Video Evidence

One of my favorite TV shows is King of Queens. Michelle likes it too. There are traits about the two main characters, Doug and Carrie, that hit very close to home- and so it’s funnier to us than it might be to most.
In one episode, Doug hosted a reunion of his high school football team in his home, and the war stories began. It isn’t long before the coach mentioned the "big play" that won the "big game" and Doug started to light up. As the coach continued to give a dramatized retelling, Doug remembered the play clearly and how he saved the day- it was one of the highlights of his life. Then the coach concludes the story by attributing the play to someone else on the team.

While the reunion continued downstairs, Doug spent the next few hours upstairs scouring the attic for the video tape he knew his mom had made of the game.

When he found it and played it for everyone, it clearly showed someone else making the big play, and Doug was confused and crushed. He remembered so well making the play, but the video showed otherwise. Later we learn that Doug wore the wrong jersey at the game that day and had in fact made the play. I noticed, as did the characters on the show, that the video of the play was no where near as exciting as the version the coach had told just a couple hours before.

During a recent home-movie night, we pulled out a DVD featuring our family life from 1996. As soon as it started, Michelle and I remembered clearly what was to come- we were at my parent’s house in Gaithersburg Maryland and a significant snow storm hit. The day after the storm we had gone outside with our two girls K (3 yrs at the time) and L (1 yr) to go sledding and a terrible accident had occurred.

At least that’s what Michelle and I remembered. We paused the DVD and told the now older accident victims K & L, and the two more recent additions to the family that weren’t in existence at the time, A & R, to watch closely because coming up was a terrible sledding incident where my parents dog ran out in front of the fast-running sled and was run over causing an epic wipeout. We told them I was pulling K & L very fast in the sled, and Ringo (the dog) was run over, the sled tipped, and both baby girls tumbled out at great speeds into the deep snow.

We watched the video together and the big scene started. There I was pulling the sled at a reasonable speed, then Ringo made his appearance. The action started- the sled bumped into Ringo and he backed out of the way and sat down, the sled started to slowly tip, and out popped the two little girls into about six inches of snow. They started to howl and scream in the cold snow and then the camera shows me running to pick them up.

We sat there watching the boring video for a second longer and then our youngest, R, asked “was that it?”







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