Zenith

On the small screen with curved edges and a glass surface that was olive green when dark in the middle of the dark brown squat fat console with gold knobs and a metal Zenith script plaque also gold, there were Laurel and Hardy shorts that we watched from our dusty sofa, within earshot of our mother’s kitchen noises, boiling and sautéing and bubbling, and rich smells of greasy potato pancakes or French toast at breakfast time or onions and garlic for the tomato sauce in preparation for our father’s dinner which we would eat the minute he arrived from work. We were in love with Stan and Ollie’s simple voices crackling inside the box and around the bare walls, and we smiled knowingly at their simple solutions to accidents and catastrophes that all ended happily. I think I smiled nonstop and curled my legs under a favorite wool blanket; my sister’s laugh was loud and harsh which I found to be a somewhat surprising reaction to their silliness. The windows in the room overlooking Dyckman St. from seven floors up fogged up as the hot air from the kitchen met the cold panes and condensed and the room closed in like a big cave. You couldn’t hear traffic and you couldn’t see pigeons on the ledge but you knew they were there, nonetheless. The television antenna arms pointed in a vee toward the far walls where they made sharp, long shadows which would sometimes sag and the movie would be all white and grey scratches of Laurel and Hardy’s black suits and hats running around a scratchy town, escaping from danger, making them even less real than I already saw them to be. That was the best and worst of it, how unreal they were, colorless and flat with mechanical voices that broke under the looseness of a sound tube or a loose wire. But all the same, they gave us such real pleasure that we could pretend almost anything, imagine this and that, thrills and hunger and confusion and delight, and feel safe.