Grandmaman the living time capsule

This weekend, I was in Ottawa (just outside) visiting my grandmother who was down from Temiskaming, staying with my aunt. I started filming a bunch of clips of my grandmaman with the idea in my head that she was 94 years old and would soon pass; and that it would be nice to have some video memories of her telling her stories, so that I could give them to my father after she passes away.

Below is my grandmmaman telling us a story about my aunt Joanne discovering pony penises @ the fair when she was 4 years old.


Vimeo

As I was filming her... I had some interesting thoughts going through my head about what exactly I was doing... What she was doing and why and how I was doing what I was doing. As I listened to her tell stories about my father and his sisters when they were young, one of the things that flashed in my head was that she has over 94 years of memories and experiences captured in her head. All recorded up there in her fleshy hard drive. She was a living, walking and talking archive of what it was like to live in the 20's, 30;s 40's 50's... she's a living, walking and talking timpe capsule from an era gone bye. And it occurred to me as I was doing this was that as I was filming, instead of being fully there listening to her stories ( I was listening though), I was very intent and preoccupied with recording and capturing the moment instead of being there in the moment with her as she recounted her life. It seemed to me that in my generation and I guess in this whole blogging/vloging world there are so many people who are more concerned with actually capturing moments than actually living them. We spend our time walking around with cameras, cell phones with cameras and video cameras capturing everything that goes on around us, instead of actually living, observing and experiencing what is going on around us with our own 5 senses. It seems to me that with these capture devices we are in some how removing ourselves one step from the experience; like we are putting a filter between us and the experiences. However, that being said, the actual act of filming and photographing is in itself an experience which we are living; so .... I don't know maybe I'm talking out of my ass.
All that being said, going back to my grandmother, I just got the impression that all of her memories were still so vivid and still so real. She didn't need to capture them, she lived them; and living those experiences was the best form of capturing that we could hope for.