~~~
Every afternoon, Peter picked up new mail and sorted it into three piles, his, her and junk. The last pile was always the biggest and his usually nonexistent. One day, a flyer in the junk pile caught his attention. It showed several happy families around a dining room table and in a living room. “Are you always absent from your family videos, because it is you who makes them? Don’t let yourself disappear behind the frame! The “Precious Moments” video recording system will capture all your social occasions with a touch of a button!” He was intrigued and read through the entire flyer. Apparently some company in California offered their buyers something similar to a home surveillance system but with cameras mounted at a face level. After the system is installed, the user would enter a room number on its remote, and in that room the cameras would be turned on. The family would all sit together around the table, and the system would record the cameras’ video streams. When a happy occasion is over, the videographer of the house would create a home video from the raw footage and preserve the memories for the years to come.” This is a neat idea,” said Peter to himself, “Our family is just me and her, and we appear together only on a few photos taken by strangers at our request. They offer local installer referrals, but I should be able to install it myself.”
When she came home, he asked her if it would be OK for them to have a few video cameras around the house. As usual when it came to technical matters, she had no opinion of her own and didn’t particularly care either way. “Do as you wish” she said and headed to her study.
The first order of business was to figure out how many cameras he wanted to order. Peter planned to place four of them in the kitchen/dining/living room area, two in the foyer and another one by the garage door. He also decided to put a camera in her study facing her desk. “Maybe one of these days”, he said to himself,” she will teach an online course and will use that camera as a webcam. The one in her laptop is just awful”. He went through the entire house again, stayed for a while in a master bedroom but then decided to leave it without a camera. “She may misinterpret the purpose of a camera there,”, he thought with amusement, “and the future buyers may misinterpret it as well”.
The system came in about a week. Peter unpacked everything and opted to install the cameras first. After dinner, he demonstrated them to her; he was afraid she would not like them. But she said: “Oh, they look cute. Now we will be movie stars! Maybe you will teach me how to turn them on?” He replied: “Honey, it’s a bit complicated. You can always ask me to do it.” She was never good at operating electronic gadgets, and he figured if she wanted to get better at them, she should start with something a little simpler that a video recording system. Next day, he put its central part in a linen closet by the front door and began planning how to run the cables.
Peter’s new video toy was very user friendly. He recorded them watching together a TV show; the result was four long video files. Two of them didn’t have anything interesting, so he discarded them. In the remaining files, Peter and she were shown from two different angles as they sit on a sofa and looked in the same direction, with the show’s audio track in the background. He saw how their facial expressions changed as the show progressed and how they laughed together when something funny was happening on a screen. For the first time, he thought that they were well suited to each other, despite both visible and hidden age difference.
He showed her the videos, but they were not her cup of tea. “Who would want to watch for half an hour two people watching TV? I would get bored after three minutes. Maybe the next time I invite my girlfriends, you will record our conversation? Perhaps that would be something worth seeing”. He indeed recorded their next get-together, but she was still not impressed. “I am not videogenic, and neither are my friends. Plus, looking from the outside, our conversation seems pointless and silly. I won’t be using this system, but you can record whatever you want, I don’t care.”
~~~
Soon afterwards, two minute events happened at their house. Nobody noticed them but Peter, but for him they turned out to be of utmost importance.
She had a birthday party and invited all her friends who were still in town. She thought about inviting her advisor, but decided that she would then feel obligated to be very “proper” and would have to be very careful with her drinks. At the end of the party, somebody gave a toast: “Many-many birthdays together at this table!” Everybody started clapping and saying “Yes!”. Peter also clapped, but something cold, damp and scary touched his heart. When guests left and she fell asleep, he got up and went to a living room to collect his thoughts. “How could I forget about it?! She will age, she already ages, like everyone does, everyone but me. People who live together barely notice how they get older, because they do it together as well. They share their lives, and aging is just part of that sharing. Our predicament could not be more different. I won’t age, she will. I will lose her. I am already losing her, and every day I will continue to lose her, little by little, one barely noticeable wrinkle at a time…”
He returned to their bedroom and sat down on his side of the bed. She breathed evenly and calmly, as she always did when asleep. He felt a jolt of gasping tenderness toward her. “My treasure,” said he to himself, “my beloved fleeting treasure…”
In several weeks, on Saturday October 16th, they as usual cooked together on the weekend. He decided to record this, to make sure the kitchen camera was properly directed. The TV was on. Maybe it was the same show, or maybe another show, but the host was bubbling with humor again. She continued to chop some vegetables, but he got distracted and went to the living room to see what was happening on TV. When the host made a yet another joke, he yelled it to her so that she wouldn’t miss it. She stopped, lifted her head and said: “What’s that?” He repeated, and she laughed.
