Thursday, February 22, 2018

A Different Kind of Memory Day


A request went out a few weeks ago for a video for the upcoming March 7 Memory Day. I started out this morning to make a video for it, but ran into a snag right away.

I wanted to use photos and the music from the video I have of Jim and his brother, Bill, singing “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” Of course, I had no idea how to make a new video with the music from the other one. Harold decided to help, but it wasn’t long before we discovered my program did not have the option to separate sound from the video, but Harold’s did.

Anyway, by the time we got to rolling on the project, we were working on Harold’s pc and he had a limited amount of photos to use. To make a long story shorter, the project took a new turn and instead of being a video of Memory Day, it became a memory day as we selected photos to add to the project.

We organized the photos to begin with the ones of Jim in Vietnam, followed by the one of Jim and me in Hawaii. Of course, we had to have Jim with his guitar. I loved that we had the photo my mom took of Jim on the beach in Oregon. That is one of the photos on the cover of Alzheimer’s Anthology of Unconditional Love.

One of the important things to me was to have the photo of Whitney when Jim began to sing about “silver girl.” This photo was taken of Whitney’s performance during the Miss Pettis County contest. She said that she felt her Grandpa Jim’s presence with her while she played her ukulele and sang an Elvis song.

The video ends with some photos at the Veteran’s Cemetery in Higginsville. The inscription on Jim’s stone says “Rest High on That Mountain.” We scattered some of Jim’s ashes in a spot he designated in his beloved Rocky Mountains. The photo we chose was one of Jim’s favorite spots in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Like Whitney, sometimes I feel Jim’s presence. It makes my heart happy to watch the old videos and to hear his voice. Jim spent a lot of time treading troubled waters during his lifetime. Vietnam changed his life when he was young and dementia struck when he should have had many more years for his dreams to come true. All he really dreamed of was spending time with family and traveling across country to visit the mountains and commune with nature. He used to talk to the crows in Moraine Park, but now he flies with the eagles.

So today was an early “memory day” for me. The video is different from what it started out to be, but it turned out exactly as it should have. 

Copyright © February 2018 by L.S. Fisher

#ENDALZ 

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