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In the movie I am walking slowly toward the camera. I am in an empty field, and though it looks like the Prairies I am at home on our farm in Southern Ontario. The sun is low.
It looks like an afternoon in late summer. I approach the camera with some hesitation, probably being directed by a voice off screen. I am dressed from head to toe in cowboy wear: vest, chaps and a hat; pearl-handled cap guns at my side in a rhinestone-encrusted holster; and around my neck, flapping in the breeze, a red bandana with white stars.
Before getting close enough to make out the details on my face, the shot abruptly cuts to a scene of my four sisters on a forgotten beach from our childhood.
They stand knee-deep in the water, a long way from the shore, waving to the camera, preserved perfectly for decades on 8-mm movie film.
When my father was about to turn 80, as part of our family celebration, I organized 30 years worth of family films and transferred them from 8mm movie film to DVDs.
I found that I was quite familiar with them from many family viewings over the years; Christmas mornings, birthday parties, trips to the beach, graduations, first dates, first cars, the biggest storm, the fastest race.
Usually, it was my father who took the movies, and like the rest of his life, they are carefully thought out and organized.
They are shot like still photographs with motion added almost as an afterthought.
Occasionally, my mother would take the camera, and everything would change.
Amid the sometimes wild camerawork, there were often short, insightful glimpses into the family in a more candid way.
Sometimes we patiently sat through long, awkwardly composed shots or the extreme close-up of her eye as she looked into the lens to see if the camera was running.
As part of the transfer process, my parents spent a couple of afternoons with me, recording commentary for the films as we viewed these images from the past.
There were some regretful tones as they spoke, but happiness too.
What was most clear was the affirmation that what they saw on the screen was the reality of those years.
On one of these afternoons, as they watched and I recorded, we came to the shot of me as a young cowboy.
As the scene progressed, my dad said: “That has stars on it, that bandana; that’s the one I had as a kid.”
I hadn’t known this, but at some point, Dad had passed it on to me, just as I had passed it on to my own sons when they inevitably became child cowboys.
Growing up, it was a huge event when a new movie came back in the mail from processing at Kodak.
On the following Sunday night, Dad would set up the screen and projector in the living room.
We would all take our places, the lights would go off and we would see the events of the past number of months flash by us in 3 1/2 minutes.
There would always be at least one replay of the film and on particularly amusing scenes there would often be a projector reverse and replay along with much accompanying laughter.
To extend the program, the new film was usually followed up by a screening of two or three other films from earlier on, so in time we knew them all well.
As I edited and watched over and over, I came to realize that many memories from my childhood were not actual memories, but memories of films; the home movies Dad had shot and we had seen many times as we grew up.
No wonder my childhood seemed idyllic: smiling, happy faces waving to the camera from a perfect world in which only remarkable things happened.
My cowboy days are remembered, not because I actually remember those events, but because they have been recorded on a thin strip of film, which I have seen so often they have now become the truth of my past.
In time, I too recorded the events of my own family as they grew up, now however, on video.
They show the perfect highlights, not the reality of life that lies beneath the world we see on the screen.
As with most home movie-makers, we chronicle the happy events that seem meaningful at the time, but when we look back, it is usually the things that happened between the highlights that have the real importance, the real meaning in our lives.
Fifty years later, all that remains of my cowboy days is preserved on discs.
Those and the red bandana. These days it sits folded in a drawer of my desk.
As it approaches 80 years old, it is well wor