Happy there’s no ending to this old home movie that took me by surprise

Fullerian researchers made a major discovery last week: I wasn’t adopted after all.

Claiming I was adopted was just one of the ways my brothers and sisters tormented me through childhood. I was the youngest and, let’s face it, most special. They didn’t like that. They got me back with “You’re adopted, you know.”

Adopted! I felt the tragic weight of it. No real family of my own. My whole life, all 60 to 72 months of it, spent living a lie. I demanded proof. They had it. “Ever notice there aren’t any pictures of you when you were a baby?” Check and mate. I had nothing to counter with. Of course, there weren’t a lot of photos of anybody back then. I wish I knew that at the time.

As the youngest, I was not only the cutest but the easiest to pick on. My brothers were fooling around in the kitchen one summer day, mixing things from the cupboard when they called me over.

“Try some beer,” they said. I didn’t know that beer wasn’t supposed to be red and usually didn’t come in a shot glass. “Suck it back!” they said.

I had to impress them. I sucked it back. It was a glass of Tabasco sauce. I don’t remember what happened after that. I imagine the brewmasters scattered to the wilds of the riverbank to hide out. In a just world, our father would have tracked them down and done horrible things to them — assuming he wasn’t laughing too hard.

But who gets the last laugh now? My sister looked in a box a while back and found an exposed and developed reel of Super 8 film. She didn’t know she had it, didn’t know whose it was.

Thus the discovery: Film of a baby, mere weeks old, getting baptized. Oh, he’s adorable, this sleepy and clearly unadopted baby yawning and twitching and frowning adorably and being so much more adorable in general than any child before or since, particularly the ones in his immediate family.

Archivists have issued a preliminary report, excerpted below:

“We are confident this material is as rare and valuable as the Zapruder Film, though not quite as disturbing.

“The conspiracy theorists may ask ‘could this have been staged?’ Not likely. The girls in their white dresses and boys in their period-correct starchy church-shirts could not be duplicated.”

After the church scene, there’s a sudden shift to the Fuller home.

From the report: “All five older children are posing on the chesterfield, showing obvious affection for the new member of the family. One of the boys — the future ringleader of the Tabasco beer assault — is ‘hamming it up’ for the camera, making funny faces and striking a muscle man pose. Even at this early stage, he senses a shift in the family dynamic and must fight for attention with such an adorable, adorable little brother in the house.”

It goes without saying that I can’t watch this film without crying — not because so much had changed but because of the miracle that so much hasn’t. Gratitude over sadness. Our parents are gone. It would have been their wedding anniversary this week. But their kids are still here, amazingly in the same city, and the DNA of us is embedded in every frame.

As stories go, we know everything that happened to this point, and we’ve been as favoured by fate as it would be reasonable to hope. The old home movie is short and ends abruptly, but I like that there’s no ending. I don’t want an ending. I don’t want to find out what happens.

Also, I don’t want my brothers and sisters to read this because I know what they’re going to say:

“You can baptize adopted babies, too, you know.”