CityView Magazine

on second thought The Things We Lived Without I By mary zahran once had a conversation with my mother in which she made the most shocking confession I had ever heard (I was twelve years old at the time). We were discussing the things that she and her family did for fun when she was a child. She rattled off a list of activities that would have made the Brady Brunch seem wild by comparison ��� board games, hayrides, charades, endless rounds of gin rummy and singing around the piano while my uncle accompanied them. Wow! Who knew I was descended from such a band of daredevils? When I asked my mother what television shows they watched, she gave me a bemused smile and informed me that they did not have television when she was a child. I couldn���t believe what I had just heard! There was no ���Wonderful World of Disney���? No ���Flipper���? No ���Mighty Mouse Cartoons���? Suddenly, my mother���s idyllic childhood took on a Dickensian cast: I pictured her on her knees in a grimy workhouse, scrubbing a floor and begging for morsels of food. How had she possibly lived in a world without television? It was no wonder they played so much gin rummy. Just a couple of decades later, I was having similar conversations with my own daughters. I can���t describe adequately the look of horror on their faces when I confessed that I grew up in a home with only one television set and three channels, maybe four if the aluminum foil and the rabbit ears were positioned correctly. I also had the painful task of informing them that our television set was black and white, a concept they only grasped thanks to the first few minutes of ���The Wizard of Oz���. I de12 | January/February ��� 2013 scribed my excitement at learning that my grandparents had purchased a color television, still a novelty at the time. I remember sitting in their house watching the first broadcast of ���Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer��� and observing that the only red items on the screen were Rudolph���s nose and Santa���s suit. Everything else was a putrid green, which may have been a perfect color for the Grinch, but was not at all suitable for the North Pole or the Island of Misfit Toys. I continued with my childhood television true confessions: I recalled my sadness when President Kennedy was shot, not because I understood the historical significance of the event, but because my Saturday morning cartoons were preempted by all that grainy footage of people crying in Dallas. I recounted my memory of the day John Glenn orbited the earth; once again, adults who did not understand the importance of a child���s television programs were saying and doing boring things on air while I sulked. There were many other things about my childhood that my children found difficult to comprehend. They couldn���t believe that telephones had at one time been permanently installed in one location in a house, making it nearly impossible for teenage girls to talk to their boyfriends because their pesky little brothers and sisters eavesdropped nearby. They could not fathom the concept of a party line, something my aunt had, where several homes shared a single telephone line and had to take turns placing and receiving calls. Whenever I express my complete indifference to owning the latest hi-tech gadgetry, my children brace themselves for my inevitable follow-up comment: ���You know, girls, somehow we

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