A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.
As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger... he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.
If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.
Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)
Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.
I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked... And NEVER asked to leave.
More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.
His name?
We just call him "TV."
He has a wife now... We call her "Computer."
Hey, I know that stranger! There was someone just like that in my family's house, and there's someone like that in my house too. The stranger in my house must be a better artist—the pictures he draws are bigger and clearer than the ones I remember from growing up—but lately I've been wondering about the stranger. I think he might have gone a little soft in the head.
He keeps interrupting his stories to try selling me stuff. It's annoying, because it makes you forget what the story was about. And a lot of the time he tries to sell me stuff I would never buy, like tampons and domestic cars.
He used to stop talking late at night, but now he never, ever shuts up. And he repeats the same old stories. I guess that happens to everyone after 50 years, but it's really boring. I keep listening, though.
He used to give us pretty solid info about politics, history and science, but now he just gives his opinions without anything to back them up. And for some reason, whenever he talks about what's going on in the world, he tries to make it out like it's a threat to my safety, my privacy, my future, like he wants to scare me. Sometimes I doubt what he's telling me, so I ask his wife (the computer) and she tells me something very different. But it's a lot harder to get the truth out of his wife unless you know how to ask her, because she's heard every crackpot conspiracy theory out there—and I'm so used to trusting him.
He's turned into a voyeur. He used to make up stories, but for the last few years he's just been talking about real people. Mostly it's about celebrities, or about people who are dumb enough to want to be celebrities. He must be following these people around everywhere they go, because he's always catching them in embarrassing situations. He goes on and on and on about these real people like they're incredibly fascinating, but they aren't. They aren't even real: they're so shallow and self-absorbed, they're more fake than the characters in the made-up stories were.
His voyeurism is getting out of hand. He's been coming into our bedroom. He tells us stories until we fall asleep, which is nice sometimes. But it's weird, because I'm pretty sure he doesn't stop talking after we're asleep. And you know what else? I've seen him watching us when we're having sex. And he doesn't stop talking while that's going on either.
I don't like the stranger anymore. He hasn't taught me anything for as long as I can remember. But day after day I sit there, letting the stranger try to sell me shit, listening to the same old stories over and over, listening to his scare-mongering and his silly gossip. And then I wonder: is it the stranger who's gone soft in the head, or is it me?
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