Some time back I read in a fellow writer’s laments that he thought we should all “take a fast” from the television and media dousing that creates stress in our minds. This person found his stress was almost immediately lowered just because he simply quit watching TV for a few days.
This so-called FAST of TV was not some noble gesture, honestly, our six-month old TV simply refused to accept the signal from its trusty remote. Before I even thought about taking our TV to the store I replaced the batteries and found the problem still present–”TV didn’t work”. I just can’t bring myself to reveal the name of the store where we bought the TV but I will say it was a brand name, generic sounding: ELEMENT. There, isn’t that a sophisticated and technical sounding name for a TV?
So far the story doesn’t sound much like a fast. However, that day I took it the store was the 14th of October (and this is November 2). So far we have gotten three calls from the Service Dept of (the big name) store, and the latest promise was announced as November 25. (And I need to insert, we only have ONE TV.)
THE GOOD NEWS about being without a TV is what you can do with the time. My wife and I are history buffs and it has amazed us what we have been able to do with the reclaimed time we would have probably not had if our TV was working. A good friend of ours has a historical blog and together we have found so much interesting facts since our TV went on the blink it is amazing. We have found names for what were once name-less faces of mill workers in 96 year-old photographs of a lumber yard my father-in-law worked in starting when he was 14 years old.
ONE SET of historical data we found was a snapshot of an up-to-now nameless group of people planting a tree in the north end of Lancaster in the early 1900′s. My wife recognized one of the young people in the group as her mother and the couple who had apparently donated the tree that was being planted was a couple who had generously given property to the City of Lancaster for a Senior Citizen activity center. A penciled note on the back of the photograph was the key to unlocking the mystery. An enlarged print of this photo made the solving of that mystery both easier and interesting.
WE FEEL BLESSED rather than cheated out of time we could have enjoyed watching TV had our set been working. Mysteries of name-less faces are honestly pleasurable when solutions result from otherwise inconvenient times.
A story written in the Summer of 1968 by an amateur journalist in her “Feathers in the Wind” journal shares, with relish, a story solved by timely observation. “The story came out of Austrailia about a sulphur-crested cockatoo name Luv. He figured out a way to keep cool in the sizzling heat of an Australian summer..
One day its owner found two flat tires on his auto when he wanted to use it. The garage mechanic found nothing wrong when he examined the tires. When the same thing happened on the second day, the owner suspected vandals. But when he heard air hissing on the third day, he quietly investigated and caught the cockatoo sitting with his beak on the valve while the air whistled around him. He was flapping his wings and having a ball.
Poor Luv, the owner has put covers [caps] over the valves now!”
Attribution for this true story is given to Dorothy B. Winn, Mechanicsburg, PA, in her journal dated #14, Summer 1968. Published and distributed by the National Amateur Press Association. GOOGLE “National Amateur Press Association”
##### One thing we have really missed without our TV is the daily weather reports. THE WORDWRIGHT