The best thing on our television set were cartoons.There were not nearly as many then as there are now,with only two channels.Usually there were only one or two cartoon shows spanning an hour or so,from five to six o'clock in the afternoon.The only ones that I remember from those days,at least the ones on in the afternoon were Atom Ant,and a show called Gumby and Pokey.Pokey was a horse,or maybe a pony made out of soft plastic.And Gumby?Well I never was too certain exactly what Gumby was,except that he was made out of plastic too,and he had a nasty green color,while Pokey was about the same color as a hot water bottle.Of course our television wasn't color,but Gumby and Pokey were sold in stores,and I'd seen them before,so I knew what color they were.The better cartoons were on Saturday morning.It's not just that they were on for longer,but they also included Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig,then later,a few years later,The Roadrunner.Bugs and his friends were always my favorite cartoons.
One night we were watching cartoons,but as I recall it wasn't at home.There was this cartoon that was about this guy who had invented a portable hole,and he was showing all the things that it could be used for.There was a bank robber who used the portable hole to get into the bank at night,and lots of other things as well-anytime somebody wanted to get past some obstacle,they would just put up one of these portable holes and walk through it.It all ended when the guy gets home and his wife is nagging him because he hasn't made any money selling portable holes.So he puts a portable hole down on the floor and pushes her into it.A second or two later,she comes flying up through the hole,followed by a bunch of fire and a devil.The devil says "Aren't things already bad enough down here without her?" And then an adult who was in the room flipped off the television,saying something about how that was not appropriate for children to watch.I had a sense of what was happening in the cartoon,but it took years before I really got the humor of the situation.
After the cartoons,the news came on.In those days the newsman would sit at a desk and read the news from a stack of papers in front of him.There were different guys doing this,but they all seemed to have one thing in common.They never cracked a smile,like they were sitting on a ram rod.They never laughed,or talked about anything,they didn't cough,sneeze or clear their throats,and,in fact they hardly looked real at all.The local news,so far as I can recall almost never featured a reporter out in the field.Just those talking statues in the studio,reading from their shuffled papers.I guess they could not have had teleprompters back then either.
Right after the news was read,the weather came on.My father was always intensely interested in the weather.I guess that was because of the eighty mile commute to work over rough New Brunswick roads,especially in winter.
There were a few different weathermen on the television,and as it turned out,my father knew one of these weathermen.I guess they'd met in Goose Bay,or maybe Chatham,but he knew the man from work,in one way or another.One afternoon we went to visit this guy,who lived way over in the west end of town,off west Main Street.He turned out to be a very nice sort of a man,and he looked very different from the way he did on the television.Like maybe someone had actually removed that stick from the nether regions of his anatomy.In fact,I had a bit of a hard time recognizing him from the man who I'd seen on television.But I though he was a good guy to know,because he'd been on television,and he was the only man I'd ever met who had.And he might even know Bugs Bunny.I hadn't really worked it out in my mind by this point,but I kind of wanted to be on television too,and I thought,if I was at the house of a person who was on television,then I'd be there as well.All I would have to do was wait on him to start reading the report,and when I got home,there I'd be.I didn't have the first clue about cameras and the like,or,that if I actually was on television,then I couldn't very well be home to watch it too.But the weatherman just sat around all afternoon talking with my father ,and the two of them shared some beer.He never did sit down and read the weather,because it was his day off.
It really is funny how your mind works when you are a young child,then,many years later you can see how totally ridiculous the things you thought were.That's because of something called Developmental Psychology,as it turns out,but I had no idea about any of that back then.So in those days,I had this particular idea about how weather and weathermen worked,which turned out to be all wrong.You see,I thought if the weatherman said it was going to rain,then it rained.It rained because the weatherman wanted it to rain.If he wanted it to snow,then it snowed,except that he would,being a good weatherman,never make it snow in the summer time.If he wanted it to be a fine sunny day,then it would.But I though that the weather was the way it was because it was commanded by the weatherman.He had absolute power.In fact,absolute power was not just something that belonged to the weatherman,it belonged to all adults.But the weatherman was an obvious example of power.He knew better than other adults how the weather worked.My father didn't like nasty weather at all.In fact,he didn't even like spring or autumn weather.So,in my four year old mind,here was this guy,who seemed to be my fathers friend,but who could,any time he pleased,make my father unhappy simply by saying it was going to rain or snow.And,on the particular day that we visited him,he said exactly that."It"s going to rain tomorrow." That didn't set well with me,because if it rained we couldn't go to the park.So,I knew I had to be polite to this guy.I was expected.But,I was really mad at him for saying it would rain.
