TV: Not Worth a Hill of Beans

Little Dirty and the Red-Winged Blackbird Confirm that Father Knows Best

 

It’s a true sign of something (Wisdom? Age? Humility?) when you ruminate on your childhood and admit that your dad was right. Over the years I’ve had to admit that my dad was right about a few things, but one of his (stern) musings ranks near the top, a prophetic call fitting of Jeremiah the weeping prophet himself. He would order, repeatedly, “Turn the television off! It will turn your mind to mush!”

“Turn the television off!”

This is a soul-crushing edict for a young boy semi-addicted to Houston Oilers football, LA Laker basketball, and Battlestar Galactica (the post-Star Wars TV hack job clever enough to put Erin Grey in a spandex space suit). It was as if the electron gun in the back of the TV was a major artery shuttling essential nutrients to my very existence. “Turn the television off” – a phrase as popular to the five Nelms kids as “We’ll take you to the swimming pool, but only after you’ve all weeded the garden for an hour.” (The latter of which, happened frequently and, in my memory at least, always when it was 95+ degrees in the shade.)

Let’s just say that my dad is gifted with objective discernment (a fancy phrase which in this context means he was raised on a coddle-free, do-your-part-or-don’t-eat farm in Middle Tennessee). He had no qualms putting the clamps down on the TV set. Not only that, but given that he escaped that Middle Tennessee farm to be a renowned expert in literature and English education, we got the double-whammy – we had to earn our TV hours by (gulp!) reading books.

One year we were even subject to the “bean system”. It went like this: each half-hour of television came at the cost of one dried pinto bean. Each week we were granted a paltry allotment of beans, a treasure that could only be increased by reading books. No books, no TV. It was at this time that I believe I discovered The Great Brain and Encyclopedia Brown series, easily digestible fare to quickly stockpile the beans to finance the TV fix. (It was also at this time that I realized that if I got up at 5 a.m. in the morning on Saturday, nobody else was up to audit whether or not I used perfect “bean math” with the Saturday morning cartoons – on more than one occasion I creatively rounded the 90-minute Bugs Bunny and Friends down to two beans. Consider this my plea for absolution.)

Fast forward a few decades and skipping the details in between, it is my pleasure to say that my dad was 100% right. I “shot my TV” over four years ago now and have never looked back. You really don’t miss it, trust me. Okay, maybe you’ll drop in for internet feeds of “The Daily Show” and “The Office” from time to time, or occasionally buy a box set of “Band of Brothers” or “From the Earth to the Moon”, but other than that, giving up TV is a winning strategy. Consider my Sundays...once every week I celebrate 3-4 extra hours of life, liberated from NFL football and ESPN Prime Time. Ahhh, sweet freedom.

“Turn the television off! It will turn your mind to mush!” What I failed to realize as a kid is that the business end of my dad’s proclamation was really the second part, the mind-to-mush part. You see, there is an opportunity cost to our television hours. This is something hard to realize until you replace the digitized world with the one that is fully 3D, IMAX, omni-visial, interactive, ultra-reality, aroma-infused, Technicolor magic with the ultimate surround sounds of treble chirps and frog-throated bass. In other words, go outside.

Case in Point 1: Garage “Kitcom”

Outside my garage door is a comedy of fur. The four kittens have grown, found their “sea legs”, and proceeded to pounce, chase, climb, tackle, and chew anything that moves. In fact, they’ll pounce on something that isn’t moving in hopes that it will move and therefore initiate a new chase which will inevitably result in another chance to climb, tackle, and chew. (Mamasita’s tail and my ankles are surviving witnesses.) Pounce, chase, chew, repeat. Pounce, chase, chew, repeat. The reruns never get old.

Little Dirty has taken the lead in the kitten antics department. The first to eat solid food, the first to take a solid poop, and now the first to stalk, Little Dirty is a kitten of boundless energy. This morning, as he danced in mid-air, defying gravity thanks to his little jaws clamped onto The Fading Tiger’s tail near the top of a home-spun cat tree, I could only wish that everybody had that type of entertainment in their garage. I even said it aloud, “Who needs TV!” You don’t need that plasma screen with satellite and TiVo, you just need to get a Little Dirty.

Case in Point 2: The Wisconsin Air Show

Spring in south central Wisconsin has to be the best time and place on the planet. Almost every morning a new wildflower grows in my woods, a new baby critter scuttles into the brush, and the green landscape breathes deeper and stronger over the glacier lakes and moraines. If heaven is anything like June in Wisconsin then I don’t blame Elijah for catching an early ride.

With spring, the red-winged blackbirds have returned, of course, and brought with them the air show. Tell me you’ve seen this? If not, get yourself to a marshy field or upland area post haste! The red-winged blackbirds lay their eggs in thickets around tall grass and green, moist earth, or just about everywhere around as far as I can tell. As such, the male spends a great deal of his time defending his territory and babies. And by “defending” I don’t mean agitated whistling and flustered flapping of wings – I mean relentless, pinpoint, acrobatic aerial assault. At any given moment around my home you can peer up into the sky and see a huge crow flying in concerted zigzags, getting incessantly pecked by a little black darting dot. That dot would be the red-winged black bird.

Today I saw perhaps the most impressive blackbird display of the entire spring. I was out on my bike, up and over Owen Park and overlooking the entire string of lakes down to and through Madison, when up above circled a red-tailed hawk, close enough to count the brilliant tail feathers. Hawks are all over the bluffs up here, always riding the rolling waves of the wind, but this one caught an earnest eye because swarming around him like bees on a beehive were two male red-winged blackbirds. They pecked him, dived bombed him, bumped him from below, flanked him from the side, all at breathtaking speeds and with surgical accuracy. The hawk’s wingspan was easily 3 feet or more, and the blackbirds were just mosquito size in comparison, but they kept at him. Higher he floated, but they kept at him. Higher still, on that rolling wave high into the sky, they all did their thing. Eventually the blackbirds returned to their grassy realm, and higher and higher until just a dot himself soared the hawk.

I loved these blackbirds. I loved that hawk. I just loved being able to stop in my tracks to watch them do their thing while below I did mine. At that moment, “my thing” was to give them that moment of awe which they deserved so much, yet needed not at all.

I finally brought my head down from the sky back to the earth. A baby bunny glanced at me and dove into the weeds. And I rolled on, a rich man richer.

Epilogue

I wish I could have shared that natural moment with anybody paralyzed by reruns of Friends or frivolous media coverage of Paris Hilton going to jail. Aside from a few shows (…the Planet Earth series, The Daily Show, anything by journalist Bill Moyers, for example…), TV just ain’t worth a hill of dried pinto beans.

Here, Little Dirty taunts The Fading Tiger from the top of the food bin. Little Dirty outweighs TFT by a about 3X, but what TFT lacks in mass he makes up for in spunk.

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