Unreel

Chapter One

Myopia 

‘No doubt you were the sort of child who pulled the wings off butterflies.’ — anonymous admirer

The idiot box: my first hazy television-related memory, bathed in the blue-tinged glow of a cathode-ray tube, hails from when I was about three and therefore a complete idiot myself. People were walking into a room, speaking, and walking off. It was probably one of the plays they filmed live in those days: General Electric Theater; Philco Television Playhouse. A world lived in badly lit monochrome. I looked and looked. This wasn’t right. How, I asked Mum, do those people get inside the TV? Considering her later wild attempts to explain where babies come from, complete with alarming hand gestures, I was barking up the wrong tree.

Still, my mother, who’d never had anything adequately explained to her as a child, made a point of taking our questions seriously. As far as my infant mind could translate her reply, there were people in a ‘studio’ at a ‘television station’. They were playing ‘make believe’, a pastime I misheard, being a good little Canadian, as ‘maple leaf’. When Dad brought home a jug of fresh maple syrup someone had given him, Mum put it in a cupboard and forgot about it until it fermented and then exploded, creating a sticky, sweet catastrophe. If I’d been old enough to spot a metaphor for television’s treacly seductions, that would have done it.

So, the people playing maple leaf were filmed by a movie camera, like the one Dad borrowed to make a home movie of us to send to Mum’s family in New Zealand. That film (it would later materialise, a ghost from a lost life, thanks to a Kiwi cousin) travelled to the end of the world in 1960 on a boat. Miraculously, the pictures we were watching on our TV in 1955 came through the ‘air waves’ to our walnut television, radio and gramophone console at 3389 West 43rd Avenue, Kerrisdale, Vancouver, 26 miles from the Peace Arch Border Crossing into the US, from whence came seven channels, like . . . Jesus from Heaven or Santa from the North Pole or the Tooth Fairy from wherever.

I puzzled over this, just as I used to puzzle — in truth, still do — over what the universe, space and time, matter and energy and us are contained in. The way I pictured it, the actors were in a room lined with upright, coffin-like cupboards in which they stood waiting patiently for their turn. It didn’t seem much of a life. The fabled imagination of small children, ‘old souls’ trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory, is really just a brand-new consciousness, synapses firing fitfully, trying to make sense of the random planet in an uncaring cosmos on which it finds itself abruptly marooned. I still don’t understand how TV works. What even are pixels? The science is instantly ejected by my brain, which apparently needs the space to store such vital information as the Bucky Beaver Ipana toothpaste commercial: ‘Brusha, brusha, brusha / With the new Ipana / It’s dandy for your teeth!’ When I have forgotten who I am, I will recall the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies in its ineradicable entirety: ‘Y’all come back, now, ya hear?’

Magic is just not knowing how shit works. Television seemed like magic to me. It still does.