BLOW UP YOUR TV!

You really don’t notice just how eccentric your family is until you move back home after a few years absence. The realization is multiplied when a partner comes on the scene – but that’s another story…

It was during a phone conversation in the early ‘80’s that my Dad told me that the TV had just blown up.

“What do you mean blew up? You mean the tube just died, right?”

“Nope it blew up with smoke and everything. It’s still smoking now.” Dad said with a sense of shock and awe in his voice.

As he expounded further upon the details of the event the scene flashed into my mind and I was in hysterics. And, every time I read this cartoon I actually hear Dad’s voice and view my mother’s low key response. I was killing myself as I drew it, during job #32 (see previous post jack of all trades) when, when I wasn’t handing out towels at 5:30 a.m. to obsessive racquetball enthusiasts my employer allowed me to work on my craft. And, it cracks me up even now.

Like my nieces’ and nephews’ generation I too moved “back home” to live with my parents a few times in my adulthood. On a return from Victoria, I went into the family room – which we lovingly referred to as theatre #1. Though all of their 5 children had moved out a number of years prior to the TV blowing up, the room was filled with lazy boys (which Dad had accumulated on garage sale safaris during our absence) all facing the TV. A person could get whiplash trying to maintain a conversation while visiting my parents in this room.

Anyway, when I turned around there they were the 2 TV’s, one sitting on top of the other. I figured maybe Mom watched one and Dad the other, but upon closer inspection I realized that this was not so. Dad’s story was true but what he hadn’t told me was that when first TV blew up his solution was to put another one on top of it.

Seeing my response of stifled laughter, Dad with great enthusiasm explained that once he took the tube out of the expired one he could use it as a bookcase (which he in fact did) and best of all, “you’d never know that it had ever been a TV”

NOT!

It was impossible to mistake that old TV console for anything else despite the picture albums he housed within it. And, everyone’s bemused look when they saw the configuration was met with the T.V. blow up story ending with Dad exclaiming in amazement, “You’d never know it had once been a TV.”

Love ya Dad! In memory of Norm Thacker "a friend" July 07, 1917 – March 26, 2002.

(NOTE - for a larger image click on the cartoon. Cartoon copyright Nance Thacker 1991. All rights reserved.)