When I was growing up, my family lived next door to a perfect clan of six. My sister and I were the same age as their oldest two and so, despite growing apart in our high school years, we all still got together every year around the holidays for dinner. Celebrating Christmas a few days late with the Brady Bunch didn’t just alleviate the pains of letting distant relatives down, it also made you feel like you were on TV. And who doesn’t want to be on T.V.? Propped up and posed for the camera, laughing and cheersing each other.

It was during the most recent of these dinners that the youngest of my neighbor’s family, Tommy, began telling an anecdote about how he had managed to stay out far past his curfew when he was 16. He spun a tale of window leaping and tree branch swinging that would have made the Ringling Brothers look like they had muscular dystrophy.

What was more interesting than his fibbing at the dinner table was his willingness to do so. Here Tommy was, only a year after having committed the crime, and he was blurting out the trade secrets of teenager-hood to his parents. He’d taken a dossier of classified information and splayed it open to the Russians, to his mother, the Boris Yeltsin of adolescence.

Later, I asked him why:

“We have ‘free days’ ever since Sarah (his oldest sister) moved out,” he told me in confidence, over a beer in his snow-covered driveway. “When everyone is home for the holidays, we’re allowed to talk about whatever we want, admit to anything we’ve done, and my parents have agreed to not get mad about it. It’s gone, done, and they said we should all be relaxed on the holidays.” He took a last gulp of his beer and shoved a piece of gum in his mouth.

As a twenty-three year old, I’d hope that I’d be done hiding things from people as understanding as my parents. They know all of my bad habits: I go out drinking when I’m at home, I stay up late drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and they’ve caught me claiming I have doctor’s appointments to avoid visiting relatives more than a few times. That doesn’t make me proud of anything. The idea that little Tommy had a few days each year when he could unabashedly admit to any sort of wrongdoing was, to me, downright salacious. Even my recent break up with a long-term girlfriend was something I only shamefully admitted to when they finally asked where she was four days into my stay.

A week before the dinner at my neighbor’s, my dad interrupted a movie I was watching by dropping a box of photographic slides on my stomach.

“What the hell?” I coughed, the corner of the cardboard box still felt like it was drilling into my rib cage.

He had a smile the size of a sunrise on his face, “They’re the slides that we shot of you and your sister when you were little,” his mustache and slight belly rumbled with delight, as if he’d beat Indy to the Holy Grail. “Come to the living room and look. The colors are unlike anything I can get on any of our digital cameras.”

I considered explaining to him exactly why digital cameras will never compare to film, but quickly realized that he didn’t care about why; it was to be one of those awkward nights when you’re forced into bonding with everyone in the house.

I obliged. He already had a screen set up with the projector at the ready in the living room. To see exactly what the difference was, I brought my laptop, hoping to compare the pictures I’d been taking with a digital camera – which cost an entire summer of golf course slavery – to that of these relics from nearly twenty years ago.

He pulled a handful of slides out and stuffed them into the circular loading deck. At this point my sister and mom had gathered in the room, all four of us with drinks in hand and the sort of electric excitement that comes from rubbing your feet across the carpet of the bedroom you once called home.

The ensuing twenty minutes was what you’d expect in one of those rare best case scenarios. Everyone wasn’t just civil, but comical. Whenever there was a picture of one of the kids crying, my parents made fun of their own old haircuts; the ever-present naked baby pictures miraculously didn’t make it into the mix.

Neither did the pictures of my sister, recently hit by a car, close-ups of her bleeding head, arms, and legs to document the incident for the authorities.

The picture of my dad with the car packed, ready to leave my mom when I was four didn’t show up either. Though, with him loading the projector I’d suspect it had little to do with luck.

We came, finally, to a photograph of the front of the house. No doubt, it was twenty-five years old yet was still bursting with hues that no computer screen could produce. “You’ve got a picture of the house on there, don’t you?” my dad asked. Alas, he wanted to prove that his old Canon A-1, more tank than camera, was superior to any of my newfangled contraptions.

“Yeah, of course. I’ve got a few.” I lifted the screen open and casually clicked on my photo organizing program. The application opened across the entirety of the 15” screen. It sorted everything I’d shot for the past 3 years by “event,” displaying single photos and titles to represent all the photos taken on that occasion, in a grid pattern that produced a chronological mosaic. With my family cluttered around me, my screen screamed:

“Here is Jim’s sister, always camera shy, tongue stuck out and head turning away.”

“Here is Jim drunk at college.”

“Here is Jim’s friend riding a wheelie through a red light.”

“Here is Jim lying in bed with his ex.”

“Here is Jim’s failed attempt at being an artist.”

“Here is Jim and his girlfriend just before she broke up with him. They are both smiling.”

I scrolled past as fast as possible. Up to the top, the earliest, first pictures I’d taken with the camera. They were innocent, test shots to make sure the device worked. There sat our house, shining in a dense, humid, Chicago summer. Neighborhood kids were playing on one side of the photo and the neighbor who would host dinner a week later was mowing the lawn on the other.

I increased the brightness and held the computer up next to the projected film picture on our wall.

I turned to look for a response from my dad. From my mom. For someone to break the silence with a “You just can’t beat analog. I told ya!” And then they’d all heartily laugh and playfully jab each other on the shoulder, relishing in the antiquity and beauty of times and technologies forgotten. My mom would get up and ask who would like some coffee to go with the pie she’d baked. My sister would say, “Decaf, please,” and then offer to help her make up desert while my dad and I laughed about how nothing was quite like back when we were younger.

The best case scenario, the perfect scene that had been created for the night was gone, though. All three of them were looking into their glasses, now empty of spirits. Perhaps I’d paused for too long when her picture came up. Perhaps they didn’t expect my faults to be quite so well documented. Perhaps they saw the water welling up in my eyes.

That’s the worst thing about all this technology, all this moving faster and growing up. Only a few days a year, we get a “free time” period when everyone looks past it all. When you are free to avoid pulling your faults from that box.

But most of the time, you’re on full display. No matter how hard you try not to be. No matter how many times you go home and remind them that you’re fine. No matter how well you’re figuring out your new life so far away. There’s just no more box to leave things shoved away in. After a certain age, you have to look at a glowing screen of yourself, duller than reality, but actions perfectly documented all the same. There are no “free days” and there is no leaving of slides behind. There’s no avoiding one or two poor decisions.

Sometimes all you can do is listen to a tale, a fantasy, about “free days,” then pat your neighbor on the back, finish your beer, and look him in the eye. You just have to admit to him, “God. I wish…” then walk back into the warlike fray of pretended perfection when all you want to do is lie face down in the fresh, pure whiteness of winter in the Windy City.