Another Rant . . . (Patricia Potter)

More Ranting . . .


I’m still recovering from the great book finale and emerging back into the real world. I think I want to return to my fictional one.

My Mom’s in a nursing home. She’s 98, and her legs do not work at all which is why she’s in a nursing home. She has absolutely no strength in them, none at all. It’s as if they were pieces of spaghetti. She has so little strength in them and in her arm that she needs help merely to move from one side of the bed to the other.

But her mind is still good. Her hearing not so good. Her eyesight not so good, but otherwise her health is stable. It is not an altogether happy situation for her. She would much rather join my dad who died four years ago (Yes, I do have very good genes).

The nursing home is an excellent one, and we were extremely lucky to get her there. The waiting list currently numbers seven hundred, and the joke – really the reality – is that you have to sign up when you’re born. It’s a Jewish home, though Mom isn’t Jewish. If anyone you love has to go to one, I heartily recommend a Jewish one. There’s a certain reverence for the aged, a caring that I couldn’t find anywhere else. There’s a great patient/staff ratio, much better than most, and activities throughout the day. It looks like a fine hotel, and each wing has its own aquarium and song birds. There’s daily bingo and volunteer musicians and happy hour.

She can read but only for short periods, and she needs big print books. I'm always hunting for short, easy-to-hold big print books and, to my surprise, they are rare. To my surprise, my very large Barnes and Noble has only one tiny shelf of big print books and very few titles. I subscribe her to DoubleDay Big Print books but some, when they arrive, are too big and heavy for her to hold long. Someone is missing a huge market here.

Even with a book, though, she’s lonely, and I try to go over every night. We visit, then watch TV together, thus the coming rant.

Unfortunately my only real complaint again against the nursing home is its television service. Twenty stations only and most of them are really, really poor ones. There’s the major networks, a college sports station, two cable news stations. the game channel, a religious channel and little else of interest.

And the major networks really, really sucks these days.

True, my mother has a difficult time with fast moving dramas such as E.R. and “Lost.” She loves baseball, but we can’t get major league baseball, and the rest of the offerings? Dismal. We have “The Bachelor,” which offends me no end. Nothing is worse than watching twenty women standing there to see who isn’t going to be picked. They wait with stiff, hopeful smiles while one man humiliates them one by one. We watched it once, and that was it.

Then there’s “Big Brother House” or whatever it is. A bunch of twenty somethings that act like they’re twelve. And “Super Nanny” who straightens out disfunctional families, at least for the hour they’re on television. There’s “Survival” where people lie and cheat and scheme, and the mindless “Deal and No Deal,” and, well, shall I go on? There’s always “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”

There’s comedies, but most are raunchy and not very funny, and there’s twenty-four hour cable news stations, but after hearing the same sound bites over and over again, we sigh and turn it back to TV Land and watch forty-year-old episodes of “I Love Lucy” and wish for the return of the glory days of network television.

It’s kind of pitiful when the best show on television, as far as we’re concerned, is the “Antique Road Show.” The rare gem is “Masterpiece Theater” on PBS. "Lost" lost me a long time ago, and Mom was lost immediately.

I do have more choices at home, and I dearly love the “Animal Planet,” “Discovery” and “National Geographic.” But I yearn for the great mini-series of the past, the classic comedy and the “can’t miss” series like The West Wing.”

They tell us that the writer’s strike proved that reality shows are cheaper to make, and we can expect more and more of them. I really don’t know how many more I can take. I really can’t figure out why more people aren’t reading these days.

So do you have a favorite program today you can recommend? Or a favorite one from the past.

Or – horrors of all horrors – am I just becoming an old fuddy duddy?

On the happy side, it's a beautiful day in Memphis. A good friend from Florida is giving a seminar at my local RWA chapter, and I'm really looking forward to a full and happy day with writer buddies.