Calling
New Delhi for Free (and
other ephemeral truths of the 21st century)
Technology first rocked our world when a lightning bolt zapped a bush at the entrance to a cave, and First Man crawled out and stuck his hand into the mystical blaze. Centuries later (just how many seems to depend on your religious orientation), we still find technology fascinating, mysterious, distracting, vital and Wow! Shiny!—and it still fries our grasping, hapless human hands, not to mention our grasping, hapless human brains.
Order it here.
No
Questions Asked
I stood mired in
WalMart amid televisions tuned to Dr. Phil. Hundreds
of Dr. Phils.
Thousands.
“Breathe,”
I told myself.
WalMart
overwhelms me. I’m drowning in a great wave pool,
buffeted by tsunamis
of
gleaming inventory—advancing, retreating, pulling me
to buy. When I
surface
long enough to remember what I came for, when at last
I grasp my
particular
pulsating silver siren delight, it turns to pressboard
and veneer in my
hands.
I
never go to WalMart.
But
I had flown in the night before, from Massachusetts to
Indiana, to
visit Ma,
and if you want to buy a television in Indiana, you go
to WalMart.
I
held my breath, plunged my hand into a stack of boxes
and grabbed a
20-inch
flatscreen TV.
Gotcha.
Once
the set and I were safely in my rented car, I mopped
my brow and
congratulated
myself. I had survived. I had gotten a good deal. I
would reward myself
with a
glass of wine tonight.
But
first, I had to drive from Fort Wayne, where I was
staying, to the tiny
town of
Avilla, 30 miles away, to deliver my prize to Ma.
Ma’s
got Alzheimers, but she’s doing well in her new
Assisted Living
apartment. The
Avilla facility came with cable access, and my sister
Mo had told me
that Ma’s
14-inch TV, a relic from her and our
late dad’s
house, was too low-tech to work with it. The new TV
would be my
housewarming
gift.
I
carried the box into Ma’s spacious studio and gave
her a hug. Ma has become a bit deaf, and her little old
TV was blaring
Dr.
Phil’s show.
She
glanced at the box. “I don’t want that thing. I
get three Fort Wayne channels real clear here.”
I
wrestled the set from the box. “Trust me—you’ll love
it. It’s bigger. And it’s got closed captioning, so you
won’t have to
play it
so loud.”
“What?”
“Closed
captioning.”
“What?”
“THOSE
WORDS THAT MOVE ACROSS THE BOTTOM OF THE
SCREEN,” I shouted. “With this bigger TV, you could
actually read
them.” I
turned off her old TV; the quiet was instant, cottony. I
put the little
set in
the closet and placed the flatscreen on the end table
she used as a
platform.
“Watch it for a couple days,” I said. “If you decide you
don’t want it,
I’ll
take it back.”
“You
can’t take something back just because I don’t
like it.”
“You can
take anything back to WalMart,” I assured
her, hoping I’d never have to find out if that was true.
“No questions
asked.”
The
facility handyman was off for the day, so the
cleaning lady helped me connect the flatscreen to the
cable box. Ma
said, “I
hate all those wires sticking out. If I had my dresser
from the house,
I could
put it on that, and they wouldn’t show.”
She was
referring to the house she no longer owned.
This would segue into an argument over the way my sister
Mo had
parceled out
Ma’s furniture to family members. Ma had given full
permission, but
couldn’t
remember doing so.
I
avoided the topic of the dresser; you can’t win an
argument with someone who has Alzheimers. The cleaning
lady and I
rearranged
the cables. “They make special furniture to hide TV
wires,” I said.
“What?”
“ENTERTAINMENT
CENTERS, Ma,” I said. “You need an
entertainment center for your new TV.”
The
cleaning lady and I tried to program the flatscreen, but
we couldn’t
make it
work. The cleaning lady left to go clean something. I
pushed aside the
cable
box and plugged the flatscreen straight into the wall,
where Ma’s old
set had
been connected. Let the handyman hook it up tomorrow.
Until then, she
could
watch her three stations on a nice big screen.
Ma
frowned at Dr. Phil. “It’s so dark.”
I
brightened the picture. The doctor’s teeth gleamed like
angel wings.
“I
like my TV better.”
