"I Yam What I Yam"*

Despite my father’s perennial protestations, much of my formative years were spent (he’d squawk, “squandered”) in front of a television set. In fact, I’ve no doubt that, had I read a page for every hour I watched (“wasted”), sitting and staring at “that damned boob tube,” I’d be at least as learned as he. And though the programming I encountered was most pleasurable, cartoons were most preferable– specifically Saturday morning cartoons.
Episode after episode we watched, hour after timeless hour. Second only to unwrapping presents on Christmas morning, my brothers and I looked forward to nothing more than rising with the sun, setting ourselves in front of the sunny glow of the television which warmly kept watch over us while Dad was at play and Mom was away (or was Dad away while Mom was at play?). Anyway, as the sun waxed towards its zenith, we, fixed in front of the family’s, waned our day away, deaf to everything else, children of a lesser god.
In fact, I distinctly recall my dad, hurriedly on his way out of the house, pausing just long enough to share his disgust with us, admonishingly asking, “Why don’t you read a good book?!” (preferably one from his “library,” of course). The punitive and derisive manner in which he shamelessly shamed us always made me want to run as fast and as far as I could, not only from him, but from anything even remotely associated with him. And it’s taken me all my life to unlearn that which, in only a few, short years, I’d learned to despise. To this day, despite my sentiment for stories and my love of learning, I still find myself fearing and resenting those dreaded fraternal twins (just as Amphion undoubtedly yet understandably resented Apollo and Artemis): reading and writing. And now it’s as if I’m always afraid to find my father, angry as Zeus, ominously lurking between every page, behind every word, ready to annihilate me instantaneously into oblivion with thunderbolts of seething rage for daring to even consider turning on the TV instead of turning over the page.
So, although he would have preferred we religiously devote ourselves to worshiping at the altar of that much vaunted (by him), yet much less valued (by us), “library” consisting of a solitary bookshelf, burdened with such kid-friendly titles as The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America (Jefferson Davis) or The Foxfire Books (with chapters covering everything from “moon shining” to “faith healing” and “other affairs of plain living”), instead we watched cartoons, and by far my favorite was “Popeye.”

* Any resemblance between appearance and reality is strictly coincidental.