What We Lost When We Stopped Making Home Movies

Icame to a jarring realization sometime last year. Thumbing through family videos on my iPhone, which really reside not on my iPhone but inside an ethereal cabinet whose key is kept in Cupertino, I grasped that I possess only several-second clips of our son’s march through childhood.

There he is crawling clumsily. There he is laughing at my funny noises. Walking. Reading. Duckpin bowling. Telling a joke. Opening birthday presents. Reciting lines at his school play.