Charles Bronson offed my father. He hid a bomb inside a bottle of red wine, and when it exploded, he gave my old man everlasting life. For this, I am eternally grateful.

The fateful moment occurred in 1987, about halfway through that woefully underappreciated masterpiece, "Death Wish 4: The Crackdown." Dad, who had spent his career working behind the scenes in TV and film, was the picture's production manager. When the director needed an Italian-looking man to a play a doomed Mafioso, one look at my father's Roman profile told him he had found his victim.

So there he is for a few glorious minutes and two short lines, "Kid, kid, get back in the kitchen" and "What the hell?" They cut his other dialogue, Dad said, because "I was stealing the scene." When American Movie Classics (I told you it was a great film) began showing "Death Wish 4" recently, I gathered my three daughters around the TV. There, in living color, they saw their late grandfather, whom they faintly remember and know through still photos and family lore.

"He's only acting," I assured them. "If he was really a gangster, we'd be rich!"

As I replayed the scene -- isn't DVR grand? -- I thought about my dad, of course. But I also considered the mind-bending breakthrough that this snippet of celluloid represents. We haven't found Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth, but we can enjoy the next best thing -- virtual immortality. All of us!

Not only will my children always have those few minutes of film of their Papa John, but so will their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on down the line. Ten thousand years from now, our descendants will be able to see and hear him -- wondering, no doubt, why he came to such a nasty end.

I'll have to film a little segment explaining the circumstances and include it among the boxes of DVDs chronicling my girls' lives: their earliest words and first steps, their toddler talents and elementary school view of life. Pure gold!

We take tradition's word for it

Here's the amazing thing: As our video cameras whirr away, we take it all for granted. In fact, our ability to preserve the past is nothing less than a radical transformation of history, a profound empowerment of memory that has been fueled by ambiguous scraps since the dawn of time.

Through most of history, only the famous were immortalized. They endured through written accounts -- that's how we know of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and Joan of Arc. Sculptures and paintings gave inklings of what dignitaries and a few anonymous plain-folk looked like. But these renderings were arbitrary, as much a reflection of their creators' eye as their subjects' countenance.

Even for history's stars, the gaps are wide. Scholars hold that we have no firsthand accounts of Jesus. We certainly don't know what he, Buddha or the Prophet Muhammad actually looked like.

And consider Shakespeare, whose 37 plays continue to shape how we look at the world and ourselves. Through his work, we understand his artistic mind. But we know little about the man.

Until the 1820s, we couldn't see what people truly looked like because there were no photographs. Until the 1860s and '70s, we couldn't hear what they sounded like because there were no recordings. Until the 1880s, we couldn't watch how they moved because there were no films. Before the 20th century, we had shards of knowledge about a handful of figures. Of the vast majority -- zilch.

My great-grandparents exist for me only in a few snapshots taken in their sunset years. I don't know what they looked like when they dared to leave their homes in Italy, Sweden, Denmark and England and come to America. I don't know what they sounded like, how they lived, what they thought, their favorite books, foods or sports. As for their parents -- they are only names on birth certificates.

'The Road Not Taken' is taken

For much of the past century, technological preservation was largely the reserve of the privileged few. We have extensive film and sound recordings of every president since Theodore Roosevelt. Where Washington's farewell to his troops and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address are only glorious words on the page, we can hear FDR's fireside chats and watch Richard Nixon resign.

We're told that the 19th-century star Edwin Booth played a mean Hamlet, but we can watch Laurence Olivier play the part -- forever. We can hear Bessie Smith sing, see Robert Frost read his poems and watch Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech.

For the rest of us, there are few records. The only film of me taken before I bought a video camera in 1997 when my first child was born is a few minutes from a silent home movie my aunt made when I was 4. I'm the tow-headed nut punching the clown.

Imagine if you could watch films of your ancestors from 100, 200 or 300 years ago -- walking, talking images of people we know only through unreliable family stories or simply as names and dates on silent tombstones.

We can't. Thanks to affordable video cameras, we don't have to suffer the fate of the forgotten. Like ageless gods, even the humblest can live on in hi-def glory.

Next time you break out the camera, look good, sound smart, try to crack a joke. And don't be like my mother, who's always turning her head, putting her hand over her face.

Get ready for your close-up -- it's going to last.

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