Recently, while reading through Amy K. Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I was amused by her “Table of Most Memorable TV Shows and Movies”. AKR was born shortly before me so a lot of her choices were happily familiar – The Carol Burnett Show, The Electric Company, The Love Boat and (not the re-booted) Fantasy Island. Thinking about them took me back to the living room(s) of my childhood – how differently we used to watch television.

First of all – the word television: does it even apply if you watch a show on your laptop or tablet or phone? Often you don’t even hear the phrase “I’m watching TV” anymore. Instead, we’re often watching Netflix or YouTube. I do still watch THE TV – the news, the shows we’ve PVR’d and of course, Netflix (and Disney and Prime) when we’re looking for commercial-free binge-ability.

What struck me this last week while my husband was away for a week-long convention and I wasn’t watching any of “our shows”, was how different the experience of watching TV was from when I was a kid. The physically obvious: there was no such thing as a remote control. If I wanted to change the channel, I would have to get up off the couch (or reach up from where I was laying on my stomach in front of the TV) and turn the channel dial. No buttons, no electronic lights. If my Dad or any of my older siblings wanted to change the channel, again, I would get up off the couch and turn the channel for them. (Little siblings everywhere were a prototype for the universal remote.)

And channels? The word barely registered as plural. We had three and sometimes one didn’t work. And that was only after my dad had a rotor installed so we could actually turn the giant antennae on our house to catch our choice of network: CBC (which was CKSA Lloydminster), CTV (CFRN in Edmonton) and if the airwaves aligned correctly, we might also get CITV from Edmonton, which was somehow kind of cooler because it was a new station in the ’70s. Our antenna wasn’t quite like a tuneable satellite dish – Rick’s grampa had one the size of a hot tub parked on his front lawn – but it did the trick.

Because that was all I knew. I memorized the TV schedules (didn’t we all?) – at different times during my growing up years Sundays was The Waltons, Fridays was Dallas (and Good Rockin’ Tonight after my parents went to bed), Thursdays was St. Elsewhere, Saturdays was The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show. And if you missed it, you missed it. If you weren’t home the day that Mary Ingalls became blind or Mary Richards finally moved out of her studio apartment and then you missed the re-run (and who knew when that would happen?), then you might have to wait until the nineties or the aughts to find the show on VHS or DVD.

As a teenager, I would often spend a week of my summer vacation staying with my older siblings once they moved to The City and graduated to the fascinating world of cable TV. Most of my “vacation” with them was spent with the television while they were off at work. For the first time, I watched The Price is Right, Eight is Enough, even Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – all offerings that my local networks didn’t offer. While I was there, I also read all their magazines or listened to all their record albums, but I could also ask (nicely) to borrow them when I went home. Cable TV stayed where it was so that kind of made it special.

Isn’t it funny how we need the entertainment, the news, the sports? One of the first things my roommate Reva and I did when we moved into an apartment before we started university was to sign up for cable TV. Annnnnnd Superchannel which was (gasp!) Only Movies. If the U of A had offered a course on Terms of Endearment, I would have aced it. Because there still wasn’t that much choice when I turned on the television. If the choice was between Terms or studying for mid-terms, the TV probably won – at least until the panic set in 24 hours before said midterm.

And now, if I need to go to the bathroom or fix a snack in the middle of a show, I just hit pause and go. There was a moment last week when I did just that and it triggered the memory of how we used to only do that during commercials. As soon as the break happened, when watching TV in real time, you would run to the bathroom or the kitchen because otherwise you would miss the show. And I kinda missed that. For maybe a minute. Then I sat back down with my snack and resumed my show.