Hard-drive archeology: Requiem for a Television
I was going through my hard drive today trying to find a particular essay that I'd mentioned to a friend this weekend. It was something I'd written in response to a conversation I had with dochyel more than 10 years ago about Adam and Eve and God's reaction to their eating the apple. I couldn't find it; my suspicion is that it's lost to old technology and the dim mists of time. I may try to reconstruct it at some point.
In the meanwhile, however, I found a light thing I wrote when I got rid of my old TV set and purchased the one I have now. It entertained me then and was something of a comfort (because I'm an odd duck) so, since I can't find the thing I was looking for, I'll post this instead.
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Written December 2001
When I was 15, my mother won a television set in a raffle at our synagogue. It was an RCA color TV with a brown wood-grain finish, two channel knobs, four color and picture-adjustment knobs, and an on-off volume knob. It also had something you never see anymore: rabbit ears. Now, 25 years later, this TV which has served me so well, is going off into the great TV-recycling plant in the sky.
I've been feeling really odd about the retirement of this television and the acquisition of my zippy new set, complete with S-video, 3-comb digital filtering, and a host of other high-tech features I don't really understand. It genuinely feels like the end of the era, as if I were burying an old friend.
Year after year, I followed the cycle of TV events that mark out the seasons: I'd watch The Ten Commandments at Passover in the Spring, fireworks on the Fourth of July, the Macy's Parade and The Wizard of Oz at Thanksgiving, It's a Wonderful Life at Christmastime, and the ball dropping on New Year's Eve. I discovered the TV shows that defined my pop culture horizons: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, every generation of Star Trek, The X Files, and The West Wing. I watched the Gulf War unfold and the World Trade Center fall. My old RCA was a companion to me through illness, blizzards, local events like the implosion of the Kingdome, and international celebrations like the Olympics and the falling of the Berlin Wall. It's kept me company in the wake of break-ups and hard days at work.
Now, like so much industrial waste, I'm sending my old TV off to be recycled, so it can be replaced by a Japanese-manufactured unit sporting technology two generations newer, a screen 8 inches larger, and a sound system richer and fuller than this old thing ever had.
And yet, I'm filled with nostalgia, as though I'm losing something irreplaceable. Maybe it's because I first saw so many of my favorite films on this set in classic late-twentieth century fashion: riddled with commercials, edited for length and content, at the end of an argument with my brother about what to watch. Maybe it's because kitties past and present curled up with me for a good long sob session as we watched Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds. Maybe it's because I watched this TV with my mother before she died.
I guess we don't think too much about most of our appliances, and I guess most of them don't really merit much contemplation. When I at last disposed of my pokey old toaster oven, it was more with disdain than anything else. But televisions really do become parts of our lives and have become a cultural binding force. If I grieve the loss of my television, old enough to have graduated college and launch its own career, I suppose what I'm grieving is the loss of a connection to my own past as well as the conduit through which I connected with the rest of the world for such a long time. Or maybe I'm just grieving the loss of those rabbit ear attenae that gave it such panache.
Hail RCA. Hail mono sound. Hail channel knobs that haven't worked since I was 22. You've served me well.
In the meanwhile, however, I found a light thing I wrote when I got rid of my old TV set and purchased the one I have now. It entertained me then and was something of a comfort (because I'm an odd duck) so, since I can't find the thing I was looking for, I'll post this instead.
------------------------------------------
Written December 2001
When I was 15, my mother won a television set in a raffle at our synagogue. It was an RCA color TV with a brown wood-grain finish, two channel knobs, four color and picture-adjustment knobs, and an on-off volume knob. It also had something you never see anymore: rabbit ears. Now, 25 years later, this TV which has served me so well, is going off into the great TV-recycling plant in the sky.
I've been feeling really odd about the retirement of this television and the acquisition of my zippy new set, complete with S-video, 3-comb digital filtering, and a host of other high-tech features I don't really understand. It genuinely feels like the end of the era, as if I were burying an old friend.
Year after year, I followed the cycle of TV events that mark out the seasons: I'd watch The Ten Commandments at Passover in the Spring, fireworks on the Fourth of July, the Macy's Parade and The Wizard of Oz at Thanksgiving, It's a Wonderful Life at Christmastime, and the ball dropping on New Year's Eve. I discovered the TV shows that defined my pop culture horizons: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, every generation of Star Trek, The X Files, and The West Wing. I watched the Gulf War unfold and the World Trade Center fall. My old RCA was a companion to me through illness, blizzards, local events like the implosion of the Kingdome, and international celebrations like the Olympics and the falling of the Berlin Wall. It's kept me company in the wake of break-ups and hard days at work.
Now, like so much industrial waste, I'm sending my old TV off to be recycled, so it can be replaced by a Japanese-manufactured unit sporting technology two generations newer, a screen 8 inches larger, and a sound system richer and fuller than this old thing ever had.
And yet, I'm filled with nostalgia, as though I'm losing something irreplaceable. Maybe it's because I first saw so many of my favorite films on this set in classic late-twentieth century fashion: riddled with commercials, edited for length and content, at the end of an argument with my brother about what to watch. Maybe it's because kitties past and present curled up with me for a good long sob session as we watched Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds. Maybe it's because I watched this TV with my mother before she died.
I guess we don't think too much about most of our appliances, and I guess most of them don't really merit much contemplation. When I at last disposed of my pokey old toaster oven, it was more with disdain than anything else. But televisions really do become parts of our lives and have become a cultural binding force. If I grieve the loss of my television, old enough to have graduated college and launch its own career, I suppose what I'm grieving is the loss of a connection to my own past as well as the conduit through which I connected with the rest of the world for such a long time. Or maybe I'm just grieving the loss of those rabbit ear attenae that gave it such panache.
Hail RCA. Hail mono sound. Hail channel knobs that haven't worked since I was 22. You've served me well.