Imposter
Peculiar Privilege
When the children were little I went to a talk by a colleague who was director of a pre-school. His talk focused on what he saw as TV eroding children’s attention span. That would have been around 1970.
I came home and told Lacey about the talk, suggested we put the TV away for the 40 days of the liturgical season of Lent. She reluctantly agreed. The children were angry.
Lacey, and probably the children, knew that the TV addict in the family was me. To this day if I am in a room with a TV playing, I am riveted, even to ads.
Easter came and we never took the TV out again. Our now grown children laugh when we talk about it, saying they saw plenty of TV at friends’ houses. And can still be a bit peevish that their friends wouldn‘t come over to our house.
Because I have a short attention span (OCD?), I’m grateful to have lived without TV all those years. It leaves me out of a lot of conversation about series our friends binge watch at night. Whether we would have become the avid readers we are, had we had a TV, is impossible to know.
I have to guard against feeling morally superior for not being drawn into a lot of the detritus that a plethora of channels now sponsor. Since texting and the internet, computers, which came after we dumped TV, the reality is that I am deeply impacted by media.
Lacey and I are both tennis fans. Thanks to a generous son-in-law we have been able to piggy back on some site he subscribes to, and watch virtually the entire tennis season on our computers. Our friends think it’s funny that we hunker down at the kitchen table, our faces inches from our 13” screens. When we go to friends’ and see matches cast onto a screen that covers an entire wall, we’re dazzled. Yet we notice that our MacBook air casts such a sharp image, that, if you don’t mind miniature, may be a sharper image than on the larger screen.
Who knows how much my sense that I have all the stimulus I can manage without TV, has to do with being in this late life chapter.
Of one thing I am certain. It hasn’t made me a better person. What makes me a better person is understanding my connection to you is what makes me able to be grateful for being here. Acknowledging each other as out lifelines is what makes it fun.
