Kids and the Things They Teach

While thinking about the things I have learned from my daughter, I overheard a friend refer to TV as an idiot box and I was reminded of why I disagree.

FLASHBACK/1983

I’m wandering through the den, on my way to my office, my head desperately looking for something that can be sustained through more than a sentence or two of wordsmithing.

So far, a walk in the garden and its determined experiencing of the glories of nature, to include an attempt to understand animal behaviour in the persons of Idli and Chutney, Great Dane and Rhodesian ridgeback, respectively, has proved, you should pardon the expression, fruitless. Both the dogs were unequivocal in their averment that wandering aimlessly through SoCal semi-desert scrubland on a hot summer morning was not on their agenda. I had left them to their somnolent arrogance under the porch and went to find my wife. Now, you’d think that a woman who has said, sometimes publicly and none too quietly, that she knows me better than I do myself, you’d think she’d be able to tell me what I could write about on a given morning, wouldn’t you? I’d say fruitless here as well, but I can’t, ‘cuz, y’know, the kid and all... Anyway, she had, in no uncertain terms, sent me from her side, unaided; hence my journey through the den; which contains, among other things, my daughter, inelegantly sprawled across the couch facing the television.

I grump my way to the couch and dad-bully her into making room for me. She grumps right back and does so.

The television is awash with the emotions of a group of impossibly beautiful young people wrestling, hair and makeup intact, with some sort of seemingly intractable issue that necessitates much emoting. My grump had found a place to roost.

After a desultory, naam ke vaaste, attempt to make sense of the happenings on the screen, my grump morphed into the parental whine of idiot boxes and their time wasting ill effects, culminating in asking her why she was not, instead, reading a book and thus improving her mind and putting time to good use.

Her universally understood time-out gesture put a stop to the whine.

“Is a picture worth a thousand words? she asks.

“Give or take” I respond.

“Then how many words am I reading in a 30 minute program?” she asks, a touch too triumphantly.

We then go on to discuss the relative merits of what is available on TV and in print. My insistence that all that is available on TV is unwatchable, unworthy, junk, is somewhat deflated by my admission that there is only a small proportion of all that is available in a bookstore that I deem worthy of my time and attention

My balloon gets punctured when she wordlessly hands me the remote control.

FLASH FORWARD/ today

The very pleasant memory of my daughter snuggled up next to me as we watched a National Geographic Special on the doings of a small, rare, and important fish that lives in the Red Sea and her Master’s degree in Marine Biology.