At some point in the next week, I will finish watching season 6 of The Office on NetFlix and part of my connection to Verna will dissolve. I’ve been half channeling, half mirroring Verna since she died, and at the conclusion of season 6, the last one available instantly, I will probably stop watching the shows Verna viewed for the last several months of her life.
Shortly after she was first diagnosed with cancer in 2006, family and friends brought her DVDs to watch while she recovered from her biweekly doses of chemotherapy. We were reformed TV addicts at the time, but Verna quickly renewed her habit out of necessity.
A cancer memoir that appeared shortly after Verna first got sick captured Verna’s state of mind. Cancer Made Me Shallow Person, an illustrated narrative by another woman who ultimately lost her battle to cancer, is funny, irreverent, poignant, and a brash statement of identity amid a terminal illness.
Verna loved the book (which I also read) and used it to defend and rationalize her sedentary lifestyle. So she watched Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, The Sopranos, 24, The Medium, Curb Your Enthusiasm, MI5, both the original British and later American versions of The Office, countless movies. She said she just didn’t have the energy or ability to concentrate long-term on reading books, though she still devoured them, albeit more slowly.
I alternately resisted and embraced her TV viewing. I preferred reading, but TV is so mindless and, yes, watching a show together meant being together even if it was a very passive form of connecting. Sometimes I would read on the landing leading to our garage, huddled against the first step while Verna, resting in her recliner 20 feet away, cackled at some comedy or was engrossed in a tense drama. And at other times, I employed a can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em approach and sat on the couch and watched with her.
When we were laughing together or nervously awaiting the outcome of a show, I still preferred to be engrossed in engaging fiction or non-fiction, but it wasn’t as if Verna and I had no prior TV viewing history.
When we were first married, Thursday nights were Cheers. Then we drifted to Mad About You, a show that resonated because it was, like us, the story of a Jewish guy married to a non-Jewish woman. Tears of laughter streamed down our faces at the various family situations, often involving Paul Reiser’s neurotic Jewish relatives, Paul and Jamie navigated.
Then we had Miguel, and TV became less and less important. Verna went back to work, I did some writing, and we spent our evenings cleaning up or relaxing with books, magazines, or the newspaper. We still watched movies, pretty faithfully every Friday evening and often on weekends, but we avoided the boob tube (no pun intended).
So, now as season six winds down, and Jim and Pam just got married, escaping their own ceremony to secretly wed in the mist of Niagra Falls, I feel wistful and miss Verna so damn much. I sit in her electric recliner and, like her, have the computer propped on my knees, and I imagine myself laughing at the same scenes and instances in The Office as she did.
And that is why the soon-to-be conclusion of season 6 is so sad. In some ways, I feel Verna is with me when I watch her show. Once the show ends, I will have to confront in even starker terms what I have been living with since August 30: Verna has died and is not coming back.
Then, again, another one of our shows, the surprisingly witty and often hilarious How I Met Your Mother, season five, is now available on DVD. Verna and I watched seasons 1-4 together. I’ll have to see this one alone.
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Friday, October 29, 2010
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Boys Will Be Boys
I was jailed two nights ago and shot several times.
As soon as Maya and I walked into the park play area, one of the four year old boys who plays there most days by himself said, “Everyone who comes to the park has to play tag,” which meant I had to be the tagger.
Wuan ran off in one direction, followed by Maya with a beaming smile on her face. They were joined by two more four year-olds, Ryan and Alex, whose mother always walks the family dog, Toby, on the grass outside the play area and has it frolic with our dog, Gigi, and one older guy, Miguel.
I learned a couple of things by chasing four preschool aged children and one not quite teenager up and down the play structure. One, in sprint-like activities, I cannot catch up to Miguel anymore. He has gotten faster and more elusive and I, now 50, have slowed with age. The second thing I learned is boys, especially young boys, can be very aggressive.
I played tag for fifteen or twenty minutes and then decided to take a break. I wanted to talk with Verna and Toby’s owner, Patricia, who were on the edge of the park’s grass. But Wuan had other thoughts. He immediately grabbed me and said, “You’re going to jail.”
“Yeah, you’re going to jail,” added Maya for reinforcement.
“I’m going to jail?” I mockingly protested.
Miguel was either on his bike or not-so-surprisingly watching TV, so the four young ones grabbed me and locked me up near the periscope atop one of the play structures. Wuan and Maya guarded me and Ryan and Alex climbed near the slides. My hands were clasped behind my back around the bars of the structure.
Wuan was clearly the leader, giving orders with the manic energy of a prison guard amped up on steroids.
