When Your Boob Tube is … Too Small

Of all the challenges baby boomers face, none is more daunting….than answering the challenges our children pose! Laurey Boyd found out firsthand, when suddenly her boob tube wasn’t nearly big enough!

There has been a strange phenomenon in our otherwise low key little bungalow. We have gone from television sets that are teeny, to only tiny, to friggin’ huge. I was the last holdout in this transition. The aesthetics of the living room are my domain, and I’ve held to a Frazier-like eschewment of anything gaudy. Not only the monstrously humongous TV but the apparatus you put it in. I wasn’t game for a double-D-cup wall unit in my face every time I entered the living room. It took our youngest teenage son to move me past my passé philosophy.

“We need a new TV. This one is too small. ALL my friends have bigger ones.” That last line of reasoning never carried weight with me. I fought him on the size issue too. “Well, I’m sorry if our B-cup television is not good enough for you any more,” I countered with expert motherly guilt.

“Wha—-t?!” he replied, “I, I, I didn’t say it wasn’t good enough. I’d just like to actually see what’s happening. The pictures on my friends’ TVs are amazing.” Then he played the child’s trump card in parent/child disputes of this kind. “You don’t have to get me anything else for Christmas, just this. My gift can be for the whole family.”

The nerve. Also, the effectiveness!

I had to admit I was having a hard time reading the program guide on our small TV from across the room. My husband and I are both using bifocal contacts and glasses now. I guess we were ready for the large print version of television as well.

I realized that I too would like the big boob TV, but I played it coy til I was out doing some casual Saturday shopping with my husband. We had purchased a pair of wool socks at the mall and were wondering what to do next. Well, we could go to Wallie World and just browse at the large screen TVs . . . “Okay!”

This pressed the launch button in my husband. He became a man on a mission. He takes electronics and gadgetry deadly serious, and I, through my innocent suggestion, had released the hounds. He was on the scent now. We were in for a long haul of intense shopping research.

After standing a distance away from several models to compare picture quality/price ratio, we finally settled on one with the sharpest image. Now for the support system. We opted for a minimal unobtrusive design. While choosing the stand, someone from the store informed us that they were out of our carefully chosen TV model. A branch store 30 minutes away had only one in that model. They would hold it for one hour.

We quickly paid for the low profile (but heavy!) stand and loaded it up. We raced to the store that had our TV and sighed in relief when both it and the stand fit in our small Scion. This was obviously meant to be.

The credit card company called us on our way home. There was unusual activity on our card and they were just checking to see if it was really us. Yes, we laughed. Not to worry. Could we verify our purchases of the last two hours? Let’s see: a TV stand, a large screen TV; oh, and a pair of socks. Yes, that’s it. We are two wild and crazy shoppers.

Amidst much flurried rearranging, my husband erected the stand and connected all the different components to their proper ports. We eagerly awaited our son’s return home from a band trip. We played it cool. Half the fun of doing something unexpected is acting as if nothing happened. Watching the joyful look of shock on his face completed our adventure.

The old living room TV has replaced the even older one that was in our bedroom. I just don’t know. It’s looking kind of puny in there in the corner on its small table. Maybe we should check out the ads this weekend. We wouldn’t want to miss out on some large screen deal. They might be having a special on the Pamela Anderson model.

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