keeping up with the Hinkleberrys

When I was in the third grade suddenly all the kids were talking about Uncle Johnny Coons.  So cool.  Nowadays all the kids eat in the lunch room, but back in the golden days of my youth almost all the kids ran home for lunch and back to school when it was eaten.  Not everybody.  There was a room in the basement where kids could eat their lunch.  Me and my sisters went there a few times on the rare occasions that Mom was off on some kind of errand.  It was dingy and cramped and the chairs wobbled, the kind of place where only disreputable kids who didn't have parents that loved them enough to be home to put some cold cuts between Wonder Bread and heat up Campbell's tomato soup.

Anyway Uncle Johnny Coons was on television, which was the first great wave of technology to wash over me.  Wash, it steamrolled, it steamrolled everybody.  Family life was never the same.  Remember how the railroads brought us standardized time, well television brought time into two dimensions.  It was no longer seven PM, now it was seven PM on channel seven.

With the dominance of tv came the first resistors, intellectual types as I recall, who surveyed the array of low brow fare and declared that this crap will rot your mind.  And sometime in high school I became a tv resistor.  I walked out of the blue-lit living room down the streets of the hood, all the windows seemed to have a blue tinge, i thought of that light illuminating slack-jawed faces as they watched that crap and felt superior. 

I kept this up through college, and hanging out days.  People would talk about tv shows and I would snicker, never heard of them.  I think it was when they started having tvs in bars that I began to weaken.  In the middle eighties a friend of mine had a tv he didn't know what to do with so I let him park it at my house.  Tentatively I turned it on, well how about this, then that, and it began to rot my mind so that when my friend's situation changed and he took his tv back, I went out right away and bought myself one.


The next new thing to impinge on my life was the answering machine.  I remember the shock when I called one of my more progressive friends and instead of getting in touch with them or listening to the echo of the phone ringing endlessly like a train whistle as it wended its way through the lonely prairie, there was Good evening, you have reached the Hinkleberrys who are not at home right now, likely because they are attending some fabulous event that people of your ilk would never be invited to so please leave some pitiful message and we will get back to you, if we don't have anything better to do.

Well I never.  The nerve, the gall, who do they think they are?   I was taken aback, my words stumbled, I sounded like the kind of person who indeed would be staying at home, probably rotting his mind on tv, while the Hinkleberrys attended their fabulous event. 

But then these messages became more common.  Eventually I got one, and when I called people and the ring just went on and on like that lonesome train whistle, I thought, what is wrong with these people, why can't they keep up with the times?