“You have to stay in jail,” he practically shouted. “And you can’t leave. If you do, I will shoot you.” Then he cocked his fingers like a gun and waved them menacingly in my face. He even made the shooting sound, “Pow, pow.”
Maya, who doesn’t watch any TV unless Miguel sneaks in cartoons on the ION channel while Verna and I are outside with Gigi, pulled out her fingers and imitated Wuan.
Great, I thought, just great, we try to shield Maya from violence and she shoots me anyway. I remember reading about one parent who never let her kids even play with water guns. One morning the kid fashioned a gun out of a piece of whole wheat toast. The real world is so damn opportunistic. It finds ways to seep into our daily lives.
Eventually Wuan’s father rescued me. He basically told Wuan to leave me alone. He’d been sitting on the park bench with Ryan’s father watching me tire myself out as they talked.
But the experience of being jailed and shot by four year olds got me thinking about aggression and boys. Last year, Wuan snatched his great-grandmother’s cane and whacked Maya in the head. I was on the park grass, probably tossing a baseball or football with Miguel, and Verna was with her. I came running after the attack and immediately grabbed Wuan by the shoulders.
“You may never, ever hit Maya or anyone again. Do you understand? What you did is very, very wrong. And if you hit anyone again I am going to make sure you aren’t allowed in the park. I’m going to speak with your father tonight.”
I did go over there, and his father was quite apologetic. He assured me nothing like that would ever happen again after I told him of at least a half dozen incidents where Wuan had terrorized kids at the park.
As I left his doorstep, I wondered if Wuan’s aggressiveness was the result of any abuse he was subjected to at home? Or was it because both of Wuan’s parents worked fulltime and Wuan was left in the care of a nearly crippled great-grandmother who was stooped at a 90-degree angle and shuffled so slowly?
Either way, I had to protect Maya. And after the incident, there were no problems with Wuan. He occasionally throws sand at kids and grabs them, but I have not yet heard of any more violence on his part.
Whenever he gets rambunctious in the park now, I just stop him and say, “Wuan, you know that is not right. You need to stop that now.”
He actually stayed away from the park for several weeks after he hurt Maya. He must’ve been afraid…of me. Good. Nothing like fear to change behavior. The next time he came to the park and we were there, I decided to say hello, which I did. Then he sat alone on the swing as his grandmother rested on the bench.
“Wuan, do you want me to push you?” So I pushed him in one swing and Maya in the one next to him. I figured he deserved Good Steve unless he did anything to upset me.
But Wuan is still aggressive, though he now controls his impulses toward others. He yelled about me being in jail and repeatedly warned me he would “shoot me for real” if I tried to escape from jail. And he kept poking me with a plastic ball casket, similar to the one used in Jai Alai. Even after I asked him to stop, he poked and prodded until his father finally intervened.
So I started wondering about boys and aggression. Why are some boys predisposed to violence and why do others learn how to be physically and emotionally mean?
There have been plenty of books on this subject, so I will not venture into any scholarly, therapeutic, or journalistic areas. I will just share a random thought or two based on my experiences as a father and teacher.
First, I think TV and media saturation in general plays a big role in kids becoming more aggressive. Kids are exposed to massive amounts of TV and video games by the time they reach kindergarten and that is not good.
One time, when Miguel was about four or five, he was at a birthday party for someone in our play group. Most of the kids were at regular preschools, but Miguel and his buddy Zach were at a Waldorf-inspired one. The mother of the birthday boy noticed how calmer Miguel and Zach were compared with the other kids, especially her own son who threw a fit if he didn’t have one of each colored Starburst candies. She reasoned Miguel and Zach were more sedate because of their Waldorf-inspired preschool.
Not that Miguel was immune to being mischievous. One time he convinced Zachary to throw one of their classmates’ necklaces in the toilet. Another time he and two other boys viciously ripped out some freshly potted flowers from the school garden.
But on the whole, Miguel can entertain himself outdoors and in his room, reading and creating his own imaginary worlds, and that is largely because we supported Waldorf ideology when he was younger and deemphasized TV and video games. Miguel didn’t see his first theater movie until he was eight, and only got to use the computer once he entered public school and then only for educational purposes.
I know I sound like some neo-Luddite, but we chose a path that worked for us and we hope it served Miguel. At the very least, he can now mold beeswax, knit, and only babbles incoherently to himself once or twice a week.
So I don’t have the answers. Verna and I made choices based on books we read, lectures we attended, experiences we had, and our intuition. OK, Verna’s intuition, because Mother (at least in Verna’s case) almost always knows best. Therefore, I don’t know how to keep boys from being too aggressive. I can only role model for Miguel (and Maya) and hope they learn from what they see around them. And use the experience they have with Verna and me to guide them during the turbulent times of life outside our home, when they are exposed to a world we can’t always control.
