My island has television and a streaming service that gives
us movies to our heart’s content. There are so many movies and shows available
that it is overwhelming. Sometimes, by the time I have reviewed all my options,
so much time has passed that I must turn off the devices to walk the dog or
make lunch or move my limbs before ossification occurs.
In my childhood things were different. That island had
television as well, but there were four channels that were reliable and another
two in the mysterious realm of VHF that might not come in or might broadcast
from China.
One desperate fortnight we were quarantined with the German
Measles. My father declared himself an essential worker (I guess as a chief of
orthopaedics at a major hospital he was that) so would sneak out in the small
darkness of the early morning leaving my poor mother to fend off three bored
children. In my memory I was eight, my brother eleven. My sister would have
been thirteen, but she was always good at closing her door with a stack of
books.
My mother had housework to do, leaving us boys to our own
devices but unable to even leave the house to shoot baskets of play whiffle
ball. We grabbed what comfort and amusement we could from the small television
set in the den upstairs.
The afternoon was taken by soap operas (our house once appeared
in the windows of the set of As The World Turns) which were of no interest to
us. It was not baseball season. But there were movies – well, movie it turned
out. There was a program called Million Dollar Movie which coupled an old film
with a call-in lottery. It was on from one to four every afternoon.
All would have been great, my brother and I being film
buffs, if they did not show the same movie every day for the whole week. The
first week it was “Once Upon a Time”, a Cary Grant movie about a dancing
caterpillar. The next week it was Grant this time fighting Nazi spies in a comedy
called “Once Upon a Honeymoon.” We watched them repeatedly and religiously. I
still have long portions of those two movies memorized even though I have seen
neither in almost fifty years.
There is comfort in the ordinary sometimes. As thrilling as
it is to have choice upon choice, sometimes knowing that the same movie will be
on at the same time is the kind of structure we need.
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