The family reserve

Today a package that I’ve been hoping for arrived:  the replacement lamp for my eight-millimeter movie projector.

Finding a new lamp is more than a minor accomplishment; my projector is a Bell & Howell Filmo Master Model 400, made sometime around 1947, the lamps for it (DAR, if you’re a Super-8 freak) haven’t been made in more than twenty years, and there are no modern equivalents.  None.  To use the projector, you have to find someone who has a stash of new old stock lamps, and to find any NOS lamps at all is a small miracle.  And if you do find a dealer who somehow scored one, he’s going to gouge you for it.  The only dealer I could find who’d even admit to the possibility of having one on hand wanted $168 for it!  (The lamps also run hot—500 watts—and have an abysmally short service life of about 25 hours as a result, so conservation is going to be a good idea.)

However, I got very, very lucky last week, because I found a NOS Sylvania lamp, still in its original box, being auctioned on eBay, and I won the auction at $26 plus five bucks shipping.  (This is less than the lamp cost new; it still has a price sticker of $36.70 on the box.)

So today the lamp arrived, all intact and in good condition, and I installed it in the projector, plugged it in, and gingerly flipped the switches, because I had no idea what the mechanicals or wiring of the projector are like; I bought it at a yard sale and have been afraid to open it up in case I couldn’t get it put back together.  And wonder of wonders, it worked!  The lamp came on, the drive belts pulled, the sprockets turned.  I don’t know where the projector had been before it got to me, but wherever that was, it must have been cold storage, because nothing gave me any problem at all.  (I suppose I ought to mention that the projector, which still looks new, is still in its original case, which barely shows any wear, and everything is so complete and unused that the original warranty card is still stuck inside the takeup reel carrier, and the little oilcan for oiling the works, which came with the projector, is still in its cubbyhole.)

So after that, I got out the box of home movies I’d rescued from the family farmhouse when we sold the household goods early last year.  There were twenty or so reels, mostly labeled in my grandmother’s looping scrawl with titles like “Snow & Bluebonnets” and “Taninul 1964” and “Williamsburg & Fair at Gatlinburg very poor” and “Ricky swimming & Sid’s Party.”  I set the projector on the dining table, focused it on the opposite wall, and started loading and running film.

And lord, but it was “another country” that I saw:  my parents and grandparents, great-uncles and aunts ten and twenty years in their graves, family friends whom I remember in their sixties and seventies as young men and women.  There was film with me as an infant of three or four months (I couldn’t yet hold up my head) and a full head of thick, dark-brown hair, my hometown’s centennial parade of 1954, with my father dressed in a flashy black-and-white charro suit and an enormous formal felt sombrero, astride somebody’s bay horse and looking dashing beyond belief, shots of the cousin who killed himself back in 1969 because he couldn’t tell the family he was gay and he couldn’t live with the knowledge that if he came out, his father would have declared him dead to the family—still alive and building a raised flowerbed for irises in my grandmother’s yard, footage of a rare Christmas gathering about 1963 when all my grandparents were present (the two families disliked each other and neither approved of my parents’ marriage) as well as my uncle and his wife, and a great-uncle and his wife who’d driven down from north Texas, a long sequence of my aunt’s high-school graduation in Massachusetts in 1948:  the aunt I never knew because she had cerebral palsy and its consequent circulation problems so she was always and forever cold, and one day she caught her dress afire standing in front of a space heater trying to warm herself, and died of her burns . . . .

The film is in mediocre physical shape at best; the color dyes have completely washed out or flaked off the base stock in patches, leaving seconds of blank screen before something recognizable fades in again, but there was more than enough still present to make me feel I was sitting in a roomful of ghosts.  Of everyone I knew in those movies, fewer than ten are still alive, and of the adults then, only my mother is left.

And there are more I remember,
And more I could mention,
Than words I could write in a song;
But I feel them watching,
And I see them laughing,
And I hear them singing along.

We’re all gonna be here forever,
So Mama don’t you make such a stir;
Just put down that camera,
And come on and join up
The last of the family reserve.