Tunnel Vision

When our old console TV broke, my mother, in the belief that you never throw anything away, and that she’d have the money to fix it someday, borrowed a smaller black-and-white set with a finicky bunny ear antenna, and placed it on top of the old set. I watched reruns of Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, and I Dream of Jeanie in fuzzy grey tones. A year later, when the second TV broke, she got her hands on an even smaller set and placed that on top of the second. I carried on watching reruns—not noticing the tragicomedy around me.

Inspired by Autumn Moon