If all else fails, I have brochures for monasteries we might consider once I free myself from jail and can think more clearly. I have gunshot wounds to tend.
As soon as Maya and I walked into the park play area, one of the four year old boys who plays there most days by himself said, “Everyone who comes to the park has to play tag,” which meant I had to be the tagger.
Wuan ran off in one direction, followed by Maya with a beaming smile on her face. They were joined by two more four year-olds, Ryan and Alex, whose mother always walks the family dog, Toby, on the grass outside the play area and has it frolic with our dog, Gigi, and one older guy, Miguel.
I learned a couple of things by chasing four preschool aged children and one not quite teenager up and down the play structure. One, in sprint-like activities, I cannot catch up to Miguel anymore. He has gotten faster and more elusive and I, now 50, have slowed with age. The second thing I learned is boys, especially young boys, can be very aggressive.
I played tag for fifteen or twenty minutes and then decided to take a break. I wanted to talk with Verna and Toby’s owner, Patricia, who were on the edge of the park’s grass. But Wuan had other thoughts. He immediately grabbed me and said, “You’re going to jail.”
“Yeah, you’re going to jail,” added Maya for reinforcement.
“I’m going to jail?” I mockingly protested.
Miguel was either on his bike or not-so-surprisingly watching TV, so the four young ones grabbed me and locked me up near the periscope atop one of the play structures. Wuan and Maya guarded me and Ryan and Alex climbed near the slides. My hands were clasped behind my back around the bars of the structure.
Wuan was clearly the leader, giving orders with the manic energy of a prison guard amped up on steroids.
“You have to stay in jail,” he practically shouted. “And you can’t leave. If you do, I will shoot you.” Then he cocked his fingers like a gun and waved them menacingly in my face. He even made the shooting sound, “Pow, pow.”
Maya, who doesn’t watch any TV unless Miguel sneaks in cartoons on the ION channel while Verna and I are outside with Gigi, pulled out her fingers and imitated Wuan.
Great, I thought, just great, we try to shield Maya from violence and she shoots me anyway. I remember reading about one parent who never let her kids even play with water guns. One morning the kid fashioned a gun out of a piece of whole wheat toast. The real world is so damn opportunistic. It finds ways to seep into our daily lives.
Eventually Wuan’s father rescued me. He basically told Wuan to leave me alone. He’d been sitting on the park bench with Ryan’s father watching me tire myself out as they talked.
But the experience of being jailed and shot by four year olds got me thinking about aggression and boys. Last year, Wuan snatched his great-grandmother’s cane and whacked Maya in the head. I was on the park grass, probably tossing a baseball or football with Miguel, and Verna was with her. I came running after the attack and immediately grabbed Wuan by the shoulders.
“You may never, ever hit Maya or anyone again. Do you understand? What you did is very, very wrong. And if you hit anyone again I am going to make sure you aren’t allowed in the park. I’m going to speak with your father tonight.”
I did go over there, and his father was quite apologetic. He assured me nothing like that would ever happen again after I told him of at least a half dozen incidents where Wuan had terrorized kids at the park.
As I left his doorstep, I wondered if Wuan’s aggressiveness was the result of any abuse he was subjected to at home? Or was it because both of Wuan’s parents worked fulltime and Wuan was left in the care of a nearly crippled great-grandmother who was stooped at a 90-degree angle and shuffled so slowly?
Either way, I had to protect Maya. And after the incident, there were no problems with Wuan. He occasionally throws sand at kids and grabs them, but I have not yet heard of any more violence on his part.
Whenever he gets rambunctious in the park now, I just stop him and say, “Wuan, you know that is not right. You need to stop that now.”
He actually stayed away from the park for several weeks after he hurt Maya. He must’ve been afraid…of me. Good. Nothing like fear to change behavior. The next time he came to the park and we were there, I decided to say hello, which I did. Then he sat alone on the swing as his grandmother rested on the bench.
“Wuan, do you want me to push you?” So I pushed him in one swing and Maya in the one next to him. I figured he deserved Good Steve unless he did anything to upset me.
But Wuan is still aggressive, though he now controls his impulses toward others. He yelled about me being in jail and repeatedly warned me he would “shoot me for real” if I tried to escape from jail. And he kept poking me with a plastic ball casket, similar to the one used in Jai Alai. Even after I asked him to stop, he poked and prodded until his father finally intervened.
