Grandma Needs Camera Time, Too

Meghan Cox Gurdon wonders why we spend so much time capturing and recording our young while forgetting the older members of our families.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Meghan Cox Gurdon wonders why we spend so much time capturing and recording our young while forgetting the older members of our families.

Somewhere in our family archives there's a scrap of videotape that my Uncle Bob shot in the Seventies.

It captures a few minutes of a Christmas scene in a dark living room.

The camera jogs around a bit, but there's a flash of golden hair (me, at 7), and several times we see a pair of hands entering the frame to proffer wrapped parcels. Mainly, though, the lens is focused on two inky-haired toddlers, my cousins, who, as the youngest in the extended family, were the center of adoring attention.

That's the effect young children have on family gatherings: They're so pleasant to exclaim over, with their freshness and innocence and the endearing way they mangle the English language! Their fleeting youth is what we most want to capture with cameras. So in concentrating on his boys, my uncle was only acting as any tenderhearted father would.

Yet when I think of that fragmentary videotape, it gives me an almost physical pain. Sweet as the boys were, I wish I could turn the camera away from them. I wish I could make it show me the people who, at the time, seemed the least important. I wish the videotape showed the faces of my grandparents.

It is their lightly wrinkled hands that we see reaching toward the toddlers, bearing gifts. They seemed impossibly ancient to us children at the time, but I now realize that they were hale, full of life, only in their late 60s.

If young children tend to attract the cameras, old folks practically repel them -- not that anyone means unkindness by it, of course not! -- but, well, they're not new. We know what they look like. If we stopped to ponder it, which we mostly don't, we'd recognize that time changes the faces of the elderly just as inexorably as it does the young. Unfortunately, these alterations are not necessarily as attractive, and so, without really thinking about it, we turn away.

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