"A Tour of Brer's Room 1997"

I had completely forgotten about this film until my brother John reminded me of it. The year was 1997, and he had recently got a new camcorder. We were all young and alive, then: Mom was alive; Pop was alive; Mike was alive; and those of us who weren’t alive hadn’t been born yet. True, Nanny had recently passed away, but even Omi was still alive and would be for the next three years. Kelsey and Elijah had been born, and Kaitlyn was coming in December (now she has a kid of her own, and another one on the way). It was just me, Mom, and Pop at the old homestead on Loop Drive; I was getting paid by the Gummint to take care of Mom (having done so unofficially for years) and had a little income for the first time in a decade and was starting to buy books and toys again. Items I was inordinately proud of.

Two aspects of this film rather embarrass me now. One is that in that blue shirt I look rather like a tethered balloon. I still have a prominent pot belly, but then I must have been verging on 380 pounds. Lucky I had my trollish strength, which is now almost completely gone.

The other is that I keep saying ‘Tolkine’ instead of Tolkien. I know I must have seen the proper pronunciation somewhere by then, but I’d been saying it since seventh grade, and it was a hard habit to break. In my defense, to quote Marge Simpson, “[I’d] only ever seen it written down!”

Oh, and I keep strangling my speech somewhere down in my throat. This is brought on by a combination of camera shyness (though this was only meant to be seen among family) and an attempt to show off at the same time; in short, a half-assed attempt to present myself, to ‘act’ .

A Tour of Brer's Room 1997 - YouTube

My ‘Cave of Wonders’ was basically my bedroom in the back, the same room that had been (successively) the guest room, the sick room, the toy room, and Susan’s room before it was mine. This was the room where a ghost hit me when I was lying sick of a fever and where an entity claiming to be Omi tried to lure John out the window. For a long time, the Little Hoofer haunted the closet until Pop took him out and burned him on the trash pile, and it was here that we ran our famous Haunted House for our cousins. As you can see, it was a place of lore and legends. I loved to lay down there in the evening, light off and window open, and listen to wind sighing through the ash trees. Those trees are now long gone themselves, part of that vanished world.

Well, here it is, a random slice of my old world, which of course I considered the new world then, and little dreamed how things would change over the next twenty-seven years. I was a mere 34  at the time and hadn’t even written any Elf & Bear yet. I see how dumb and naïve (innocent? No-one is innocent) I was, and how lazy. Well, I’m still pretty lazy, and how can you judge just how naïve you are now until experience wises you up a little? Life, as they say, can only be lived in one direction. I was still buying books at Hastings and through a Bargain Books catalog; it would be years before I was introduced to the internet and to Amazon and a wider, deeper, older realm of reading became available to me. Memory tells me that I was often annoyed by Mom and Pop and Mike, though it fills me now with rue. I would give almost anything to be annoyed by them again, if only for a little while.