Settle in. Throw a bag of Orville’s in the microwave. Close the curtains, dim the lights. Get comfortable. It’s time for... (drum roll, please...) home movies!

Actually, it’s not time. And that’s probably a good thing, since watching other people’s home movies is about as much fun as being stuck in your house for three months, baking bread, eating bread, and having the bathroom scale mock you with bread-related insults (“Yo, muffin top!”). Instead of subjecting you to that, I’ll just tell you why I have been watching home movies and why I can’t show them to you.

(Editor’s note: While you will not be subject to home movies (be thankful), you should prepare yourself for a very tangential explanation. And while I’ve got your attention, let me propose “tangential” as the word of 2020. According to the Google dictionary, tangential means: “diverging from a previous course or line; erratic.” Think random dots that we’ve been frantically trying to connect in order to find some sort of pattern or meaning.)

It all started with Bobby Bones. If you don’t know who that is, you obviously aren’t a country music fan or a Dancing with the Stars aficionado. His main claim to fame (wow, that rhymes!) is a popular syndicated morning show on country radio stations. His un-main claim to fame is that, with a huge fan base, a modicum of talent, and buckets of enthusiasm, he managed to win DWTS in season 27. Yeah, I know - I was rooting for Milo Manheim too.

I’ll just tell you why I have been watching home movies and why I can’t show them to you.

I’m familiar with Bobby Bones not because of his fancy footwork but because of my wife’s ability to wrap me around her little finger. (Prepare for a tangent.) As recently as three years ago, I hated country music. When asked what kind of music I like, my answer has always been: Everything but country. I liked rap more than country. I liked opera more than country. I liked Yanny more than country. Anything but (yuck!) country!

Until my loving wife set out to change that by launching a highly strategic propaganda campaign to lure me into the twangy, achy-breaky, grab your cowboy hat and let’s go two-steppin’ world of scorned women, neon moons, and cheatin’ hearts. Through a clever, painful, yet surprisingly effective immersion program (kind of a hick, musical version of Berlitz), she managed to convert me. To the point that country is now what I listen to in my pickup when I roll my windows down, turn the radio up... and cruise. I’m an unabashed fan of Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett, Old Dominion, et. al. Pretty sad, right? How the mighty have fallen.

Anyway... the point here is that he - country station phenom, Bobby Bones - recently began advertising for something called Legacy Box. While this is not a plug for that service, it is a description of it. Legacy Box converts old movies, videos, slides, etc, into digital formats so you can actually watch them.

(Editor’s note: You were warned that this would be a tangential journey. And... boy, is it.)

Thinking this sounded kind of great, I got my dad a Legacy Box for Father’s Day. Which motivated him to dig a bunch of Super 8s out of the crawlspace. He hasn’t sent anything off yet, so I can’t vouch for Legacy Box’s conversion skills. But I did borrow a few of the reels, along with his old projector and, with expectations running sky high, sat down in the living room the other day and spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out how to thread the stupid projector. It was maddening! When I finally got the d....ang thing to work, I was rewarded with about an hour of really herky-jerky, poorly lit, amazingly fuzzy home movies! I bet you wish you’d been there!

Thankfully, my memories are (mostly) intact and while Fran squinted at the little square of light and said things like, “What is that? Is that person? Was that a dog? Was that Bigfoot? Can you get that hair off the screen?”, I was entranced, my mind swirling with vivid scenes from my childhood.

Go ahead and pop that corn, pull the blinds, and pretend that the following is a janky, glitchy, out of focus Super 8 movie with no sound, but plenty of happy, technocolor memories.

According to the film log, which was meticulously kept by my father, one of the reels contained a segment featuring a place called Warm Springs. There are probably lots of Warm Springs around, but this particular Warm Springs was a Shangri-La outside of Las Vegas. As in Nevada. We lived in Vegas (aka “Sin City”) for a while when I was a kid and we visited Warm Springs during the summers. Seeing it listed there on the Super 8 log, I had this great idea: Why not sidestep Legacy Box, shoot that segment with my iPhone, make a little video out of it, and share it with the world! Turns out Warm Springs only got about 12 seconds of screen time, most of it “Is that a swimming pool or another shot of the cat?” level of quality.

