Before Boredom was Invented

 (Blogger's note: This is the original version of what the FW Weekly published last week.)

   

     When I was a child back in the sixties, summer in Houston's suburbs was endless and sometimes dangerous. Boredom, you see, had not yet been invented. We did not have the ability then to store thousands of songs or have inventions that regurgitated those songs with all the clarity of a gramophone. We did not yet have at our fingertips hundreds of TV stations playing nonstop reruns. And we did not possess cellphones that took really, really bad pictures. Yet our lives were still worth living, believe it or not.

      One languid summer afternoon, when my father was at work and my mother had taken to bed for the duration, as we used to say, with strict instructions that we not wake her unless we were pretty damn sure St. John of Patmos' Revelation was being fulfilled and Jesus Christ himself was returning robed in clouds of glory to separate the sheep from the goats, I got an idea.

      I made up my mind to wire some old radios together. We had a pile of them, rectangular, Bauhaus-like, boxy white, black, or brown clock radios with knobs and clock hands, total anachronisms now. Today's high-tech whizzes wouldn't be able to turn one on, let alone tell time.

      Being an “imaginative” child, which meant that I had already spun a huge number of tall tales to get me out or, more often, into of all sorts of jams, I thought maybe if I could wire all the radios together I could listen in on a conversation between some of Houston's Finest chasing beer-bellied robbers with raccoon masks and stripped tees or perhaps the Secret Service with their cool sunglasses and pockets brimming with Man from U.N.C.L.E. gadgets was even now eying balconies for hidden assassins nearby, or maybe some Martians were orbiting right above sprawling Houston, searching in vain for leaders to be taken to who would not be nonplussed by their green skin, multiple antennae, and oddly-shaped heads.

      I found the requisite number of old radios, took out the backs of them, and after finding some spare wire and wire cutters, I wired them all together. Then came the moment of truth. I plugged one in, and immediately all the electricity in the house went out.

      Now you need to remember that this was summer in Texas, well, in Houston, Texas, where life as we know it was impossible before freon was invented. Before freon made air-conditioned life possible only a few could survive Houston's subtropical sauna-bath-like annual summer meltdowns.

As far as I knew, the whole city had gone dark and all that wonderful life-giving cool air had stopped, too.

      At the Astrodome, the Eighth Wonder of the World, the National League's perennial doormats, the (Dis)Astros, playing a day game with no natural light, were totally blacked out right after Don Wilson threw a strikeout and radio announcer Loel Passe had only time to say, “He breeeeezed him, one more . . .”      

     At the Medical Center, Michael DeBakey was stopped in mid-cut, his sharpened scalpel frozen above someone's sternum; Mission Control, just a few miles to the south, was going dark just as a Gemini astronaut was floating into space; and all over the city technicolor movies were stopped in mid-scenes.      

     For all I knew, all because of my foolishness, riots in cinemas were now occurring, angry patrons with slick backed hair and tight Levis were throwing spare Milk Duds, popcorn, and Goobers at ducking ushers while white screens were being ripped apart by a colorful fusillade of Dots as hard as rocks.

      Since I had been raised the right way, incredible spasms of guilt began to shoot through my very soul. But suddenly all my guilt disappeared to be replaced by my second most common emotion, fear. I heard my father's footsteps outside my door. I knew it was his steps. His heavy patent leather footfalls of his Florshiem wingtips were by then etched into my young brain.

      I also knew that I was or soon would be dead because his belt and I would become one. But something truly amazing happened before I was read my last rites. My dad came in my room still dressed for work, though his tie now was loose and his suit rumpled. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just looked at me askance, his thick eyebrows making two question marks, my signal that I needed to answer and PDQ.

      I'm ashamed to say it, but I hadn't the time for an elaborate lie, so I was forced against my usual practice to stick with the truth. I told him everything, and the truly weird thing was that he thought it was just hilarious. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I wanted to wire the radios together. He loved the part about the Martians.

      I looked at my dad's face turning red from laughter and wondered if the scorching Houston sun had baked his brains or maybe being stuck in the endless traffic of the Gulf Freeway had made any diversion funny, even his only son causing a massive blackout.

      Whatever the reason was for his unusual forbearance, he escorted me out to the backyard to show me the fuse box. He then educated me on the ins and out of fuses, an important lesson, but more importantly I learned that day a bit about patience and compassion.

      At 56, I am all-too aware of my own failings – that I have not always measured up to my father's example. Even so, that day he left me an important standard. That though I had done something potentially dangerous and certainly dumb as a box of rocks, my father took pity on my young self as I confessed to him the honest truth. Truly it's a wonder he could hear me; my knees were knocking so much.