TV Trays

My hypothetical wife and I still eat supper off of TV trays. We got a sturdy solid wooden set of them at Walmart when we moved to this house in 2000. Before that we had those flimsy metal ones, and these are a big improvement. There isn't much on TV that we like anymore except "The Big Bang Theory", so we mostly watch DVDs of old shows and the occasional movie. It usually takes us at least two suppers to complete a movie because we only watch it while we're eating. Other than that, I watch a little news and weather, and that's about it.

I said that I didn't watch much TV as a kid but, the more I think about it, I probably watched as much as anybody when I was in elementary school. It wasn't until high school that I got too busy to sit around in the evenings with my family and watch TV. We didn't get TV reception where I was in Alaska, or radio either, because the surrounding mountains blocked the signal. They had towers on some of the mountain tops, but that was only for telephone service. Cell phones hadn't been invented yet, but the Alaskans used to to run their land lines up the mountain and broadcast to other towers all over the state. All calls within Alaska were billed as local calls, and they had one small telephone book for the state. There were only 200,000 people in Alaska at the time, and 10% of them lived in Anchorage. Last I heard, Anchorage now has more people in it than the whole state did when I was there.

We had a TV set in our day room when I was in the army, but I don't remember ever seeing it turned on. The guys told me that was because all the shows were in German. We had an American radio station, The Armed Forces Network, but no American TV station in Berlin. So, from about 1959 to 1967, I got out of the habit of watching TV, and I never missed it. I did not own a TV set until 1975, when my daughter started school and people kept telling me that she would be a social outcast if she couldn't discuss her favorite shows with her little friends. My daughter is now 47 years old, still doesn't own a TV, and is far from being a social outcast. Of course she has a computer and one of those magic telephones, and they give her all the screen time she wants or needs.