When TV dies

Around midday on Sunday a storm hit Sydney Harbour. The lightning struck so loudly at one point that I was sure something close by had been hit.

It had.

Bye, bye shiny, flat-screen, surround-sound, gazillion-inch TV.

Bye bye.

I wasn’t too upset by it. It’s under warranty. And gone are the days of childhood when I would watch TV from the moment I got home from school until bedtime – starting with General Hospital, my favorite soap opera. These days I tend to think TV is destroying America. I only have one, and on principle hope to never buy a second. They suck up your electricity and creativity, depress your mood and metabolism, and ultimately render you inert – mentally, emotionally, physically and socially.

The TV fried on Sunday. It’s now Friday. The repairman is coming with a replacement on Saturday. Or a loaner, not sure. (How pathetic can we be if we require loaners to get by?) Anyway, in the week that passed, life went on as usual with nothing missing that really mattered. Instead, there was something new.

The first night without TV, my husband and I went to take our depressing dinner trays to the couch, only to realize that it felt a bit strange facing a shiny dead screen.

Uh… shall we eat at the table? – I ask, uncertain.

[Silence]

Um…

[He's thinking...]

Okay.

There was wine. Candles. Cool mood lighting. Conversation. We always have conversation, mind you, but this conversation was different. More confessional. More conspiratorial. There was just something in the air that night.

Or at least something not in the background.

We used the table again the second night. And maybe the third, I forget. But the point is, there was no interference. Just music.

And after dinner I seemed to notice him in the room more, noticed that we were together, spending time, even if we weren’t talking.

Life can be sweet when the TV dies.

Of course, it ain’t footy season.

So it’s no skin off my nose not having a TV on a Friday night.

And I don’t have any weeknight line-ups I just MUST watch. Those days are long gone. Good riddance. I may have caught an episode of 30 Rock during dinner in the past or watched a home renovation show to avoid studying. But I could take ‘em or leave ‘em.

And of course I live in Australia, so to get the latest Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men or Friday Night Lights, you have to hit the torrents.  You don’t need a TV – you need a computer. And ours is 22 inches wide.

So really there’s only one reason I need that TV.

Brenda is back.

And I’ve got 5 recorded episodes of General Hospital piled up to watch so I can see what she’s been up to.

That TV guy better show up tomorrow.

A Sydney Halloween

I’ve always had a special fondness for Halloween – in part because the holiday occurs in October, the month I was born. For the egocentric child in me (now gone), I looked on the month of October with great excitement because my birthday was coming. And for the sugar-obsessed child in me (who lives on within my aging heart), Halloween was a thrilling finale to the month.

Like many American kids, I celebrated the holiday with relish: hanging paper scarecrows in the windows, carving pumpkins, roasting pumpkin seeds, watching Halloween specials on TV, and of course, roaming free and wild through the suburban streets on the hunt for candy from strangers. Only after every neighborhood door was rapped did I rush home to count, categorize and trade my candy with my sister.

For all of its wonders, conveniences and pleasures, Australia is grossly deficient when it comes to celebrating holidays. And Halloween, sadly, is largely ignored. Granted, there are sporadic half-hearted efforts to acknowledge a holiday considered quintessentially American. A handful of parents in a few neighborhoods may over-organize and heavily chaperone some trick-or-treating in the very early evening, and you may find a costume party or two in the city. But no one really goes ALL OUT.

At least the supermarkets are trying to make a buck by selling a few pumpkins. And thanks to their profit-focus, I’m able to have something of a celebration here.

So every year I buy a pumpkin for about $25, carve it into your standard face, sit it in my apartment window with a candle, and roast its seeds to salty perfection. As much as I would love to gaze on its menacing face, I turn it outward in the hopes that I might spark the Halloween fever in my neighbors. And as much as I love the taste and crunch of those seeds, I share them with my classmates to inspire an appreciation for pumpkins and their possibilities.

This year was no different, for the most part.

I bought and carved my pumpkin on the 24th and roasted its seeds straight away. I’ve been sharing the seeds with junior doctors and med students at the hospital, who like the med students of previous years, respond with surprised pleasure to their salty goodness.

I even showed off pictures of my pumpkin all aglow.

It’s become a ritual for me, lighting the candle when the sun goes down and turning him to face my neighbors. I’ve been counting down the days until Halloween – for what purpose, I’m not quite sure. After all, there will be no costume parties to attend and no trick-or-treating for someone so old as me. Perhaps I can catch a Simpsons Halloween episode on TV…

Today is the 27th: Day 4 for my pumpkin. For some reason, I thought to light it early before the sun went down. So I proceeded to lift off its top and found this…

WTF?!!!

After my outburst of profanity, I just couldn’t – stop – looking. It was the most terrifying thing I’d seen in some time, and I’ve spent the last five years in hospitals.

Seriously, that is the scariest looking mold I’ve ever seen. It’s like a fuzzy monster…

And there’s two of them.

Too terrified to touch them, I took to spraying them with bathroom Instant Mold Remover – perhaps not the brightest idea I’ve ever had – but it instantly wilted the frightening fuzz into tufts of wet grey hair. They looked like witches’ heads.

