by Tracy Werth

My mental health has improved since I discontinued our cable TV service. I had become addicted to watching too many news programs even before this abnormal administration slinked into power along with their minority populace. The $90 we save each month is a bonus, especially since my unemployment money ended this summer. Every night when my husband wants to watch the local then national news while we eat another quarantine casserole, my exposure to that one hour can both anger and depress me even in that small dose of the ever expanding events of this dreadful year.  My grandparents raised me by setting an example of what honorable behavior is and to believe that much of the world is just. I am glad my Nana and BaaBaa are long dead.

One way I have found to maintain my sanity is to use the time machine that is my television.  My watching habits are now confined to the free over-the-air channels that rerun shows I remember from childhood.  I am grateful that my husband’s job continues bringing in money and keeps us insured. But still I feel a constant underlying buzz of anxiety that keeps me from sleeping more than three or four hours each night. Before the pandemic I had been borrowing a lot of library books on members of the British and French resistance during WWII. Now when I am feeling particularly fearful, I remind myself that these terrible times pale to what families like Anne Frank’s endured.

Even though my husband’s internist wrote him a letter that he should work from home due to underlying health conditions, his job as a machinist makes that impossible. It took a long time for his employer to mandate masks and then only after several guys at work got sick from this virus. It would piss me off if I or a loved one died due to the treacherous tactics of the current federal government, in addition to the fact that I live in a state where for months our governor outlawed cities from forcing people to wear masks.

My nighttime routine is to fall asleep after the 1 a.m. episode of Mannix. On bad nights I cannot drift off until sometime during Cannon or even Barnaby Jones. At dawn I am awake again but stay in bed hoping to catch another hour or so of sleep. The only benefit of this new pattern is my recent 6 a.m. discovery of a ‘50s B&W Western starring then fledging actor 28-year-old Steve McQueen. I always skip the channels that feature those old cowboy series until one morning I paused changing channels at the sight of the King of Cool’s twinkling eyes gazing right at the camera above the title opening scene. Wanted Deal or Alive was filmed when American school children were already proficient at performing duck and cover drills under their desks for the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack. All those decades of Americans’ certain knowledge that the Soviets were out to destroy our country and now Putin is breaking us without firing a single bullet. Again, I am so grateful my grandparents are not alive to see this.

I am glad to have grown up in the ‘60s trusting in my teachers’ lies that the only reason we rehearsed hiding under our desks was simply the danger of flying glass from our classroom windows. I am appreciative that our training never had to be utilized during an actual nuclear war. The drills ended in the 1980s about the time my son was born. How distressing to know that those old preparations for an envisioned event have now been replaced with active shooter drills due to the very real school shootings in this country, so common now that most do not make it into the news.

After dinner, I check in with debonair Dick Cavett’s talk show to catch guests like George Harrison or Alfred Hitchcock. One of my never-miss programs are episodes of The Best of Ed Sullivan.  The Black Lives Matter movement makes me realize how much of a civil rights trailblazer Ed Sullivan was. I remember as a kid the excitement of seeing The Supremes sing on his show or how I sat mesmerized by the beauty of Diahann Carroll or by the snazzy choreography of the sharp dressed Temptations. Baby Boomer that I am, I get a kick out of witnessing early appearances of future rock legends like Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and, of course, the Beatles who I fell in love with immediately the first time Ed introduced them when I was in kindergarten.

Whether I was living with my beloved grandparents or my parents or over at a friend’s home, everyone had the T.V. tuned to CBS on Sunday night to see the limitless variety of acts booked onto the Sullivan show. I long for those days again. A time when Americans would gather in front of the usually single television in each household and see an opera singer followed by a pair of European jugglers and then perhaps a Catskills comedian. My grandparents always made sure to call me in if the next performer was the adorable puppet Topo Gigio or my favorite Senor Wences. “S-all right!”  I want to return to those days when a young man could formulate a future vocation by spending hours practicing ventriloquism with a mail order dummy. When entire branches of families had careers based on a long history of acrobatics or training dogs to do tricks.

When the show highlights performers my older family members enjoyed when I was very young, I cry. My heart aches for my Nana when I see her beloved Victor Borge perform. Tears slowly spill down my cheeks when I see the smiling face of Louis Armstrong. He has the same chubby cheeks of my BaaBaa who may have lost a leg in WWII but never complained and made me feel special all my life. I miss him so much and cannot help but wish my BaaBaa was here to make me feel secure again.

The credits roll after Ed Sullivan ends the episode from beyond and I sit on the sofa and wish for an actual time machine so I can join my departed family members in a time long gone. I would even take Vietnam and Nixon again over this guy.