THE TV REPAIRMAN, another short one by Jai.

 I was in 1958 an engineering student at Ottawa U., renting a room where I heated my spaghetti sauce in a plate sitting on a boiling pot of noodles cooking on a defective hot plate that probably threatened the curtains, my room …and my life. Happily, my mother was 200 miles away. This was twenty years before cheap microwaves took care of student hunger with fast popcorn. My TV had all her guts exposed, showing off her ancient round picture tube. That thing had been soldered together as a kit ten years earlier. Yeah! My dad made for us a TV set four years before Canada had TV stations. Living not far from the US border, I had all the kids in my street watching Space Command and Howdy Doody on WPTZ Plattsburgh NY…weather and rabbit ears permitting.  Word got around as I remember my dad and I installing home-made TV antennas on rich doctor’s roof. And so at age 7, I thought of myself as “tech savvy”

So it was only fair that I would inherit the original TV set that gave me so much pride fun. By connecting the sound output of my record player to pins of its vertical and horizontal oscillator lamps, I could thrill to black and white light shows in visual sync with the beat of early rock and roll playing on my radio speakers so connected.

One week before the Grey Cup, the TV died and I took it to a pipe-smoking repairman on Rideau Street. The day before the big game, I entered the place with excitement, holding in my hand a ten-dollar bill, the estimation money for a yoke replacement. That’s the big donut-shaped magnet around the neck of a picture tube. While I waited inside, I got to survey a mess of wiring, electronic circuits and transformers clogging counters, work benches ..and the floor. Then on a high shelf that went around three walls, crammed helter-skelter with all brands of TV sets, I happily spotted my own naked baby, the only one of the few not covered with dust and spider webs. Said he didn't have time, but a week later still no TV to take home with me, this time not even bothering to give me an excuse.

I was very upset, looking puzzled as I walked out. The lady next door, a hairdresser I think, stepped out to tell me that she hadn't seen a thing come out of that place in months "He can't seem to repair anything anymore. Yet TV sets to fix keep getting brought to him. I warn people when I get a chance".

As a brash sixteen years old, I was pouring scorn on that old man not fit to be in that business . I thought he was obviously in over his head with the new tech. "But he's only forty and used to be good" the lady said, interrupting "His wife used to do the books, clean the place up and all.

She paused and looked down at the sidewalk. Her doctor wasn't sure if she died of lead poisoning or an asthma attack .She did an awful lot of soldering. I can still see her at the workbench in a corner. She didn't smoke but you often could see a plume of blue smoke rising over her head ".

The Ottawa Roughriders had won the Grey Cup in 1951. I was hoping to watch a repeat win in 1954 on my repaired TV, a game I watched somewhere else with no pleasure as they lost it badly. They got to win the cup in 1960 and I heard that the quiet Ottawa population exploded and managed to destroy a lot of Ottawa's downtown in their celebration, Go figure! I went back to that town years later. The repair shop and hairdresser’s, demolished for a high-rise.

A year ago, as a wasted 78 year-old, I needed to dispose of mountains of wires, computer circuit boards and so many defective electronics, junk and computers, stuff I hoarded for years... to be fixed one day... or recycled later. Looking at that amount of unfinished business, I remembered that "old" repairman's shop and a sadness wrapped over me. A month earlier my own cigarette-loving wife passed away from lung cancer. Today, I don’t watch TV,  all in on YouTube...and...TikTok.

It's never easy to drop out of anything that used to arouse passions, even after they turn into poison, problems or pain. That goes equally for people and things , I guess.

JAI