Taking a paper towel to them to wipe them away, I was disgusted to find that there was almost no pumpkin meat behind them. The flesh-eaters were quick in their work.

After 3 decades of Halloween I should have known better. I should have realized that a fresh vegetable couldn’t last a week being heated from the inside by a candle while sitting in a humid apartment in Australia, when it doesn’t last much longer than that on a cold front porch in the northern hemisphere.

I must have carved it too soon this year.

The house now carries the distinct and disturbing smell of rotting pumpkin meat, but I just don’t have the heart to take my sick friend to the trash just yet.

I have 4 more days until Halloween, after all.

And anyway, it’s kind of frightening wondering what that pumpkin will produce when I wake up tomorrow. It’s a horror now.

Fitting.

But it’s also sad. I’m trying to hold on to my American childhood here.

So I was as giddy as a trick-or-treater when my Aussie husband came home and threw a bag in my lap.

Candy corn!

Such sweet consolation.

UPDATE: Today is Day 5 for my pumpkin. This morning I was relieved to find him free of mental health problems after his surgery, but I still came home from work today sick with worry that the witches’ heads had resurrected.

They had. With a vengeance.

I haven’t the heart to show those pictures. They’re less gruesome, but more depressing.

But they’re not nearly as sad as the trip to the garbage I just took with my pumpkin in a cheap plastic bag.

It’s the 28th of October.

I was so close.

Art Break: ‘To Do’ List

I love coincidences. I know I’m supposed to shrug them off as random concurrent events – like rational people do – but I prefer to give them meaning.

I choose to live in a world with unseen forces.

Today I received an email notification about a new blog post from a dear friend. She’s a motivational blogger of sorts and a Christian, and her latest post discussed the unseen force of God guiding her in her daily tasks – in her ‘To Do’ list.

Huh.

Coincidentally, I was planning to publish an “Art Break” post today on that very subject.

'To Do List', oil on canvas, 3 x 2

I painted this 3  x 2 piece for my mother-in-law for her 67th birthday. She gave me several of these tiny canvases some months ago to encourage my painting, but I found them intimidating. I was thinking that I’d have to translate something grand, like a landscape, into something very tiny that could fit into my hand. It was only after I was making a ‘To Do’ list on a post-it note that it occurred to me that I could paint a post-it note LIFE-SIZE on a 3×2 canvas. Neat.

My mother-in-law doesn’t believe in unseen forces save those that physicists recognize. A Richard Dawkins-reading atheist, she has no time for Christian gods and their unseen hands shaping your ‘To Do’ list. And she has even less time for the gods of coincidence that speak to me. No time at all.

She has a labradoodle to walk.

And a garden to weed.

And a yard full of zombies to kill on her iPad.

Baptism by fire

Every culture has its ritual for young boys and girls. In black America, there was once a rite of initiation into the world of mainstream beauty. And it didn’t involve training bras or lipstick. It involved a red-hot stove and a cast-iron comb.

I found this little piece of my childhood in one of my memory boxes today.

This iron beauty once lived in my kitchen junk drawer and was put on top of a stove burner “on high“ in the mornings before school. A towel around the neck, a bit of vaseline on the top of the ears, and America’s little black girls were ready to get their do’s pressed into bone-straight submission. Hair grease was imperative to keep the hair from overdrying and breaking while being pressed. But hair loss wasn’t the only peril. There was always the feared “finishing touch” – a first degree burn across the forehead or rim of the ear. You knew it was gonna be a good day if you left for school without getting burnt.

The pressing comb is still being made and still being used in salons and kitchens across America. It’s a handy alternative to chemically (and permanently) straightening your hair. And I hear there are shiny, gold-plated electric versions now – safer and with better temperature control for the silky hair of our fair-skinned sisters whose hair still isn’t straight enough for our collective tastes.

The pressing comb has gone mainstream.

But there’s something about this comb that evokes bygone days. Not just the rust. And not just the way the top teeth have bent and come together from a blistering heat that had no business near a little girl’s scalp. There’s something comforting in holding this dirty iron comb by its solid wooden handle in my sunny, harbour-side apartment in Sydney. It grounds me. It warms me. It transplants me to a kitchen chair in front of a single mother, who woke early to make two little black girls pretty for school, before beginning a long day of three jobs to support them.

And it connects me to every black woman in America that can never forget that particular smell of burnt hair and bacon in the kitchen of her youth.

Still -

Sometimes I think that it’s long past time that America’s little black girls escape the indoctrination, and put away their mammas’ hot combs.

Sesame Street thinks so too.

For more on black hair, see this post.

What else?

I just received one of those “You should really watch this” mass emails, which I promptly ignored, of course. But I didn’t have the heart to delete it.

A few hours passed.

Then I reminded myself who sent it. Someone full of heart and very sincere.

Then I realized who received it. Only 12 people, and one of them me. He wanted to share something with me. It’s nice to be thought of. An honor, really.

Then I realized that 5 minutes of my time was nothing. I’ve wasted that many minutes 50 times over just today.

So I’ve just watched the video.

You should too.