We Used to Watch Slides

Sundays used to feel like days of endless hours. The best ones were the ones that ended with a slideshow.

Now slideshows are pretty easy to come by electronically, but back in the eighties they involved waiting until after dark (so the picture would be most clear) some re-positioning of the furniture, setting up the big projector screen, firing up the projector and gathering the boxes full of trays of slides.

Some trays were more exciting than others, but as long as we had popcorn we could get through them without too much complaining.

The less exciting slides had pictures of old cars, mostly broken down and often in fields, people we didn't know and landscapes.

The best ones were the trays that had old pictures of our parents, before we were born and ones of us when we were younger. There was one tray that never ceased to thrill me. My mom worked with the young women in the ward when it was called the MIA. Even though they must have been between the ages of 12 and 18, to me they seemed like actual grown-ups. I loved it when they came over for activities at our house.

One year, for Halloween, the MIA girls came over and dressed up as potatoes, using garbage bags and strange makeup. My mom has always been great at dressing up, and usually managed to make me pretty nervous - even if it was just through a picture on projector screen long after the fact, when everything was certainly safe and sound. There was a photo of her in a white silky dress with a real skeleton arm instead of her regular arm. The memory of it still gives me that uneasy feeling. These pictures were followed by many other pictures of various neighborhood kids in costume. And me, dressed as a witch with a carefully painted wart on my nose.

The Halloween pictures may have been the most intriguing, but then followed the memories that we really loved to relive. We'd accompany each click of the button and sound of the carousel advancing with oooohhhs and ahhhhs and, "I remember that!" Or, "Look at Dad's hair!" Sometimes we'd shout, "Turn it!" depending on whether or not we were embarrassed and feeling the heckling coming on and other times we'd shout, "Leave it!" and spent a lengthy amount of time recounting all the other details we could remember about that time.

When Kristin was 8 and I was 11 we went to Puerto Vallarta with our parents. It was the trip of a lifetime, at that time, and looking at the slides from that trip was as close to being back there as we could come. We'd laugh and fill in the details and almost feel the heavy humid air, warm rains that would fall every night and smell the scent of...Mexico.

Watching slides was more than just a good way to end a weekend, it was a way for our parents to get us out of our rooms and put us together - reminiscing our lives, which we hardly even realized were still just getting started. Laughing and looking at pictures together solidified those childhood events in our minds for a long, long time. We had our mom and our dad and often our grandma, in our home, together.

Besides the memories captured on slides, now the memories of watching the slides are among my favorite.