Over the Labor Day weekend, my wife and I ventured north to Upstate North Dakota to celebrate a few birthdays and hang out with family. A journey we have made countless times over the past 30 years or so. Countless times that seem to count more and more as many of us are fast approaching, or are, of the high-mileage sort. So it goes.

Sunday night, my brother Gabe decided to roll back the odometer a few years and cued up some old family videos on the big screen. First stop, Christmas Eve 1986, at Grandpa and Grandma Ellis’s house in Lignite…Grandpa Fritz’s last Christmas. I suppose there always must be a last for most everything and everyone, as that is the nature of it all.

Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase, “To infinity and beyond,” although useful in rallying Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Rex, and Hamm for a harrowing mission to rescue Woody from Al’s Toy Barn, is wildly optimistic for us finite human types.

The images from the past that we were watching had been advanced through the years from Betamax to VHS to DVD, and perhaps someone someday will move them to The Cloud and beyond the beyonds of anything that we can currently fathom.

I know I sound like a crotchety old skeptic when I say, “I don’t trust The Cloud,” but I don’t trust The Cloud. I can hold a Betamax, a VHS, a DVD in my hand…I can write “Farting Around with Family June 1991” directly on them so when people beyond me stumble across them they know exactly what they’ve stumbled across.

Unless, of course, someone along the way, in a desperate, frenzied moment, taped over “Farting Around with Family June 1991” with an episode of MacGyver or a Lee Greenwood music video (to hold them over until their Columbia Records shipment arrived). Both forgivable offenses in the disruption of the farting around to infinity and beyond time and space continuum.

Betamax, VHS, DVD…you can use them to prop up a shelf, steady a wobbly table, whack your little brother…try that with The Cloud. Clouds breeze in and breeze out with nary a trace of their former existence. As do we…eventually…but at least Betamax, VHS, and DVD give us a modicum of hope that somewhere in a galaxy far, far away someone will pull us out of a tattered Skechers Shape-Ups shoebox and see us. See the image that once cast a shadow on this earth and hear the voice that once shouted obscenities at The Cloud.

I suppose that it is true that The Cloud won’t clutter up landfills to infinity and beyond, but what are we supposed to do with all those empty Skechers Shape-Ups shoeboxes? You can’t keep a cloud in a shoebox…a fart in a Pringles can…that’s a different story.

As the family sat around watching the past bounce around shrouded in poor lighting…lighting that is desirable now to blur the ravages of time and the elements…it was nice to have all who have gone among us again. Sporting events, birthdays, holidays, and the general day-to-day stuff of day-to-day family life…good stuff.

To finitude…and a bit beyond.