So I started wondering about boys and aggression. Why are some boys predisposed to violence and why do others learn how to be physically and emotionally mean?
There have been plenty of books on this subject, so I will not venture into any scholarly, therapeutic, or journalistic areas. I will just share a random thought or two based on my experiences as a father and teacher.
First, I think TV and media saturation in general plays a big role in kids becoming more aggressive. Kids are exposed to massive amounts of TV and video games by the time they reach kindergarten and that is not good.
One time, when Miguel was about four or five, he was at a birthday party for someone in our play group. Most of the kids were at regular preschools, but Miguel and his buddy Zach were at a Waldorf-inspired one. The mother of the birthday boy noticed how calmer Miguel and Zach were compared with the other kids, especially her own son who threw a fit if he didn’t have one of each colored Starburst candies. She reasoned Miguel and Zach were more sedate because of their Waldorf-inspired preschool.
Not that Miguel was immune to being mischievous. One time he convinced Zachary to throw one of their classmates’ necklaces in the toilet. Another time he and two other boys viciously ripped out some freshly potted flowers from the school garden.
But on the whole, Miguel can entertain himself outdoors and in his room, reading and creating his own imaginary worlds, and that is largely because we supported Waldorf ideology when he was younger and deemphasized TV and video games. Miguel didn’t see his first theater movie until he was eight, and only got to use the computer once he entered public school and then only for educational purposes.
I know I sound like some neo-Luddite, but we chose a path that worked for us and we hope it served Miguel. At the very least, he can now mold beeswax, knit, and only babbles incoherently to himself once or twice a week.
So I don’t have the answers. Verna and I made choices based on books we read, lectures we attended, experiences we had, and our intuition. OK, Verna’s intuition, because Mother (at least in Verna’s case) almost always knows best. Therefore, I don’t know how to keep boys from being too aggressive. I can only role model for Miguel (and Maya) and hope they learn from what they see around them. And use the experience they have with Verna and me to guide them during the turbulent times of life outside our home, when they are exposed to a world we can’t always control.
If all else fails, I have brochures for monasteries we might consider once I free myself from jail and can think more clearly. I have gunshot wounds to tend.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
My Twilight Zone
I spent most of last week week in bed, felled by a nasty virus that doctors initially thought might be meningitis, sinusitis, or the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu. But after a battery of tests, including a spinal tap and cat scan, I was told to ride it out and my massive headache—the kind where I wanted our dog to shoot me—loss of appetite, and overwhelming sense of malaise would pass someday.
Because my head ached so badly, piercing pain behind the eyes and across my forehead, I was unable to read or even remain upright. Most of the time I was just curled in a semi-fetal position on the couch, drool forming on the edge of my mouth, as the dog nipped at my socks.
But I did manage to pass some of the time when I wasn’t asleep or wishing I was dead by watching daytime TV. I never thought American civilization was in such dire straits until I ingested an overdose of afternoon TV. It’s a veritable nightmare.
Almost everything I watched was pure and unentertaining crap. I must admit up front that we don’t have cable, so we rely on a few local stations and several more quirky ones that are pulled in by our HDTV.
One thing I found on the tube is a plethora of judge shows. There was this one guy, I think Judge Alex, who spent most of the show counseling a young woman, who’s already had an army of abusive boyfriends, to make better choices. Uh, duh, no shit, buddy; where’d you get your law degree? The 24-year old female was suing her ex-boyfriend for borrowing her car when they were together, crashing it, and then refusing to pay for any damages.
On Maury Povich, who was actually trained as a real journalist, he did a show about incredibly obese toddlers. Being the father of a toddler, albeit a lean one, I tuned in for a few moments. He featured one three-year-old boy who weighs 114 lbs, which is 80 lbs above normal. Heck, that kid weighs 40 lbs more than Miguel, who is 11. He is only 45 lbs lighter than I am, and I am 50.
Then there was this show hosted by a guy I’d never heard of, Steve Wilko. On it, a woman accused a male relative of either killing her daughter or hiring someone to do so. She was crying and had to be restrained by members of Wilko’s crew as she shouted in a thick Southern accent, “Did you kill my baby? Did you have someone kill my young-un?”
“No,” he said defiantly. “I did not. She was my young-un too.”
I didn’t tune in long enough to ascertain what type of kinship relationship the accused and the dead girl shared.
As I watched these shows and one or two others, I kept thinking two things: one, why would people who may have legitimate legal grievances choose to air their cases in such a tawdry fashion? OK, I know the answer to this one already. And, two, give me Judge Wapner. The original People’s Court was the best. Wapner delivered judgments that were often swift and painful, but occasionally laced with humor and pathos. And he never took bullshit from anyone or doled it out in return. He seemed the real deal; the rest of these bozos are pretenders to a crown they will never wear and to a thrown they will never ascend.
