CABLE TV and THE LATTE FACTOR

We’re trying to get rid of cable television at our house. I have led the ‘discussion.’

Cable television costs us $120 per month with all the HD stuff - and that doesn’t include the extra money charged for watching ‘first run’ movies at $6 a pop.

My Baby Boomer husband and I remember when television was free. All a house needed was a sturdy antenna on top of its roof and perhaps a wire coat-hanger for an internal, tuning emergency.

Ok. Ok...I know, we also needed to have a family member squat in front of the Magnavox to fiddle with the horizontal button when the images started to flip, and only had a mere 12 channels from which to choose - but it seems to me we had more ‘favorites,’ and none of them cost us anything to view.

We also only had one television in any of the homes in which I lived through 1986 when we bought a tiny tv for the kitchen. We still have just two television sets in our 2013 home, and I employ the same rules my mom imposed:  

                        #1: No television during the day unless it’s horribly rainy out or you are truly sick and in need entertainment.

                        #2: Televisions do not belong in bedrooms.

All this to say, I watch two cable channels that will be hard for me to give up: TCM and CNN. As for the HBO, SHO and the others, I can wait for the dvds.

My husband, on the other hand,  is obsessively attached to ESPN, the Braves’ games on TBS, and the Golf Channel. 

He’s fine with dumping cable until he contemplates life without these crutches. He awakens to ESPN, naps to the Golf Channel,  and joins our Tomahawk-chopping friends in his love/hate relationship with the Braves.

I tell him our friends have cable. He can nap to NPR. Sports bars litter our town, and our son has cable at his place.

He looks at me like I just don’t get it.

 I’d like to think that’s the truth.

However, on a recent morning in the wee hours - when I am wont to curl up on the couch in the den in front of a classic movie - he caught me holding my coffee cup close and crying with Mrs. Miniver as the bombs dropped all around England on the telly.

“Ah-ha,” he said, “What will you do when the cable’s gone? No more Mrs. Miniver for you!”

That’s when I realized that I’m not sure I can give up my 5:00 a.m. oldies. 

There is something in the black and white flickerings that settles me down. I hear the tick-tock, tick-tock of the introduction to "The Early Show" at 5:00 p.m. each night, when our mother let us turn the television set on. We’d relax with a Thin Man, an Andy Hardy, a Shirley Temple or an Abbot and Costello film, waiting for our dad to get home.

Now, I watch those old movies, drink my coffee, and wait for the day to begin.

Thinking about all this brings me back to this nagging question I have about all stuff lately:, and I stop to wonder: Does cable count  as a “latte factor”? Is it one of the things we have to have and don’t need?

I’m afraid the answer is ‘yes.’ I’m just not very good at telling myself ‘no.’