Call me a dinosaur: I watch the dinnertime news.
Never would I miss it. The pork chops and the tuna casseroles and the spaghetti and meatballs are always planned around the weather, the sports and the news stories. We eat before or we eat when they’re done, but never from six to seven.
This is noteworthy, it seems to me, because I’m a bit of a dying breed.
None of my colleagues watches the six o’clock news. They get their news elsewhere: from Twitter, say, or Facebook. Or by eavesdropping on the bus.
The sons have never in their lives watched the six o’clock news, except perhaps when they were younger and wandered into the kitchen to ask what was for dinner, only to glance at the television behind me. For them, however, the exposure to the experience, in which they might have briefly taken in a report on the traffic or a coming election or a dog that had mysteriously travelled halfway across the country, was purely accidental.
To this day, they do not do what I do: which is to do everything possible to make it home from work in time to get my fix. They do everything in their power to be somewhere else at six. At a movie, say, or at the gym. Or on a barstool, a frothy cold one in their mitts.
My parents, however, were also full-fledged dinosaurs.
The only way I would have called them at 6:15 would have been because there happened to be a commercial. And even then, the chat would have been concise.
“Did you just see that report?” I would ask. “The one about the corner store that was broken into and the elderly woman who disarmed the thieves with her cane and managed to hold them there until police arrived?”
“Yes!” my mother would have said. “Amazing! OK, we better go! The weather report’s beginning!”
This is not something I would have likely heard by eavesdropping on the bus. I would have heard about someone’s date on the weekend, but not about the Senior Superwoman. I might have heard about somebody’s daily clash with the boss, but not about the cat that awakened its family when the barbecue burst into flames.
Yep, I get my news the old-fashioned way. Not by listening to random strangers, but by listening to one or two particular strangers — the people who happen to anchor the news.
So call me at quarter to six, if you like. Just not at 25 past.