This was disappointing until, moments later, I recalled writing about Warm Springs a number of years ago for a sort of memoirish collection of essays. And after a brief Dropbox search (Dropbox being the modern-day crawlspace), I found it!

So go ahead and pop that corn, pull the blinds, and pretend that the following is a janky, glitchy, out of focus Super 8 movie with no sound, but plenty of happy, technocolor memories.

Warm Springs

You’d think that much water bursting out of the ground in the middle of one of the most godforsaken deserts on earth would be a simple thing to find. But if I had a map here beside me right now, I don’t think I could say which direction it was from the city, toward this or that state line, up or down, past Hoover Dam or up to Tonopah, just that it was a long, long ways from home.

The ride out there was eternity itself. At least, I thought so. After all the getting ready, packing coolers with pops and ice and hard boiled eggs, and gathering towels, and making sure everybody had their bathing suits and flip-flop shoes, when we finally climbed into the car and started out, time stopped. The wheels of the car hummed, Mom and Dad looked out the front like there was something other than sand and sagebrush to see, and I sat in the back with my sister on a sticky vinyl bench seat, anticipation cutting at my insides like a knife.

We drove and drove and I tried not to think of what was coming, but always failed: the big pool with the gravely bottom, the pipes feeding it with warm water, the palm trees stretched out over it like umbrellas, hiding it from the angry Nevada sun, the shady stream that led up to the spring itself where you could sit under the falls like a king and look at the world through a sheen of curling water. It smelled like summer.

Sitting all anxious and ready, I tried not to think of how we’d swim until our fingers and toes were shriveled like pale raisins, how we’d get so hungry diving for sunken treasure that we’d be trembling by the time Mom opened the ice chest and handed out tuna salad sandwiches that were so cold they hurt out teeth when we chewed them. And how we’d drink black cherry soda and laugh and spend our hour out of the pool exploring the stream, which we were convinced was the most dangerous place on earth, next to the Amazon, inhabited by crocodiles and sharks and electric eels.

Sitting in that backseat, time frozen solid, I’d close my eyes and tell myself to push from my mind the big splash contest we’d have in the deep end, how I’d do a cannonball, then my patented forty-five to send water droplets halfway to the moon. And how we’d sit out to cool off and talk about how we’d like to move here and build a house on this very spot, and have the pool be our living room and have to swim to the front door. And we’d stay there always, wrinkled and wet and happy.

Sitting there in the car, waiting on forever, I’d shake my head at the feelings of sadness that I knew would come up when the sun finally began its return trip to earth and we had to start thinking of packing things up. I’d drink another pop - a cream soda this time - and leap back into the water, wishing I could hold my breath and sit on the bottom and count the pebbles till there was no more talk of leaving. And when I came up for air, I’d push back my diving mask and hurry up to the falls to put my hand into that perfect curl one last time. And as I watched it account for my presence and felt it tickling my fingers, and listened to the constant flow of water and the breeze rustling the palms and the distant sounds of giggling and leisure, I’d look around me, half expecting to see God himself, because I’d found heaven.

Sitting there in the backseat, pained at how long it was taking to get there, I’d try desperately not to think of having to go back, of having Mom wrap the flowered beach towel around me, of carrying things to the stifling hot car, gravel crunching under our flip-flops, and of the trip home, where I’d fall asleep, exhausted, spent, dreaming of the next time we got to come.

Sitting there, driving, driving, driving to wherever it was - north, south, east or west - I’d look at my sister and pray to myself that someday there would be no end to it, that time would quit working while we were there, instead of on the way, that things would stay put, that it would keep on being summer and we’d go on jumping and splashing and hollering, eating cold food in the shade, and we’d be together in Warm Springs forever.

Okay, you can open the blinds now. (Heavy sigh...) I gotta to figure out how to rewind this d...ang thing!