At Least It's In Color!

I decided to bring the old portable TV from the storage room and put it in the guest/computer/spare room. I bought a bigger splitter, hooked it up and plugged it in. Nice! Now when someone is spending the night, she can have a TV. When I'm doing stuff on the computer, I don't have to miss my favorite shows. I'm glad I thought of it. As a matter of fact, I have it on right now! This is going to be great!

My granddaughters were over the other night. They were excited about the TV being in the computer room. I wasn't home when they discovered it. When I returned, they asked me to find the remote for it. I explained that this particular TV was old and didn't have a remote. Smiles turned to frowns. Huh? No remote? Well, how do you turn it on? I demonstrated how to turn it on, how to change channels and how to adjust the volume. Frowns turned to smiles!

They gleefully jumped up onto the bed and settled themselves in at the foot of the bed to watch some kiddie TV. I started to leave the room but they had one more question. If there's no remote, how are they expected to change the channels? Smiles turned to frowns. I explained that someone would have to get off the bed, walk over to the TV (a grand total of 5 feet), change the channel and then return to the bed.

"Well, what do we do when we get sleepy and want to turn the TV off, if we don't have a remote?" Emma asked.
"You'll have to get out of bed and turn it off", I said.

They looked at each other. No smiles, just frowns and head shaking, as if to say "Nana's crazy".
"At least it's in color," I said. Huh? They didn't really have any conception of black and white TV.

"Oh, you mean like the first part of The Wizard of Oz!", Maggie said, nodding her head. "That wasn't in color, either."

"Yes, just like that," I replied. I told them how when I was a girl we had to get up, walk over to the black and white TV to change the channel, or adjust the sound, or try to fix the horizontal and vertical holds (huh?), or to wiggle the rabbit ears (huh?) and then go back and sit down. Of course, Mom and Dad had the four of us to do those little chores. What did Mom do when we were in school all day? I know she watched her "soaps". Surely, the TV messed up during the day.

Having a TV in my room when I was a kid would have been the greatest! Having more than one TV in the entire house would have been the greatest! Having a TV in another room so we all didn't have to watch Perry Como or Ed Sullivan or, the worst - wrestling! By having only one TV, we were at the mercy of Mom and Dad. We watched what they wanted to watch. Cartoons could be on, but if they wanted to watch something else (of course!) they would just change channels. We couldn't complain. We were just children.

Well, anyway...now the girls were not so enamored with the TV in the room they would be sleeping in when they come to spend the night at Nana's. (They don't have TVs in their bedrooms at home, so I figured it would be a special treat.) They got off the bed, turned the TV off and as they were going downstairs, Maggie informed me that when she spends the night with me, she'll be sleeping in my bed in my room with my TV and the remote. This old TV was nothing special.

"At least it's in color," I mumbled to myself.