with a little help from my friends

i've been housesitting this week for friends (and kitty sitting 3 odd fellows). the differences between their house and my house are great, but the one that has impacted me the most is the cable. i haven't really watched television (aside from watching TV dvds--Freaks & Geeks, Pete & Pete, 90210...the classics, y'know) in about 9 months. i watched a bit when i visited K$ in austin, but this, friends...my goodness.

i've been watching 2 episodes of the wonder years before i go to bed around 11 pm. and then this morning i heard joe cocker crooning the theme this morning on the radio. i really, really love that show. i was so young watching it when it was on TV the first time and now have watched it all again through reruns and am counting on the day that the music rights can be secured and all seasons will be released onto DVD so i can get my grubby little hands on them.

the 2 episodes last night were just 2 examples of how awesome and poignant this show is. the first episode i watched with midge and scrat was about the English teacher who tried to buck the system--getting rid of letter grades in favor of Pass/No Pass, reading Catcher In the Rye, opening up the world of literature beyond the uninformed intentions of a disconnected school board. it was such a cool episode and made me wistful for high school English, really the only thing about high school i truly loved in retrospect. (there was this great moment in 11th grade when we watched Hamlet and our ditzy teacher wanted to fast forward through naked parts, but was so inept at technology that she paused it instead.)

and then the joni mitchell played. i realized from the beginning how important music was to this series, but last night, the episode "Kodachrome" reminded me in waves of memory. in the background we could hear the tinkling of "both sides now." it's so funny how one song can be recorded by the same artist twice in her life and sound SO different. this led midge and me to discuss how heartbreaking that scene in Love Actually is when accompanied by the gravelly breaths and slowed phrasing of a much older joni singing 'both sides now.' in this particular episode of TWY, however, the song makes the experience of opening your mind up to possibilities hopeful, rather than hopeless.

the second episode is the one where wayne really feels his inadequacy academically and makes the misguided attempt at salvaging himself by joining the army (if i say what happens and you don't know, then i've ruined some stuff for you. do yourself a favor and catch the reruns)--it's 1972 at this point and Vietnam is still raging with war.

and that leads to the sadness to come from Vietnam. from the beginning of my life i was taught about war, mostly just through the lens of an academic historian, examining battle tactics of the respective wars, the impact on my own family (my grandfather as a paratrooper in WWII and then deployed again in Korea, coming back a very different man), the political tug-of-war and responsibility. so there i sit watching this episode knowing what might loom in wayne's future and flashing to every page of textbook in college that covered post-1950 history. i remember seeing these episodes as a kid wishing i was that age at that time and could somehow talk wayne out of it, talk all of those boys at it, screaming for their salvation from a war that did nothing but leave a lot of grieving parents and spouses and children. i was an inflamed child, aware of what Napalm was and what protesting meant, but not really. i wouldn't really know the weight of protest until i was in college.

how is it that television of all things (remember, it rots your brains!, parents say) reminds you SO MUCH of your own life?

thank you for being in my life, kevin arnold.