I guess it's just that you tend to view adults as kind of godlike when you are small.I know I did.I was in this world where thing were very uncertain to me.But all of the grownups I knew were confident in what they said,or at least seemed to be.In my family I was safe and things were predictable because of all this,so I really couldn't process the idea that maybe adults,maybe even the omnipotent weatherman were prone to making mistakes and were not really directing the world in the manner of their own choosing.If they were,what need would there be of God.My mother still told us about God all the time,so the idea of adults doing whatever they wanted was starting to erode in my mind.But only a little bit.Years later,I would come to realize that the weatherman had very little to do with the weather.He just told it as it was.And sometimes,far more often then than now,he didn't even do that.
One night we were watching cartoons,but as I recall it wasn't at home.There was this cartoon that was about this guy who had invented a portable hole,and he was showing all the things that it could be used for.There was a bank robber who used the portable hole to get into the bank at night,and lots of other things as well-anytime somebody wanted to get past some obstacle,they would just put up one of these portable holes and walk through it.It all ended when the guy gets home and his wife is nagging him because he hasn't made any money selling portable holes.So he puts a portable hole down on the floor and pushes her into it.A second or two later,she comes flying up through the hole,followed by a bunch of fire and a devil.The devil says "Aren't things already bad enough down here without her?" And then an adult who was in the room flipped off the television,saying something about how that was not appropriate for children to watch.I had a sense of what was happening in the cartoon,but it took years before I really got the humor of the situation.
After the cartoons,the news came on.In those days the newsman would sit at a desk and read the news from a stack of papers in front of him.There were different guys doing this,but they all seemed to have one thing in common.They never cracked a smile,like they were sitting on a ram rod.They never laughed,or talked about anything,they didn't cough,sneeze or clear their throats,and,in fact they hardly looked real at all.The local news,so far as I can recall almost never featured a reporter out in the field.Just those talking statues in the studio,reading from their shuffled papers.I guess they could not have had teleprompters back then either.
Right after the news was read,the weather came on.My father was always intensely interested in the weather.I guess that was because of the eighty mile commute to work over rough New Brunswick roads,especially in winter.
There were a few different weathermen on the television,and as it turned out,my father knew one of these weathermen.I guess they'd met in Goose Bay,or maybe Chatham,but he knew the man from work,in one way or another.One afternoon we went to visit this guy,who lived way over in the west end of town,off west Main Street.He turned out to be a very nice sort of a man,and he looked very different from the way he did on the television.Like maybe someone had actually removed that stick from the nether regions of his anatomy.In fact,I had a bit of a hard time recognizing him from the man who I'd seen on television.But I though he was a good guy to know,because he'd been on television,and he was the only man I'd ever met who had.And he might even know Bugs Bunny.I hadn't really worked it out in my mind by this point,but I kind of wanted to be on television too,and I thought,if I was at the house of a person who was on television,then I'd be there as well.All I would have to do was wait on him to start reading the report,and when I got home,there I'd be.I didn't have the first clue about cameras and the like,or,that if I actually was on television,then I couldn't very well be home to watch it too.But the weatherman just sat around all afternoon talking with my father ,and the two of them shared some beer.He never did sit down and read the weather,because it was his day off.
It really is funny how your mind works when you are a young child,then,many years later you can see how totally ridiculous the things you thought were.That's because of something called Developmental Psychology,as it turns out,but I had no idea about any of that back then.So in those days,I had this particular idea about how weather and weathermen worked,which turned out to be all wrong.You see,I thought if the weatherman said it was going to rain,then it rained.It rained because the weatherman wanted it to rain.If he wanted it to snow,then it snowed,except that he would,being a good weatherman,never make it snow in the summer time.If he wanted it to be a fine sunny day,then it would.But I though that the weather was the way it was because it was commanded by the weatherman.He had absolute power.In fact,absolute power was not just something that belonged to the weatherman,it belonged to all adults.But the weatherman was an obvious example of power.He knew better than other adults how the weather worked.My father didn't like nasty weather at all.In fact,he didn't even like spring or autumn weather.So,in my four year old mind,here was this guy,who seemed to be my fathers friend,but who could,any time he pleased,make my father unhappy simply by saying it was going to rain or snow.And,on the particular day that we visited him,he said exactly that."It"s going to rain tomorrow." That didn't set well with me,because if it rained we couldn't go to the park.So,I knew I had to be polite to this guy.I was expected.But,I was really mad at him for saying it would rain.
I guess it's just that you tend to view adults as kind of godlike when you are small.I know I did.I was in this world where thing were very uncertain to me.But all of the grownups I knew were confident in what they said,or at least seemed to be.In my family I was safe and things were predictable because of all this,so I really couldn't process the idea that maybe adults,maybe even the omnipotent weatherman were prone to making mistakes and were not really directing the world in the manner of their own choosing.If they were,what need would there be of God.My mother still told us about God all the time,so the idea of adults doing whatever they wanted was starting to erode in my mind.But only a little bit.Years later,I would come to realize that the weatherman had very little to do with the weather.He just told it as it was.And sometimes,far more often then than now,he didn't even do that.
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