Growing up and going to work

Ah yes snow, and how about when you first got a color tv? I remember when color tvs were exotic. And they had these color knobs that you could fiddle endlessly with trying to get the perfect color. I still compare some of the painting I do to that, just fiddling, trying to get the color perfect.

And remember when something went wrong with the tube the repairman would show up and fiddle with the arcane gizmos in the back of the set while the whole family would stand around wringing their hands hoping it would get fixed before Ed Sullivan came on.

And then there would come a time after the late movie, and maybe there would be some little commentary, and I think I recall there sometimes would be some sort of blessing or prayer, and then that pattern with the numbers and lines and the Indian, I don’t know why the Indian. I think that only lasted like ten minutes and then it was gone and there was all that awful snow with its menacing buzz.

I think that snow was random electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere which would be the echo of cosmic rays which would be the echo of the big bang itself. I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but I think it’s close, and what better to tune in at the end of a day watching the tube than the birth of the universe?

You know a couple things I miss about the not too long ago tv schedule are the three o’clock and ten thirty movies. That three o’clock movie hit the spot for those of us without nine to five jobs. I think it generally had some dialing for dollars component, which livened things up a bit, and it seems like it was always some old timey black and white TCM type movie. Kind of stupid, but that was ok because you didn’t want to have to pay close attention to it.

This whole late night tv thing with all these guys fighting over spots and the shows themselves packed double deep have no interest for me. Well one reason is that I’m hitting the hay shortly after nine, but even if I weren’t I wouldn’t watch those shows, just trying too hard to be entertaining or something. What fit into those spots very nicely long ago was the late movie.

Normally the folks would have dragged you screaming and crying to bed by then, but sometimes, maybe they were just too tired to deal with you, and they would let you stay up.

The movies again would be those TCM movies, but since you were a kid they wouldn’t seem so stupid, indeed they would seem deep and mysterious, all those people wearing suits and fancy dresses and saying all these cryptic things to each other and then, bam, somebody gets shot. You just couldn’t wait to become an adult.

I remember once thinking about kids and adults when I was a kid. Some kids were bigger than others, and adults came in all kinds of sizes, but still there was a clear distinction between adults and kids. it seemed I had gleaned that kids became adults, and that adults were once kids, but it just seemed too fantastic, and I decided that it couldn’t be true, once a kid, always a kid.

Which was good because then I would never have to have a job. I didn’t know what a job was, but nobody talked about it very fondly. I remember being a real little kid, and my sister had to go to school, which I was so glad that I didn’t have to, and then late one summer she told me that in a couple weeks I would have to go to school too. The horror. The horror.

I have read that hunter gatherers, the parents keep the kid with them until the kid is maybe five/ten years and then they dump him into the scrum, which is all the people who are neither little kids or adults, and they all hang together. I think the adults get some work out of them, but seriously, how much work are you going to get out of a bunch of kids? So mostly they just hang out. Anyway they say that’s why at an early age kids cling to their parents, but later on all they want to do is hang with other kids.

I am thinking that my dad left for work in the morning and came back in the early evening and I knew almost nothing of where he went or what he did. But didn’t you live above the butcher shop, or near it, and I imagine you got pressed into service there from time to time. Was it something you liked to do, or something you tried to avoid?