Last time Pappy was here, he talked me into bringing back the rabbit ears. For my radio of course, not for the TV. The TV rig, which I believe I have lingered on to the point of obsession, probably deserves a name. The radio is just a radio. Well, it’s an HD radio, but that’s not why I bought it. I bought it because it looked like it would look nice sitting on my kitchen counter and it had an auxillary input for an iPod. This was in the pre-Touchy days when I was still using an iPod mini. Or nano. Whatever. Anyway, Target had discontinued the very cool Grundig radio which they had been carrying and upon which I had failed to pull the trigger on more than one occasion.
You might say that I missed the target at Target. Missed the …. Yeah, ok, as I was saying. I had driven to the other Target, the fancy Target with the Starbucks in it only to find that it wasn’t there either and rather than go home in complete defeat, I went over to the Bestest Buy to see what they had. Which was not much except this open box deal on a Sony table top radio at a price that seemed a little out of line for a desktop radio but that was my whole thinking with the Grundig and you know where that got me. So I managed to hit the target at Best Buy.
Except that this radio had no antenna with it, and I asked the Jonah Hill look alike what was up with that but he was too busy ogling Michael Cera that he blew me off with a, “They don’t need antennas anymore.” This was delivered with a combination of hubris and disdain that led me to believe that he was very, very wrong, but since I was acutely aware of my own non-trigger-pulling propensity at this point, I did not want to be dissuaded by my contempt for a kid whose best friend is about to shack up with the likes of Fogell. So home I came with a desktop HD radio.
Which was little more than a dock for the iPod mini for a while until I spied a set of rabbit ears in Biggest Lots for something like 2 bucks. I almost always pull the trigger on something like that in Biggest Lots because I only go in there when I want to feel close to my mother and I have a few extra bucks. (The smell of which usually remind my of Mama. [And we’ll just leave this whole meme for exploration another time {after all, this is a Father’s Day post. In which case I reckon I should get to the point pretty soon given that we are already well over 450 words.}]). Local public radio station WCQS had just recently launched its HD signal and they had Tavis Smiley’s show on it. I love Tavis Smiley, so I was happy to have purchased the HD desktop radio despite my misgivings re: Superbad.
And the rabbit ears worked pretty well, but they were unsightly and in the way a lot because my kitchen is really not all that big. It is not, in fact, just the kitchen. It’s also the dining room and opens onto the living room, so the rabbit ears were a huge decorative liability without being a significant help to reception. When a more comely antenna came with the WOOT which provided TV signal to the computer in the TV rig, I put that antenna into service on the radio (cable goes into the WOOT.) The smaller antenna didn’t work for squat. I wanted to blame the signal, or the mountains it has to cross, but I know (dah dah dah dah dah) it’s my own damn fault. There was only one person to call on for help.
Pappy. My Pappy is the smartest person I know. I’m not just saying that because he is my Pappy. I’m saying that because he really is very smart. He’s so smart that sometimes he tends to over think some things. (At least three people are saying “No shit, Sanuk” at this point.) When Pappy was younger, he designed radio antennas for the US Navy. In addition, he has held an amateur radio license for over 50 years. Although he has programmed fairly significant databases, coding still means communicating by Morse to him. So he knows a thing or two about radios.
This knowledge was all but lost to me at a point in Pappy’s life when he was probably as far into the over thinking thing as he ever got. It got him to the point that his marriage fell apart (I am confident Mama helped with that one) along with his business. Unfortunately for Pappy and me, this happened right around the time that nature had me programmed to assume he was an idiot. His behavior did not always help. The one thing he knew to do, however, was to just keep sending out code. Whether or not I was listening or responding, he would keep transmitting. He would keep his receiver tuned.
Eventually nature subsided, of course, and I started to see that for all his intelligence, Pappy’s as human as I am. His mistakes were not so outlandish that I couldn’t accept them. He has clearly always tried to do the best he is able. And all that experience does, after all, breed wisdom which is distinct from intelligence. What I needed at the moment, though, was not so much sagacity as expertise to get BBC World Headlines back. I did something which would have been unthinkable 15 or 20 years ago: I asked Pappy. His answer was simply to get back out the rabbit ears but to put them on top of the cabinets. Reception AND decorative issues? Solved! Thanks for being there, Pappy!