I watched a lot of tv as a kid, mostly the meaningless pablum of daytime programming. Most of it was from the late 50’s and early 60’s. It had little or nothing in common with real life, certainly not my life.
My family was poor, my father farming cotton on someone else’s land, spending what money he had to raise a crop, selling it for what he could and having to pay a significant portion of those proceeds to the landowner. There was never much left for him or us.
Our house was on the edge of town, small and spare, heated by three gas stoves, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, and the smallest in the single bathroom. In the summer it was “cooled” (and I am using that term in its most generous sense) by a large evaporative cooler, blowing somewhat cooler air through a living room window. It had a bad bearing, causing it to screech loudly on long, hot summer nights.
This was my real world and it was made nearly unbearable by what I saw and understood as “normal” on the various TV shows I watched. The characters that lived inside that small simulated wooden box were sometimes so much more real to me than the real people in my life and nearly always preferable.
I am the youngest of five and by the time I was born my parents were both in their early 40’s. They’d both been born into large, depression-era families, sharing only the life crushing poverty common in those times. They spoke little of their childhood (to me) and as far as I was concerned the history of my family’s existence began (and perhaps ended) with me.
Life had not been kind to them. Whatever hopes and dreams they might have had, were almost completely dead and gone before I was born. They did the best they could. It has taken me long years of hurt, disappointment, sometimes hate, and longing to understand that. All of that was displaced, directed mostly towards my father. My mother tried, in her own way to make me happy. My father spent all his time simply trying to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads, and shoes on our feet. He had no time or energy for the kind, generous fatherly relationships that was common on the insipid and fanciful TV shows that informed me as to what a father should be like. I still don’t and probably can never understand the soul-wringing hardships he suffered.
Against this seemingly grim background of my childhood was projected the insubstantial and unreal black and white moving pictures of completely unrealistic fictions. “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It To Beaver”, “Make Room For Daddy”, “Ozzie & Harriet”, etc were my windows to a world that was so much more real and preferable to the crude outlines of my actual existence. I lived in those shows, spoke with the voices of the two-dimensional children therein, listened to the calm, measured, and loving voices of the fathers and mothers, and dreamed of someday living in a house where patience, love, material plenty, and an easy, totally fictional and perfect life was offered to all who would take the time to sit, watch, listen, and believe.
Sure, I watched the other shows, “Superman”, “The Wild, Wild West”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The Outer Limits”, etc. The difference being that I completely recognized those for what they were; fanciful and fantastic visions with little or no connection to the real world.
I didn’t understand then that the family shows were no more accurate or relevant than these fanciful tales. To me they were what real life was or perhaps what it should be. They shaped my dreams and expectations as much as any accurate history or memories shared by my siblings, friends, or parents.
They were my mythology, even though at the time, I did not recognize them as such.
But a life built on the foundations of ephemeral and never existing shadows can only eventually dissolve under the simple and unrelenting pressures of what happens during normal human existence. The dreams and visions collapsed with no more substance than the light from which they were constructed. Life, rich and full of the ugly, insistent, and intense barrage attacks of real consequences, was always so much less and so much more than the shadows of those false teachers. Their truths and lessons, based on nothing more that some overworked and hasty TV writer’s hurried scratches, evaporated as the steam from water, boiled too long and too hot.
My life was almost always a huge disappointment, delivering none of the expected perfection, richness, and promised material wealth.
I don’t know when, but eventually I came to understand that the things on which I had built my life were baseless and simply put, bullshit.
I needed a new and relevant belief system.
I needed a new mythology.
