![\"Dad_and_thomas\"](\"http:\/\/chrisschroder.typepad.com\/.shared\/image.html?\/photos\/uncategorized\/2007\/11\/12\/dad_and_thomas.jpg\" "\\"Dad_and_thomas\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I was 10 and 11, I would host \u201cmovie nights\u201d for my family, setting up a theater in our basement and playing the old newsreels. Eventually, the films were tossed in an old box in my dad\u2019s tool room, left there to languish for a couple of decades.<\/p>\n
One night, near the end of his life, Dad walked into my brother Jack\u2019s house for dinner, shoved the box toward him and said, \u201cHere, you\u2019ll know what to do with these.\u201d And he did. <\/p>\n
This past Christmas, Jack gave each of us a videotape. <\/p>\n
The films had been edited and enhanced with two new dimensions. He had the images set to appropriate music \u2013 ranging from the wistful sounds of \u201cTitanic\u201d and \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d to \u201950s and \u201960s rock \u2019n\u2019 roll classics \u2013 and provided a modest level of voice-over introductions.<\/p>\n
During the holidays, I watched the film with my two teenage children, who are somewhat disconnected from my side of the family because they now live in Charlotte, N.C., with my ex-wife. I usually struggle to find activities on our weekends that will interest all three of us. But they were transfixed. Somewhere between the then-rare color footage of my parents\u2019 1939 wedding, the scenes of me carrying cats and footballs as a toddler and awkward moments of my sisters greeting their dates, my kids grasped a better understanding of who are all these people who gather at our overwhelmingly large family parties.<\/p>\n
Most amazing to us all was the life we lived in the ridges overlooking the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s. Dad spent hours each week driving the children to school and then going to work at Emory University. He loved the long commute down Riverside Drive and Johnson\u2019s Ferry \u2013 seeing only one or two houses before he got to Roswell Road. As the family grew older, he reluctantly agreed to move us back into Buckhead. But we all knew how much he loved his little Eden, now covered with modern homes in a development called North Harbor in Sandy Springs.<\/p>\n
Watching the videotape, the kids were getting antsy as it wound on through beach trips, traditional Thanksgiving Day walks and the introductions of my brothers\u2019 wives, but a little treasure awaited them at the end. Before he had put the movie camera up on a shelf for the last time, Dad arranged for the recording of one last scene.<\/p>\n
My children and I watched as Dad lifted a glass of champagne and offered a welcoming kiss to a woman who would become my wife \u2013 and a few years later, their mother. They fell silent, but I could tell that Dad\u2019s decades-long filmmaking hobby had, in just a couple of seconds, recorded a moment that will help them feel a part of a family, no matter how distant we may seem.<\/p>\n
Photo: My father, Jack Spalding Schroder, with my son, Thomas Spalding Schroder
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