Writing Group: Requiem for a VCR

A quick explanation: A friend invited me to join a free-form writing group; we write about whatever we want (a prompt, a memory, anything) for 10 minutes, then read our writings to the group. We do this three times per meeting. The goal is to keep your pen moving. Usually my writings aren’t that good, or are too personal to consider posting here; but one of my contributions tonight wasn’t too bad and meant a lot to me, so here it is. This is unedited and transcribed from my chicken-scratch handwriting.

It was a dark and stormy night. Really, it was. The TV was turned to snowy static as my mother and my then-stepfather opened the box. I kept asking, “What is it?” They kept looking at each other and brushing me off. In retrospect, I understand. How could you possibly explain the concept of a VCR to a 4-year-old? Now, kids have movie players in their homes, cars, bedrooms; but we’d never experienced it. Articulating it was, at the time, impossible.

I learned to say “Magnavox,” running my fingers over the beautiful raised metal letters. I looked at the interior gears of the wondrous machine — the huge spinning knob and its back-up dancers of cylinders and rectangles. I knew the familiar whirring sounds that happened between pressing “Play” and seeing an image on the screen better than I knew my mother’s voice.

I would pet the wood-paneled sides of the machine, thinking, “You’re my friend.” Do kids think that about electronics in this disposable, Made-in-China era of existence?

I wanted to know all about how the Magnavox worked. “Why didn’t you take it apart?” David asked me when I told him. “I did that to ours. And to our radio.” Well, there’s the obvious answer: My mother would have killed me. Then there’s the truer answer that I kept to myself: I loved the Magnavox and didn’t want to hurt it.

In my youth, I thought everything, inanimate objects included, had souls. My mother said I cried when they built a backyard fence around the electrical transformer box behind our house, and that I would have long, intense conversations with the fire hydrant down the street. Sadly, this has been replaced with phrases like, “David, how do I know when an iPod is totally dead?” and “I can’t get the fucking TiVo to work!”

Sometime after college, when I’d moved back to Texas and had some space to acquire more than just the most necessary of objects, I told my mom I wanted the old Magnavox. “Oh honey, we got rid of that a long time ago,” she said. “Besides, it didn’t work. What would you have done with it?”

“Turned it into a planter,” I told her. “I’d just have to take the tape holder out, throw some potting soil in there, and I could probably keep a fern or a cactus garden in it.”

She rolled her eyes at my suggestion, and I kept quiet about the real reason. I could never take the tape holder out, not in my 30s and not at age 4, when I would compulsively watch all of my cartoon tapes four times in a row because it was the same number as my age. I just wanted the Magnavox present, to still pet its ancient wood paneling and think, “I’m not putting you in a landfill. You are my friend, even if you don’t work. You are still my friend.”

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