Bathtime

At Christmas 1969 my brother received as a gift a black-and-white Sony television. It was small—a cube about a foot on every side—but despite its size it was a luxury. Back then, there were Sony TVs and there were everybody else’s TVs. In 1969 Sony was the top of the heap where TVs were concerned.

Such luxuries would otherwise have been materially beyond our family, especially considering that Mama bought the TV at Neiman-Marcus, if it weren’t the case that she had taken a part-time job at Neiman-Marcus for the holiday season and received a discount there. She worked in the gift department, where she was tickled to have sold a crystal vase to the actor Stacy Keach. Mama got a lot of mileage over the years out of her encounter with Stacy Keach. I think she had a crush on him.

Some years later, when my brother moved off to college, the little Sony TV passed down to me. By then the channel-changer knob had broken, and changing the channel required a pair of pliers. The little spindle on which the channel-changer knob had previously been mounted was half-moon-shaped, and I kept track of the channel by the position of the half-moon. 

I have always loved taking baths—something to do with womb-memory, perhaps—and in the mid-1970s I took a bath most Saturday nights. So far, so good. But where I diverged a bit from what might be considered best practices of electrical safety was my carrying the little Sony TV into the bathroom, placing it on the toilet seat, plugging it in, and watching it from the bathtub. I viewed countless episodes of the Carol Burnett Show from the bathtub. If I was otherwise occupied on a Saturday night and took my bath on Sunday, I watched whichever James Bond or John Wayne movie was on.

I would at times reach from the bathtub and, with my pliers, change the channel. This might have happened when Carol Burnett was in reruns or the Movie of the Week was no good.

It makes perfect sense now that I might have been somewhat at risk of death by changing the channel on a TV set with a pair of pliers while sitting in a bathtub, but during the Ford and Carter administrations it didn’t occur to me.

Live and learn.