one of the things missing in my life when i was a child was a television. not that it was missing in a negative sort, since i'm actually quite thankful now that i grew up without it, but its absence from our lives then seemed to be just another deafening roar that our poverty made to everyone else in the county. it was so embarrassing to have friends over, to watch them stare questioningly into the corner where the tv should have been, a cold draft from the outdoors causing the nearest curtain to flutter uncomfortably.
the story goes that my old man threw the tube out the 2nd floor window when my brothers ignored his calls to come help with some work outside, just one time too many. legend also has it that my mom was just pulling in to the house, probably in a silver '67 Chrysler, when that Zenith '76 came crashing to its sad demise in the driveway. thereon, RD2 Box 9 was sadly and conspicuously absent of that amazingly comforting high pitched whistle that accompanied the powering up of the boob tube in every other home in America. my father then became so incensed with the concepts of television and so certain that it was the demon in the den and the demise of society that he even tried to start a "non-tv society" which pretty much went over well exactly nowhere in the continental United States, but he did at least make it quasi-official by plastering a serious looking banner across the other set of family wheels at the time, a tow truck, no less.
so, there we were. my brothers and i riding our bikes to the public library twice a week, all of us filling up a brown paper grocery bag - also of the days of old - with as many books as our bike baskets could carry. when it was time to come in for the night, after our homework was done, after running ourselves snot-ragged over the hills and cliffs and forests and trees and rivers and limping or carrying our busted selves home, oft times we all sat around the fireplace (it was too cold in those days to hang out upstairs in the bedrooms in winter) and read. our parents were still learning English then, so every once in a while, pops would look up and ask, from behind his MAGNIFYING glass, "шта значи реч 'conspiratorial'?" and one of us would have to explain it.
these days, i happen to be mildly obsessed with 30 Rock, House Hunters International, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, but man do i still ever HATE tv.
