Summer of Nightly TV

One of our primary motivations for moving to Orcas Island was the peace, the tranquility, watching the sun set and the moon rise in the quiet of the evening. As tourists before moving here, we spent every night sitting in chairs, watching the colors of the sky change over the water.

So the day the guy came out to install cable for us after we made the move, I immediately felt furious. You mean we’ve come to this serene island out in the middle of all of this beauty, and now we’re ensuring we’ll have the TV on every night for sports? I was so frustrated with my husband in that moment.

As I quietly, angrily, vigorously yanked weeds out of the yard a stone’s throw away from the cable guy putting a dish on the corner of the roof, my husband walked over to the man. Gently, he said, “You better stop where you are.”

The man, a little confused for being called out to our house and then told to stop said, “I only have one connection left and you’ll be all set.”

“You better not make that connection,” my husband replied, pointing with his eyes to me, as I looked up in bewildered relief.

Thanks to that (ever-so-loving, observant, partner-minded!) decision, television watching hasn’t been a big part of our lives here, at least not in the way it would have been, had the man made that last connection.

Over the eight years since that day though, technology has been quietly building its stronghold in our house, mostly in the form of computers, but also in the ability to watch shows that no longer have to air solely on a TV station, as in the past. Roku, Netflix, YouTube, and myriad other options exist to entice us.

And now, in this much-more-quiet-than-normal COVID summer, we’ve officially become watchers of the big screen. In the past, I would’ve felt a little ashamed. But these days, it’s actually been quite fun to indulge.

When school shut us down in March, our dining table was abandoned. After all those years of eating meals together and looking across at each other, we decided to put some newness in our nightly routine. The coffee table, covered in a dark gray towel, became the new dining table as we binge-watched one Marvel movie after another each night. What fun! And what change, too, as we had never watched PG-13 movies with cussing and lewdness before. We had a lot of conversations thanks to those movies, but we also had a ball enjoying the explosive action and hilarious humor.

Next came seven years of The Flash episodes – one or two each night. Again, there were some unsavory moments, but on the whole the characters were the kind of people whose qualities you’d want in your best friends. Heck, they became our best friends on those nights, in a world where hanging out with other people was an impossibility.

After months of that, we mixed it up – either 60 Minutes, Undercover Boss, Shark Tank, The Healing Powers of Dude (a Netflix series about an 11-year-old boy and his therapy dog), or Down to Earth (a really neat Netflix documentary series shot around the world).

Now, it’s the political conventions – the Democratic last week and the Republican starts tonight.

Our habits have gotten sloppy, our routines are zilch, and our bedtimes are way too late for the mom I’ve always been in the past. But it’s been fun; different; spontaneous; lighthearted.

After five-and-a-half months of school-at-home and summer, we are now upon our first school night. Ten-thirty bedtimes will be scaled back to nine o’oclock. Breakfast will no longer be at 11 AM – more like 7:30 AM. Lunch will be at a regimented time around 12:00 rather than at 3:00. Though I will lament cooking dinner at 6 PM when it’s still a hot lake day out there, I will probably love eating around 7:00 instead of 9:00 PM. Routines will immediately be in place the moment my alarm rings in the morning, and it will be a most unprecedented start to the school year to see my children in masks and send them off to well-sanitized, mucho-measured, non-cross-pollinating classrooms where their desks will represent safe bubbles of space in which to learn and grow.

It will be another new normal to experience, as we say goodbye to a simple summer filled with, among other things, memories of TV experiences we’d never had before. We might actually sit across from one another at the table again.