Last night Celine came over and we watched a few of Grandpa’s super 8 movies. One of them was filmed in Miami sometime in the mid-seventies and had a long segment of Grandma feeding the seagulls. I wonder if that was where Grandpa took the picture of her feeding the seagulls that Dad has a big poster-sized print of. They also went sightseeing at Coral Castle, which really surprised me and Celine. (Warning: clicking that link will play Zamfir covering a Celine Dion song!) We’ve talked about that place for years, but I never knew that Grandma and Grandpa went there. It was amazing to see how easily the 9-ton doorway spun on it’s hinge.
After Celine left I pulled some really old reels of film out from the bottom of the box. I think some of them were taken before my parents even met each other! Unfortunately, the projector started to eat the film and I didn’t get to see any of them. It only chewed up the film header on one of the movies and none of the actual movie was damaged, but I think I’ll have to find out how to stop it from happening again. Maybe all it would take is a good cleaning to make the projector work better.
When I was in Montreal for Easter last weekend Mesh and Grandma gave me many boxes of Grandpa’s 8mm and super 8 films, a film projector, and a couple boxes of 35mm slides. There are lots more slides, but Mesh is still sorting through them. I said I would digitize everything.
I picked one film at random, and it said (in Mesh’s handwriting), “1973 Apr. Coreen driving off. Cats. The twins with grandma (kissing and smelling a flower on the stairway).” It was strange to see me and Christine when we were three years old. And Grandma was 33 years younger too. We were wearing some of those dreadful matching twins outfits. Red with a blue and white stripe, I think. They were awful.
Some of the slides have mildew on them. I guess I should try to wash it off. I hooked up my scanner and scanned in one small box of slides. I am amazed at how beautiful Grandma is in these pictures! It seems to me that I have always thought of her as an old woman, even in my earliest memories. I guess everybody has their own lives, separate of your impressions of them. I made a web site for these slides: http://www.floatingeye.net/ephemera/
I just remembered that Victor said he had some slides at his house that Mesh wasn’t aware of. I’ll have to ask him about that.