The only daytime show I am sorry I missed was Ellen. I watched the advertisement for her show, but I must’ve been sleeping when it actually came on. Ellen features what she calls her bathroom concert series, in which she sings with a famous crooner in a bathroom or shower. That afternoon she was slated to sing I Kissed A Girl with Katy Perry. Having a chance to hear a great singer, a great comedienne, and their duet with a great song might’ve made my day. And it would’ve been funny.
In the end, the only TV I found comforting during my convalescence was my DVD collection of the 2004 American League baseball championships, when the Red Sox overtook the Yankees after a three-games-to-none deficit and launched the greatest miracle turnaround in playoff baseball history, culminating in Boston’s first World Series title in 86 years. Watching the exciting comeback games when the Red Sox were on the brink and the subsequent World Series celebrations brought many tears to my eyes and maybe, just maybe, helped my ailing body heal a tad faster.
As for most of daytime TV, I will leave the final words to jazz singer and proto-hip-hop artist Gil Scott-Heron: “The revolution will not be televised.”
Thanks goodness.
Because my head ached so badly, piercing pain behind the eyes and across my forehead, I was unable to read or even remain upright. Most of the time I was just curled in a semi-fetal position on the couch, drool forming on the edge of my mouth, as the dog nipped at my socks.
But I did manage to pass some of the time when I wasn’t asleep or wishing I was dead by watching daytime TV. I never thought American civilization was in such dire straits until I ingested an overdose of afternoon TV. It’s a veritable nightmare.
Almost everything I watched was pure and unentertaining crap. I must admit up front that we don’t have cable, so we rely on a few local stations and several more quirky ones that are pulled in by our HDTV.
One thing I found on the tube is a plethora of judge shows. There was this one guy, I think Judge Alex, who spent most of the show counseling a young woman, who’s already had an army of abusive boyfriends, to make better choices. Uh, duh, no shit, buddy; where’d you get your law degree? The 24-year old female was suing her ex-boyfriend for borrowing her car when they were together, crashing it, and then refusing to pay for any damages.
On Maury Povich, who was actually trained as a real journalist, he did a show about incredibly obese toddlers. Being the father of a toddler, albeit a lean one, I tuned in for a few moments. He featured one three-year-old boy who weighs 114 lbs, which is 80 lbs above normal. Heck, that kid weighs 40 lbs more than Miguel, who is 11. He is only 45 lbs lighter than I am, and I am 50.
Then there was this show hosted by a guy I’d never heard of, Steve Wilko. On it, a woman accused a male relative of either killing her daughter or hiring someone to do so. She was crying and had to be restrained by members of Wilko’s crew as she shouted in a thick Southern accent, “Did you kill my baby? Did you have someone kill my young-un?”
“No,” he said defiantly. “I did not. She was my young-un too.”
I didn’t tune in long enough to ascertain what type of kinship relationship the accused and the dead girl shared.
As I watched these shows and one or two others, I kept thinking two things: one, why would people who may have legitimate legal grievances choose to air their cases in such a tawdry fashion? OK, I know the answer to this one already. And, two, give me Judge Wapner. The original People’s Court was the best. Wapner delivered judgments that were often swift and painful, but occasionally laced with humor and pathos. And he never took bullshit from anyone or doled it out in return. He seemed the real deal; the rest of these bozos are pretenders to a crown they will never wear and to a thrown they will never ascend.
The only daytime show I am sorry I missed was Ellen. I watched the advertisement for her show, but I must’ve been sleeping when it actually came on. Ellen features what she calls her bathroom concert series, in which she sings with a famous crooner in a bathroom or shower. That afternoon she was slated to sing I Kissed A Girl with Katy Perry. Having a chance to hear a great singer, a great comedienne, and their duet with a great song might’ve made my day. And it would’ve been funny.
In the end, the only TV I found comforting during my convalescence was my DVD collection of the 2004 American League baseball championships, when the Red Sox overtook the Yankees after a three-games-to-none deficit and launched the greatest miracle turnaround in playoff baseball history, culminating in Boston’s first World Series title in 86 years. Watching the exciting comeback games when the Red Sox were on the brink and the subsequent World Series celebrations brought many tears to my eyes and maybe, just maybe, helped my ailing body heal a tad faster.
As for most of daytime TV, I will leave the final words to jazz singer and proto-hip-hop artist Gil Scott-Heron: “The revolution will not be televised.”
Thanks goodness.
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