful. But, yes, really, I am glad he is my dad because who else would have taught me how to draw, who would have bought me my first cello, and who would have helped me beat level three of The Incredibles video game?

When my sister was one year old, my dad sat with her on a tablecloth in the kitchen and pressed a paintbrush in her tiny hand, guiding her hand to create splashes of red and blue on thick watercolor paper. I think the best gift he’s given us is his intense love of art and design.

In the second grade, my sister was assigned a project where she had to freeze bugs and attach them to an art piece. Other kids made little bug themed Christmas wreaths, bugs moving out of the way of a mud-splattered shoe, bugs pinned to the seats of a classroom. My dad carved pieces of colorful, shiny plastic and foam core and clay into modern art pieces so Yostina’s dead bugs could be art connoisseurs in a modern art museum. Beetles, monarch butterflies, and cicadas examining sculptures and walking up slender, gleaming steps to the second floor of the museum. It's funny to think of my dad taking total control of a second-grade bug project and making it into something an 8-year-old would never have thought of.

For a lot of my childhood, I was watching my dad watch us through a camera lens or sitting in his lap and watching him closely as he drew car after car on reams of paper. He let me draw the thin line of the car’s antenna every time. There are a few tapes where I am five or six years old, holding the camera and walking around the house, the video wobbly, zooming in and out with no discernable pattern as to why. I walk past fake red flowers with thick stalks, the corner of a beige couch, my grandfather’s knees spread out in his galabeya. In the kitchen, my grandmother smiles at me and says, in English, “Thank you, Oona.” I think she’s thanking me for filming her. That’s how I know I’m filming and not my sister.

My Grandmother’s English was never very good, and my Arabic was never very good, but we were always close. I understood most of what she was saying in Arabic, but my throat couldn’t wrap around the thick sounds of my ancestral language. In the video she’s holding a mug of tea and the pine cabinets of the kitchen are behind her.

The film pans over the plush red carpet in the dining room where a black and white cat is laying, an expression of disinterest on her thin cat face. “Hi, Patches!” I say to the cat. In 2022, Patches is nineteen years old and laying on my bed as I watch this tape. I’ve always loved that cat.

I walk the camera back to the computer room, where everyone is sitting on the soft couch and watching an Arabic film together. My dad says, “Can I film now, Oona?” I hand the camera back wordlessly and the video spins and zooms out as my dad takes control, my skinny bare legs exiting the room before the screen cuts to black.