LETTERS FROM HOME: SO-CALLED CALAMITIES & GEYSERS IN THE BASEMENT

April 13, 1995

Dear Leslie,

The one good thing about being sick, the kind of fevery sick that immobilizes everything except your channel-changing finger, is watching TV shows you ordinarily don't. Bruce Springsteen was right: "Fifty-seven Channels and There's Nothin' On."

Then something pops up like "My So-Called Life" and you're slapped across the face with how much potential is being wasted.

MTV is running "My So-Called Life" every day about dinnertime for the next few weeks in hopes the network that took the show off the air will give it another chance.

The story is about a 15-year-old girl named Angela Chase, her family and friends in modern-day America. Angela is aware, academically unengaged but envies something about Anne Frank, daydreams in class about the three times she's been kissed, doesn't tell her mother the truth about much of anything, has noticed that her new breasts seem to have come between her and her dad, and finds herself in many of the humiliating, confusing and scary situations that confront 15-year-olds. Drinking, sex, new hair colors, broken friendships. Your basic calamities.

Surprise. Nobody's stupid on this show, not even her parents.

Angela rarely smiles, but floods the room with light when she does. I've only seen two episodes but already feel a fatherly concern toward her. And identify with feeling tuned out sometimes.

I suppose this show is too real for public consumption.

DC and I were still talking about one of the episodes when we went to the library book sale. I'm afraid the two ladies at the front desk sniffed at the notion that something culturally meaningful could be obtained by watching TV. This was a library, after all.

DC bought old issues of magazines about house decorating. I got some issues of Body Mind Spirit, a Hollywoodized New Age magazine. It was the naked woman swimming with dolphins on the cover that grabbed me.

Those purchases sort of define our relationship right now. DC's planning the garden and trying to decide which colors to paint the walls while I'm trying to get my health and soul reconnected. I suspect DC has the right idea. That the tonic is to be found on my knees in the garden and atop a ladder making this house more beautiful.

The profusion of spring is everywhere. We have dogwood and red bud trees and a few tulips in our yard. A gang of starlings stripped one of them clean within a few hours.

We just called the first plumber of our householder years, a milestone no doubt. The nut on the valve that turns off the water to the whole house cracked. On the weekend. We thought about fixing it ourselves for a nanosecond.

So we camped out in the house, borrowing water from the next-door neighbors' hose and showering at my parents' house until the plumber arrived on Monday.

DC says we seem to have a calamity every weekend. No doubt that's why homeowners stay home so much.

My dad's another parent who isn't stupid. He says certain situations require a professional. When the plumbers went to work, the valve set off a geyser that would've sent me running for higher ground.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.