When later that evening he reviewed the recorded files, he saw that very moment captured by the kitchen camera. She looked a bit up, straight into the camera, with wide open eyes and a smile on her beautiful young face. He stopped the video, looked at her for some time and decided that that moment of their lives should not disappear. He will keep this video recording for as long as he will live. If he is still alive when the earth gets scorched by the expanding sun billions of years from now, he will continue to keep it as the oceans boil and evaporate.
He pondered upon this for a few days and had an idea that seemed a bit crazy. Why should he keep just this recording, just this truly precious moment that came and went and left a video of itself behind? Maybe she had moments like this every day, many times a day, and neither he nor she noticed them. He should leave the cameras on all the time and configure them to be motion activated. At the end of each day, he would review the streams and archive some selected portions of them. He would probably have to invest in additional computer equipment to store all that data, but the storage demands did not seem to be impossible.
He called the “Precious Moments”’ support line and asked if their product could be used as a usual surveillance system, always on and motion activated. They said: ” Yes, it can, but you would have to update its internal software first. Then you would need to follow the updated manual to switch its operating mode to surveillance. If you don’t want the cameras to be activated by the members of your family, you would also need to perform a special training routine. It works like this: the family member stands in front of the camera, looks at it and then gradually turns around. The camera captures how they look like in various positions, the system memorizes it and disregards the activations caused by this person. It may sound complicated, but in reality it is not. We have customers with large extended families, and they swear by this feature. “He thought he would swear by this feature as well. She worked long hours outside the house, and he was mostly home. The vast majority of activations would be his. And what could be more ridiculous than creating video mementos of a person that never ages!
The update and configuration went un
expectedly smoothly, and he verified that the system indeed became always on and motion activated. He even figured out how to automatically mix streams from the cameras activated by the same person as they moved around the house into two combined streams. If the system saw their face in a video stream, it temporarily became the Front output stream. If there was another stream with a good view of them from the side, it was routed to the Side output stream. Both output streams were compressed and stored as video files.
Then he trained the system to ignore him, walked around the house and confirmed that none of the cameras were triggered. “This company must have some top-notch software engineers” he thought, although what did he know about software?
And so his great video recording project began…
~~~
Her research process was slow and laborious. The PhD thesis required very in-depth analysis, and she had much more material to go through. Her advisor wanted her to write the thesis with little assistance from his side, to demonstrate that she could conduct research on her own. She also had to take some required classes where lecturers expected their students to read a new book every week. And as before, she had to support herself by working as a part time teaching assistant. She was frequently stressed out, and he got to see very little of her. She would come home late, grab something to eat and go to her room. She would spend the entire evening there either behind her desk or on an ottoman with her legs crossed reading books. Peter tried not to bother her. He had his own projects to do. On weekends they usually played tennis and sometimes explored local dining options.
The seasons passed one after another. She was less busy in the summer, and they could go on vacation. They got to like the Pacific Northwest. They would fly there, every time to a new place, and spend a couple of weeks on the hiking trails. Peter got concerned that there would be gaps in his video archive and bought a fancy camcorder. He made numerous videos of her, saying that on vacation, everything was video worthy. On those videos, she would drink her morning coffee, lean over a trail map, stand by a huge tree smiling at him… Sometimes she would walk along the trail ahead of him, and he would just record that on a camcorder. She didn’t seem to mind. She saw that he enjoyed tinkering with the video gadget and let him capture whatever he wanted. She never asked him to show her these videos after they returned home.
One winter was particularly cold and snowy. The town could barely keep up with street plowing, and nobody bothered to shovel the sidewalks. She had to suspend her morning runs and joked that after that winter, she would have to throw away all her clothes because she wouldn’t fit into them. At one of their dates, they brainstormed about a good winter sport she would enjoy. She grew up in Florida and her idea of a winter sport was “a summer sport with warmer attire”. Peter suggested skiing, and she thought it would be interesting to try, although she was worried about falling and hurting herself.
Next Saturday, she woke him up early, and they headed to the mountains. She found somebody to teach her proper technique and spent the day on the beginner trails. Peter had
lots of fun making videos of her progress. He skied in childhood, plus the trails were set up so that he could always take a shortcut and get ahead of her. He captured her that day from all angles and in all sorts of body positions, both vertical and horizontal. The next day, she graduated to intermediate trails and runs, and body positions on Peter’s videos became mostly vertical.
They went skiing several times that winter. Once she practiced enough, she absolutely loved the sport. One weekend, she did one of her downhill slides while he stood at the bottom of her run with his camcorder. He saw her on a camcorder screen moving toward him and stopping with her skies. Then her smiling face went out of focus and he felt that she bumped into him and hugged him. She whispered into his ear: “Thank you darling, thank you for bringing me here. I enjoy it here so much...”
