Your Turn By Rebecca Suder

The Day We Got Our Cable Cut 
I had been lobbying to cut our cable for more then two years, so when my husband said he was ready, I was on the phone with the cable company, pronto.
It was a money issue as well as a time-waster issue. The cable we signed up for cost $50. Four years, price hikes, taxes and surcharges later, we had a $75 cable bill. I was more than happy to be rid of one of my monthly bills as well as the option to revel for hours lost in a land called endless programming.
Wasting time watching television seemed debatable when I was watching period pieces on Queen Elizabeth and informational shows about the dirtiest jobs in America. Okay, those and a few dozen or so little reality shows about recovering drug addicts, rich bored housewives, and little people.
I turned in our box on a Monday and each day we eagerly turned on the television to see if the cable man had been out to cut it off yet. Each day we smiled smugly at our free cable. Perhaps they would forget altogether. I would deal with the moral implications of not telling them at a later date, perhaps a year from now.
I had tried to do the right thing initially by cutting it off; must I be taxed once again to remind them of their duties?
And then it happened. The Saturday after daylight saving, my four-year-old son woke up at the unseemly hour of 6 a.m. Judging by the pattering of his feet as he went back and forth from his desk to his bed, I knew he wasn’t going back to bed.
Blearily, I set him in front of the television, clicked it on and… snow. I tried another channel… snow. It took me at least four minutes and 15 turns of the five channels to realize the cable was GONE!!!
It then took me half a morning and a full pot of coffee to get over it. It was hard to get there with Donovan asking me the 30 different ways to fold an envelope as I slurped at my coffee and pretended to read the paper and smile lovingly at him all at the same time.
By mid-afternoon, I was back at the television again.
I mean, okay, I don’t have 120 channels, but could I at least get two? It was three o’clock and time for Dr. Phil. It’s not like I sit around watching soaps all day but I’ve learned A LOT from Dr. Phil over the years.
That night my hubby came home from a 13-hour shift. After reading a few goodnight books to our son, showering and eating some grub, he settled down on the couch with a blanket and the remote. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing he’d be perusing that evening was snow, snow and more snow. Apparently these days you need cable just to get one channel—that or an over-sized antenna wrapped in tinfoil and hanging lopsided off the side of your set. He decided to just go to bed.
I could see this was going to take some adjusting. I thought back to the myriad nuggets of advice I had showered my teenage son with over the years. Inarguably wise things like, “Only boring people are bored,” or, “You’ll never remember a day spent in front of the tube.”
Thinking back, I could almost understand why he’d rolled his eyes at me.
The fact is, I wanted to watch television. Click. I tried again and strained to see Dr. Grey and her handsome paramour, but all I could make out was a couple of dirty snowmen in scrubs bumping bottoms.
Like a greedy, crazed addict, I headed to our DVD collection. Frantically I began throwing plastic discs about in search of something interesting and new—after all, how many times can you really enjoy Ben Stiller dodging a red rubber ball?
We decided on one we had watched only once. It was a home video of our lives, circa 2002 when my youngest son was born. Watching it, we howled, we laughed, we almost cried.
My younger son was born bald and round-faced as Charlie Brown, and my older son’s antics were comic and sweet as only an introverted, knobby-kneed nine-year-old’s can be. The video captured us crashing waves at the beach, playing a rowdy game of basketball on a five-foot rim, flying a kite at the playground, practicing flips off the low-dive at the pool, dancing to punk music and rocking out on air guitar on a twin bed, and playing an intense game we called Spy Master in our backyard.
It was feel-good television and the one thing we noticed was that in an entire year of good times caught on tape, we never ever once filmed ourselves watching our 120 channels of cable. Not once.
We thought the day we got our cable cut was the end of life as we knew it, but we’re learning that it just might be the beginning… to be continued.
Rebecca Suder is chief bread baker, joke maker, nap taker and baby waker at the Suder, Crabtree, Banks residence and sometimes wonders how she ended up with 60,000 dollars in student loans and no actual income as of yet.

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