I ended up going 2 hours and 43 minutes

I'm the firstborn in my family, which means I grew up being a kid for the first time with two adults being parents for the first time. I’d like to think my parents put some thought into how they wanted the raise their kids prior to them making one. Whether a trial and error method for rearing children is any better than making up the parameters after circumstances present themselves is difficult to determine, especially in my case where I feel there were influences from both camps.

Example of the trial and error: if my room wasn’t clean, I wasn’t allowed to play outside until it was. In theory this should have been enough of an incentive to guarantee a tidy living space. In reality I didn’t want to play anywhere outside my room anyway (still the case) so being forced to stay there didn’t have the desired effect. My parents both went to college, and weren’t to be outsmarted by a six year old. Having my mattress removed and not returned until my room was clean caused me to respond the way they hoped I would.

Example of circumstantial parameters: There were rules about when and who I could date. There weren’t rules about the length of individual dates until the day after the night I didn’t come home from one.

One hard and fast rule that applied to the entire duration of my childhood was in regard to the television I was permitted to watch. PBS. Nothing else. “Wishbone” got me through high school English (and some of college), I can’t count the number of times “Bill Nye the Science Guy” was the only reason I got an answer right in Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy, and I still know ever y word to the theme songs for Reading Rainbow, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and 3-2-1 Contact (that one really dates me, but I have fond and very vivid memories of The Bloodhound Gang and Math Patrol).

I did sneak in a lot of TV on the sly. Mom napped every afternoon and dad was still at work, so between most days 2:00 to 3:00pm I had a window to indulge in Fox Kid’s cartoon programming. “Spiderman” was a favorite, and the first one in the program lineup so I usually got to see that one before mom woke up. “Big Bad Beetleborgs” was on for a while and came right before the show it ripped off, “Power Rangers”. But always outbalancing my illicit television was the quotidian diet of publically funded programming.

One feature of PBS I miss is what they would show between programs when there wasn’t anything scheduled. I assume the children’s educational television market wasn’t as saturated as it currently is, because often times they would just show B reel footage of a helicopter flying through the Grand Canyon. That was it. The shadow of the helicopter would gracefully as glide over the surface of the canyon walls for half hour blocks, while 4th graders whose parent’s didn’t approve of cartoons waited idly on living room carpets.

Boredom is an excellent motivator for activity (case and point- I’ve now been at my job at a call center for 2 hours and 25 minutes without taking a phone call. That’s a new personal record, if anyone’s interested. With nothing else to do, I log into my blog and proceed to write everything up to the period you’re about to see. <-- That’s the one) and I would likely leave to go build Legos or make puddles of mud to bury stuff in or go pull my sister’s hair. Or I would just watch the shadow and imagine how I would keep up with it were I running alongside it- which crecipices (minted it- sorry, no stealing it now) I would jump over or path I would take to keep pace.

Sadly, the helicopter in the Grand Canyon no longer has a place on the public broadcasting station. In its place are a slew of banal and insipid programs like “Bob the Builder” and “Dora the Explorer” that rot kids’ brains. Sadder yet, my parents have become unbelievably lax in what television they allow the youngest of the six children to watch. Cable? When did we get cable? And why isn’t the Disney channel blocked? That station is all trash, all the time. Have fun being dumber than a pair of bricks, Aspen and Capri- thank mom and dad for it.