I spend a lot of my time trying to educate my body regarding the difference between “in my 50s” and “dead.”
One way I do this is by using my lunch hour at work to visit the company fitness center. I try to do this five days a week. Occasionally I succeed.
Today, though, my wife and I spent the lunch hour at my son’s school. It was their annual week-before-Thanksgiving-Thanksgiving lunch. I ate turkey, mashed potatoes and ice cream, all washed down with the traditional Thanksgiving strawberry milk. All of this is food I never eat, unless it’s a special occasion or I feel like it.
So I didn’t get to work out today. To make up for that and all the forbidden food, I spent half an hour on the treadmill we keep at home down in the Beatle Room for just such occasions.
As I trod the mill, I remoted my way through the 60-odd channels we pull in on the little TV we keep down there.
In the previous sentence, you should emphasize the word “odd.”
On one, a man and a woman from some alien species were selling a machine that they guaranteed would make you just as thin and hard as they were.
A sincere young man was saying something important to a lovely young woman in a room furnished only with a sofa. I don’t know what he was saying, since it was in Spanish, which I no hablo.
Bill Clinton was on the all-news channel, opening his new library in the rain. Hillary was there, too, not running for president.
I watched a few minutes of “Joey” who is no “Friends” of mine.
The Classic Movie Channel was living up to its name with the scene where Claudette Colbert wears Clark Gable’s bathrobe as she waits in line for a shower.
Eventually I flipped all the way to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The skit featured an interview with a character named Harry “Snapper” Organ.
And so, class, we see that Monty Python were famous not only for their wit and inventiveness, but for their complete lack of shame. A valuable lesson for us all.
As I write this, my wife and son are upstairs watching the big TV, which gets even more channels. The one they’re watching right now is showing a man who is undergoing multiple tattoos and surgeries to make himself look like a tiger.
My son takes all of these channels for granted, as a natural part of life. I know better.
When I was his age, we got three channels on the big, brown box in the corner of our big, beige living room. Sort of.
One channel came in pretty well, unless the wind blew, which caused the channel to deconstruct into a grainy snowscene in which you could barely make out moving forms.
The second channel was pretty much always a grainy snowscene in which you could barely make out moving forms, unless the wind blew, when the picture vanished completely into a blizzard.
The third channel was always a blizzard.
Most of the time we watched the channel that came in clearly. The second channel we watched only if there was a show we really needed to see. I didn’t worry much about the mysterious third channel, until the mid-1960s.
The kids I went to junior high with were always talking about the latest thing we had seen on TV, or the next thing we were going to see. I was by that time hopelessly lost to rock and roll, which I could watch on Sunday evenings on the Ed Sullivan Show. Then Hullabaloo came along, on the channel we could sort of watch. Sonny and Cher singing, “I Got You, Babe”; the Luvin’ Spoonful believing in magic; Gary Lewis singing “This Diamond Ring,” then pretending not to be mortified when his dad Jerry sang his latest pop record; the Detergents doing “Leader of the Laundromat.” I got to see all of those.
What I didn’t get to see was “Shindig,” in which the Shindogs weekly disappeared into the snow of our third channel.
I lived with that, until the week the Stones were to roll on as guests.
Drastic action was called for.
The antenna which pulled the pictures out of the air and into our TV was on the peak of the roof of our big, old, pink house. On fortunate nights, it was possible to clear the picture to a watchable state by adjusting that antenna until it pointed in exactly the right direction. There was no way to know on any given night which direction that would be, other than trial and error.
I was the oldest boy, so it was my job to climb to the top of the house. It was a job I truly loved. I always stood straight up on the sharply tilted roof, walking like Sky King on the wings of his plane. At the peak, I took just a second in the biting wind to admire the little green valley where we lived. Then I rested one hand on the chimney, carefully, so as not to dislodge any loose bricks, and reached up to grab the rusty center pipe of the antenna that has half-again as tall as I was.
“Ready!”
From the lawn below, my sister hollered, “OK! Turn it!”
“Are you turning it yet?” shouted my little brother through the open window. His job was to watch the TV screen for changes and relay the information to my older sister on the lawn.
“Are you turning it yet?” My sister relayed.
“Keep your pants on!”
I turned the antenna, the cold metal rough against my puny hands.
“How’s that?”
“How’s that?” my sister yelled into the house.
“Are you turning it yet?” shouted my little brother.
Then, before my sister could answer, “Better! Hold it!”
Too late. I had already turned it past the sweet spot.
“No, back! Back!”
`I turned the antenna back an inch.
“Better…better…”
“And my sister relayed the message through cupped hands.
“Better!”
Then, my brother. “Nope! Gone again! You had it…”
I thought it might help to lift the antenna out and re-seat it. I took hold of the pole with both hands and hefted my entire skinny form against it. Of course a wind came up, and of course the pole began to fall. With a Mighty Mousian effort, I kept it from falling and stood, panting and panicked, with the precious bringer of TV leaning against the chimney. With all my remaining strength, I lifted it in mid-air to put it back in the hole where it belonged. Gravity and inertia tag-teamed me, and the antenna and I tipped down the roof slope towards our doom.
Tiny, sparkly bits tore loose from the shingles and bounced down and off the edge of the roof. I was fairly certain I would soon be joining them.
Again I heaved against the antenna. We locked immobile for a few long seconds, like equally matched arm wrestlers. I knew the odds were about equal that I would be able to force the antenna back into its hole, or that I would drop it off the edge of the roof.
And from far below, my sister yelled, “Perfect! Don’t move!”