This was the happiest moment of his entire life.
~~~
Four years came and went. The house was now all fixed up, nice, clean and comfortable. The “Precious Moments” system worked smoothly and did a very good job. Every day when she was in it produced two video files showing the Front and the Side output channels. They captured her movements around the house, as if two cameramen constantly followed her, one in front of her and another to her left or right. He now had two storage servers with expandable capacity. Every once in a while, he transferred to both of them the accumulated files to free up the system’s internal storage.
They bought a pricey Scandinavian recliner chair with a footrest and put it into their living room by the fireplace, right in front of one of the cameras. Now she would often sit in this chair reading. In winter, she liked to turn on the fireplace and relax while feeling its warmth on her feet. Sometimes, much to Peter’s amusement, she would fall asleep in that chair. She had a truly great talent for sleep. Her eight nightly hours were peaceful and uninterrupted. And Peter was an insomniac…
She changed over the course of these four years. The young girl Peter had met at a bus stop, with her impishness and impulsiveness, was now gone. She was still as beautiful as before, but in a more mature way. They had known each other for years now, and Peter decided it was the time for him to share with her his secret.
One Saturday morning he said to her that he had something very important to show her. They got into a car and he drove her to his bank. He asked to give him his safe deposit box and they went into the bank’s private room. The bank associate brought there his box and left.
Peter opened the box and removed from it a stack of documents and one document rolled on a tube and held by a rubber band. He told her his life story. He told about the Chinese student and his cocktail and about his true age. He showed her his college graduation diploma, given forty years before. He removed the rubber band and unrolled the document from the tube. This was his PhD diploma. It was followed by some old photos of himself in youth with time stamps. And finally he put in front of her the document from the bottom of the stack. It was his birth certificate.
She was shocked and astonished. “So you are about my father’s age… No wonder you seem so wise and experienced…” He reassured her that nothing in their relationship would change. “I am the same today as I was yesterday. I love you and I always will.” She promised him to keep his secret. They decided that he should no longer be seen by her friends. She would tell them that he had developed some sort of a skin disease on his face and felt very uncomfortable in the presence of strangers.
The manufacturing business that Peter partially owned started giving up the ghost, and the partners decided to sell it. Peter received a check in the mail together with the “best of luck” wishes. Now he had no income and a mortgage to pay. He considered for a few minutes the idea of finding another job as a lab technician and discarded it. Instead, Peter decided to take his chance on the stock market. He took some of the proceeds from the sale and deposited them into a brokerage account. He also joined several internet chat rooms dedicated to day trading.
To make a living as a trader turned out to be his calling. He had a lot of free time, no distractions and could do everything he needed without leaving the house. The beautiful thing about the internet is anonymity. You make up a name for yourself to be known under, and nobody sees your face or asks you for your birth date. Trading was not nearly as easy as collecting dividend checks, but he was glad he found something to keep him busy.
~~~
Next year, she was finally done with her PhD. They celebrated it at his favorite restaurant at the mall. She applied for several tenure-track positions all over the country, and Peter was worried they would have to move. But for whatever reason, the only offer she received was from her school. “Gee, when I came here for my Master’s, I could never imagine I would be living in this town for so long.”, she said, “I guess we will stay here for a while”. Peter rejoiced.
She started her first full-time job, but not much ha
s changed in their lives. She was as busy as before and often had to spend evenings in her study preparing course materials for tomorrow’s lectures.
She now contributed her half of the mortgage. The financial side of their relationship was a little odd. They kept their separate checking accounts, and neither of them had any idea about how the other one was doing money wise. When they went out, they split their checks. The common use items such as that Scandinavian recliner in their living room were paid for jointly as well. They took turns doing grocery shopping, and whoever did it paid for the groceries. All “personal use” items were their individual concern.
Sometimes Peter wondered if the two people in their house had anything in common aside of keeping the house together. She put her all into her work, her colleagues and her friends. She would come home and tell him at the dinner table about the multitude of things that happened in her life that day. He would then just say a few words about the day’s trading. He knew there were few things in the world that interested her less than the stock market.
He contemplated this one Indian summer day. The real summer was gone, but it was unseasonably warm, as if August decided to play an encore. He looked out from the window at the trees in their backyard, still lush and green, and thought that very soon they would turn golden yellow, the final hurrah before the doldrums of winter. And he realized with the same clarity that was in the air that he had entrusted technology to record and remember her life, but it could only capture its external side. It could preserve how she looked like and what she did around the house, but it was largely oblivious to her internal life, to her joys and regrets, to what she would probably call a “real her”. It would take a human soul and human memory to save all this from falling into that bottomless dark well called “the past”.