[Television is] an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.
~David Frost
My great-grandmother was a hefty woman less than five feet tall, with hands that were gnarled from years of arthritis. Her swollen legs were encased in stretchy elastic bandages. The floors in her modest home were uneven, so she steadied herself by pressing her hands against the wall as she moved about.
Though her short body was bent and disabled, her mind was as sharp as a tack and she was always at her best. I never saw her wearing anything but a black dress with a dainty, crocheted lace collar. Her peppered white hair was always braided into a bun.
I rarely saw her smile, and when she did it was ever so slight. She didn’t have much to say about anything either, unless it was in a very meek and quiet voice. She only spoke when she felt she really had something important to say, which wasn’t often.
Her six-foot-tall husband towered over her. He was definitely the voice of the family. He was tall, strong, and vigorous; she was short and quiet, but kind.
They spent their early mornings at the kitchen table with freshly brewed coffee and some fabulous baked treat just recently pulled from the oven. There was always room for something sweet, and Grandma made sure it was on the table each day.
She wasn’t one to show her emotions, so her children had a hard time buying her gifts that would seem to make her happy. When they bought her one of the first televisions in their small town she said it was an extravagant gift and a total waste of money.
There wasn’t much on the tube in those early years except local news shows, some children’s programming — and wrestling. The satin-clad wrestlers would enter the ring, each sporting some kind of flashy outfit to set him apart. Muscles bulged, and strength exuded from every pore. Grandma was transfixed.
With each slam to the floor, she would scream at whoever was winning and say how mean he was. If the tables turned, and the former victim now had his opponent in a hammerlock, she rose to the defense of the new underdog. It was comical how she shifted from favoring one to the other. Everyone tried to tell her that it was staged, but she was convinced that it was absolutely true.
She’d wring her lace handkerchief tightly around her twisted fingers. Her wrinkles seemed to deepen as she became involved in the “contest.” When it was over, she ranted on and on about the savage behavior of the two wrestlers. She didn’t miss an opportunity to tell anyone about what she had witnessed and how vulgar it was. For the rest of the week, she’d be talking to the mailman, milkman, neighbors, pastor and everyone else in town about the barbaric behavior going on in her living room each Saturday morning.
Who knew a tiny screen in a huge console could hold someone captive for one hour a week and give her enough to talk about for seven days? The following Saturday, she’d plant herself in front of the TV and watch the mayhem all over again.
Simple pleasures.
~Kathy Boecher