I
disconnected the flatscreen and reconnected her old set
to the wall. I
turned
it on. She cranked it up past Deafening.
While we
played her favorite card game, Spite &
Malice, I entreated her over Dr. Phil’s stentorian
platitudes—when is
the man not on
TV?—to give the flatscreen another chance tomorrow,
after the handyman
got it connected. If she wasn’t pleased, I promised,
I’d return it to
WalMart.
“They
won’t take it back just because of that.”
“No
questions asked,” I assured her. “And I’ll find
you an entertainment center.”
She
threw the winning card on the table as Dr. Phil’s
audience applauded, vibrating the room. “Where would you
find that?”
Where,
indeed.
That evening, I sat in a Fort Wayne
Pizzeria Uno and
stared over my wineglass, across the parking lot, at
WalMart.
Sooner
or later, everybody learns to love me, the
boxy building told me.
“Right,”
I said.
The
waitress halted at my table. “What?” she said.
----
I
stopped at WalMart the next morning. A different
WalMart, closer to Ma’s facility. In Indiana, every
major parking lot
has a
WalMart. I swam
clench-throated through shoals of
glittering inventory until I found an entertainment
center. It was four
feet
long, ridiculously heavy, and came in a flat carton.
The WalMart
greeter and I
shoehorned it into the back
seat of my rented car, then he went off for hernia
repair.
I
borrowed the Avilla facility’s hand-truck and wheeled
the carton down
to Ma’s
apartment.
Dr.
Phil rumbled from her old TV. “Voila!”
I said.
“One
entertainment center. Some assembly required.”
The
handyman arrived and set up the new TV. It still
wouldn’t work. It was connected to the cable box, but it
still received
only
Fort Wayne’s three channels. He promised he would call
the facility’s
electronics wizard the next day. He programmed the
closed captioning
and left.
“The
words move too fast,” Ma said. I de-programmed
the closed captioning.
I worked
for three hours assembling the entertainment
center, until I discovered I was missing a tiny
wedge-shaped piece of
plastic.
It was the sole, vital connection between two beveled
strips of
veneered
pressboard, and was not in the hermetically-sealed
accessory bag.
I told
Ma I had to drive back to WalMart for the
piece.
She
glanced up from a thundering Dr. Phil. She spoke.
“What?”
I said.
“THAT TV
IS TOO DARK.”
----
At WalMart, the courtesy woman and I
dragged
another
boxed entertainment center from the shelf. I ripped open
its
hermetically-sealed
accessory bag and picked out its vital plastic wedge.
I sped
ten miles back to Ma’s place.
My
sister Mo was there, arranging Ma’s meds. Dr. Phil
boomed from the new TV. Ma said, “That TV’s been turning
itself off.”
Mo
shrugged; she hadn’t witnessed it. I tightened the
cables.
Mo held
the back of the entertainment center and I
screwed it to the sides. Suddenly, the room fell silent.
The new
TV had turned itself off.
“Must be
the cable box,” I said. I disconnected the
box, reconnected the flatscreen directly to the wall,
and turned it
on. Dr.
Phil roared back to life.
We
were hanging the entertainment center’s doors when the
TV died again.
“Hmm,” I
said. “It’s not the box.” I unplugged it and connected
Ma’s old set to
the
wall.
Ma
pumped up the volume. “I told you I liked my TV better.”
Two
hours later, Mo and I finished assembling the
entertainment center. It
was
big, bigger even than the disputed dresser Ma no longer
owned. It would
have
been perfect to hide the new flatscreen’s wires and
cables, if the new
flatscreen had worked. Instead, Ma’s TV sat on top, a
raving peanut on
a vast
plain of pressboard and veneer.
I
gave her a quick hug and grabbed the dead flatscreen.
“They
won’t take it back,” Ma said.
“WalMart
takes anything back, no questions asked,” Mo told her.
----
And
that very night, they did.
I
stuffed the receipt in my pocket, wrenched myself from
the swirling,
shining
multiplicity of Dr. Phils, and dogpaddled out the door.
I
staggered to Pizzeria Uno, where I ordered a glass of
wine.
I
stared out the window, over my wineglass, over the
parking lot. At
WalMart.
WalMart
stared back at me. Triumphant. Sooner
or later—
“WHAT?!”
I said.
