There is something that contains my vivid childhood days. It is a video tape recorded by the camcorder that Dad purchased about twenty years ago. Since the appearance of smart phones, the camcorder had been placed out of sight for a long time and the tape identification device didn’t work. I was curious about the videos in it, so I found a company that converts the video into a digital file.
A week later, the flash drive that contains the videos arrived at home. All my family members gathered in front of TV with excitement and played the video. My whole body was dark because of the sunburn, my younger sister whose teeth had fallen out, and my youngest sister who had just been a year old. Seeing our childhood days in the video, we could not help but giggle. How childish our deeds were! Seeing three of us dancing with no music as we pleased, we all burst into laughter.
The problem was that our bad deeds were also caught as they were. Squabbling over a toy, crumpling the home-study materials just because we didn’t want to do that, spilling water without compunction and so on. My younger sisters were just kids who didn’t even enter school yet, so they looked cute at all their behaviors, but it put me to blush at the indiscreet deeds of me, who was an elementary school student. Not to speak of talking to adults with an ugly nature, I even dropped my youngest sister on the floor after carrying her on my back, and made my sisters cry for nothing.
My past deeds that I wanted to deny spread before my eyes. I needlessly read my mom’s mind at the scene where I acted irritated, looking angrily at the camcorder. But Mom looked just happy, watching it. She was all smiles for every scene, repeating saying, “Oh, so cute,” or “So pretty.” She even said with delight, “I miss those days. It was when you all acted pretty most.” It seemed Mom’s memories were made more beautiful than real things.
In our spare time, we gathered together to watch the video. When we finished watching the eleven-hour video, I asked my mom about which scene was the most impressive. The video contains many memories, including the national holidays we had spent with Mom’s deceased father, and summer holidays we had with our relatives as well as our family’s daily life. Mom thought over for a while and chose the scene where my youngest sister came to her, weeping and buried her face in her knees. The reason was simple.
“It’s because she needed me.”
Now I can see why our naughty childhood remains in her memory as the days when we looked most adorable. We, in the video, used to call Mom while riding a bike, while dancing joyfully, and while rubbing our sleepy eyes after waking up. Because Mom was always our number one, she must have been most satisfied and pleased with those days. In actuality, however, she must have been most exhausted while taking care of three indiscreet children in those days.
Now that we’ve all grown up, I ask myself about what is number one in my mind. Though we’ve grown up physically, we should always seek Mom just as we did in our childhood days so that these days, too, can remain in Mom’s memory as another beautiful scene.