"What other people think of you is none of your damn business."
- overheard at a 12-step meeting in north Arkansas
When she returned from attending the funeral of a friend in south Arkansas, she reported to me, not so much to my surprise as to my amazement, that the 'ski trip video' came up in conversation - came up 18 years after the incident occurred.
We were a collection of kids and youth who called ourselves The Redbug Ski Club. Every spring we loaded up the buses, often with another church group, and journeyed to Colorado. We skied the greens, blues, and blacks of Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Crested Butte, and even Wolf Creek, and ended up with a pretty fair group of snow skiers.
One year on a trip to Winter Park I brought along a cumbersome Magnavox VHS camera to record some of the action and make a few memories for the kids - I did not, and could not, fathom at the time the full extent of the memory formation which was to take place. This was back in analog days so we gathered at the end of day, tired but elated, and hooked up the camera to the television in one of the condos to watch the day's footage, uncensored, unpreviewed and unedited.
On this particular day I was filming the kids one by one as they skied toward me down a gentle green slope. When the last skier from the first group passed me, I turned off the camera and let in hang down at my side next to my hip while I waited for the next group to dismount the ski lift and make their way toward me - I should say, I thought I turned off the camera. What we saw that night on the television in the condo was a long segment of video that captured the snow around my feet, the tops of my boots and the tips of my skis - footage captured while I believed, wrongly, the camera and its super-sensitive microphone were switched off. The audience began to chide me good-naturedly for my lack of technical savvy. Then it happened. It came upon us like a thief in the night, unexpected and surprising. It had the clarity of a church bell at midnight.
It was, medically speaking, a flatus. Its length, tonal quality, and volume were impressive. It sounded like something that had been professionally produced in a sound-effects chamber. There was no confusion about what we all had heard together for the first time and at the same time.
The room fell silent as the stunned Redbugs gaped at the TV screen and at each other. Then, in the amazed quietness, I bleated out, reflexively, the only words that came to mind in that instant: "It wasn't me."
The room exploded. Youth and adults, literally, rolled on the floor clutching their sides with tears rolling down their cheeks. Our intern minister David Eaton fell out of the stool he was sitting on. The hysteria continued unabated for the better part of a half hour. Even in the darkness of our charted Greyhound barrelling down I70 toward home, a chortle here and a giggle there would break the silence. When we arrived back in Fordyce, it was the first tale told. My son was ten years old then, and would regale his friends, and anyone who came to the house for that matter, with the lurid VHS tape of his father's gastric misadventure, until, mercifully, the magnetic tape finally wore out and the whole nasty incident fell into the oral tradition. I am thankful that the whole slew of embarrassing home video shows loaded with crotch shots and fainting grooms had not started airing yet.
Two years later I was the guest of a communications class at the high school talking with the students about public speaking and effective communication. After I had shared all of my wisdom on the subject, the teacher opened the floor for questions. A sixteen year old girl I had never seen before in my life stood up and asked, "Was you the preacher that farted on that video?" I think she was Missionary Baptist.
Legacies are tricky business. Politicians and other public figures talk about their legacies as though describing pottery making. The real footprints we leave, however, are of a different nature than what we want on the official record. They consist of what we think of as fairly small things - the accidents and missteps, the gaffes, the slips of the tongue, the moments of both humor and pathos, both true magnanimity and gross self-centeredness, the word of grace offered unselfconsciously, the averted gaze, the tender mercies both given and received.
"Yes," I answered, "that was me. And if anyone in your life claims to be beyond such things, preacher or not, don't believe a word they say."
