Blessed by television

In times like these, you may have to look a little harder to find the bright side. I’m looking very hard.
One great blessing is that my daughter is on the verge of graduating from diapers. That’s going to be a savings of about $40 a month in disposable diapers, not to mention this great landmark in my child’s development has afforded me the opportunity to repeatedly and joyously exclaim the phrase “Big girl undies” without irony or fear of repercussion.
But mostly, I’m very thankful for the engineers and technicians responsible for manufacturing my extraordinarily durable 19-inch RCA color television.
My parents bought
me this TV in January of 1992 for my 16th birthday. I was a pimply, braces-wearing high school sophomore who spent a lot of time in his room. A TV in there would make the time in self-imposed exile waiting out the travails of puberty pass much faster.
It was a huge deal back in ’92 because it was a “stereo” TV. My life would no longer be lived in mono. I could finally enjoy “Major Dad” and “Unsolved Mysteries” the way they were meant to be experienced. Not in Dolby Digital Surround Sound like you can get today, just regular old, lower case “stereo sound.” I connected that baby to my old stereo receiver, cranked up the volume on “Designing Women,” and you could almost hear Delta Burke sweating.
This TV has seen a lot of changes – VCRs to DVDs to Blu-ray; Nintendos to Playstations to Xbox and Xbox 360; and analog antenna to cable to satellite, and back to digital cable, analog antenna again, and now thanks to a converter box, digital antenna.
Considering what my television has been through, it’s amazing that it has survived.
I thought I’d lost it forever just two years into its life when in the fall of 1994 I moved into the dorm room for my freshman year at Indiana University. It was resting comfortably on my new rented bed waiting to be placed in a more permanent location when it fell a good three feet screen-first onto the floor.
Now, longtime fans of Can You Dig It? will probably wonder what my dorm neighbor Jared the future Subway spokesperson thought when he heard such a crash, but I guarantee you at that point in his life he was probably down in the dining hall too busy working on his fifth helping of goulash to care.
While its owner fell face first out of bed many more times in college, the TV remained stable. Later that year, my second roommate, a sloppy, hairy, metal-music-loving Long Islander spilled a Pepsi directly into the air vents on the back of the set. It sizzled, fizzed and smoked for about a week until the Pepsi’s chemical properties evolved and mutated to create what probably can be considered the first high fructose plasma television.
When my otherwise technologically-challenged parents upgraded to a big, fancy HDTV last year, they bequeathed their 29-inch 1998 model to us. I should have been ashamed at how quickly I relegated my dear television to the guestroom upstairs, but this thing was a full 10 inches bigger. I could finally (albeit five easy payments of $39.95 too late) read the “Results Not Typical” disclaimer on the dreamy Ab Circle Pro advertisements.
Three weeks ago, the hand-me-down conked out right in the middle of my kid’s favorite show. She was mad and told me, “You have to fix it.” My only solution was to go to the guestroom and lug old faithful back down the stairs.
The RCA Dome in Indianapolis has been demolished, I’ve grown from a pimply, awkward teen to a pimply, awkward married father, and Jared may have slimmed down, but my television still weighs 300 pounds.