book trailer for Get Lucky

Get Lucky is a novel about many different things, but one of them is sisters.

I have two sisters, myself–I’m the middle one–and so I know a lot about the subject.

Here’s a book trailer I made using my mom’s Super 8 home movies of us as children.  The redhead who’s working so hard on her cartwheels is my big sister.  The blondie scampering all around is me.  And that sweet little baby with those gorgeous big eyes is my little sister.

I cannot watch this video without tears coming to my eyes.

[BlueTube]YVTCPNlvnwY[/BlueTube]

And I have written quite a bit about these videos–both in essays and fiction.  Here’s an excerpt from Everyone Is Beautiful when the main character’s mother sends her their old family home movies in the mail:

I was mesmerized by the movies, there in the living room.  Sam was still on my hip, and the boys were still in the kitchen.  I suspected they’d found the boxes of maxi-pads and panty liners that I’d bought at the store and were now sticking them to every surface in the kitchen.  But it was okay.  Wasteful, but okay.  Sometimes I was willing to shell out a box of maxi pads for a few minutes to myself.

I watched the DVDs for almost fifteen minutes.  I saw my parents bringing me home from the hospital, my mother cradling me in a yellow blanket, my father holding me on his lap and reading the paper.  I watched our first cat, Liberace—a pet I only remembered from pictures.  I hadn’t seen these movies in years.  When we were younger, back before the Super 8 projector broke, we used to make popcorn and watch them on the wall of my parents’ bedroom.  I don’t remember once ever feeling sad or melancholy or lost during those movie nights.  Back then, it was just fun. We’d tease each other and throw popcorn at our old selves.

Now, the movies had me in tears.  Of course, the timing wasn’t great.  And the company that had transferred the reels to the DVDs had added a wistful musical score that really emphasized the passage of time and how all things fade and die.  And the flickering, ethereal quality of the images made it my childhood seem so dated, so vintage—it was as if it existed in a past so distant that I’d never be able to reach it again.  Which, of course, was true.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

It really is amazing how the past disappears.  I can remember what it felt like to be that little person, but I can’t, of course, be that person anymore.

And the tension between what you lose as you leave your childhood behind and what you gain as you grow up and become your own person really captures my imagination.


And as for my sisters, the close childhood I spent with them remains to this day the standard I use to judge all closeness.