“When the World Don’t Treat You Right”
Fine. I admit it. I like 7th Heaven and I refuse to let you make me feel bad about it.
It all started a few weeks ago when, like every Monday and Friday, I woke up early for my internship and was drowsily flipping through the channels and eating my breakfast. I think first I stopped on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but it just wasn’t doing it for me like it used to; I remembered it being so much funnier. This episode, though, I was timing the punch-lines, deafened by the laugh-track, bored by almost everything else.
Maybe it was too early in the morning.
A few channels up and I came to 7th Heaven, sitting pretty but so alone on channel 20, where you’d never find it unless you strayed from your usuals and pushed the up and down buttons instead of the numbers. It glowed on my screen like the wallflower at the dance—not the ugly one, not the sad one you always felt bad for but the cute and quiet one, the one just on the brink of being beautiful, although she never quite got there. This was the girl you always secretly had a crush on but never did pursue . Maybe you thought your friends would laugh, or maybe you were just as shy and mediocre as she was. Maybe you were just afraid to slow dance.
But it felt like I had bumped into an old friend, a confidant who’s heard all my secrets but I hadn’t seen in years. We both stared at each other for a long time, my eyes on the TV, the TV’s on mine, and we watched each other all the way till commercial break.
It was so surreal. I felt old all of a sudden. All the characters who were so young before, who were in daycare or diapers or little girl haircuts back when I’d watch them in the ‘90s with my parents, had grown up. They were in Seminary school and they had husbands and some of them had grey hair. They’d all survived my childhood and stood before me different than they were before, as if to prove that time had passed, that a certain part of me had ended and been replaced with something new, something fluid and indefinite, something I was supposed to mold with my fingers and eventually become. I didn’t even know the show was still on the air. These were probably reruns. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t tired anymore.
In this episode, the writers were tackling the race issue with deftness and tact. The story took place around Martin—a new character, the obligatory male heartthrob—who had his car vandalized with racially insensitive insults just because he was friends with a black guy. We never did see exactly what was written on the car—the writers wanted to avoid any exploitation (there’s the tact I was talking about)—but he brought it over to the Camden’s house to show the Reverend and they spoke about it at length, staring at the back window where the words had been painted and shaking their heads.
Stroking his chin, the good Reverend asked Martin why he thinks this could have happened. And then Martin’s father walked in through the side gate. The Reverend turned to him, motioned toward the car and said something like, “You just don’t think that an incident like this could happen in Glenoak…”
Martin’s father fired back, “Incident? This is a crime, a hate crime, and whoever’s behind it should be locked up!”
From that line alone I was hooked. You can’t write stuff like that! Well, I guess you just can’t help but be enamored with it.
Since then I’ve gotten well reacquainted with the characters and their stories through our mornings together. That theme song with the synthesized choir “aahhhh” at the end; the way every episode starts with a solid minute or two of dialogue-less action while the credits finish rolling; the montage of actors turning and smiling at the camera (my personal favorite: Catherine Hicks, the mom, resting her chin on her fist like they tell you to do in elementary school photos and putting on a warm, close-mouthed grin that says, My children are growing up so fast. I still remember when you were small…)….there’s just something about it, all of it, even down to the way she smiles–as if everything is going to be okay and she really does believe it.
I walked passed a girl on the sidewalk today who was smiling a similar kind of smile. She wasn’t walking with anybody or staring at anything in particular—she was just looking in front of her, smiling at the sky and the ground as if remembering something funny or perfect. I walked by her and imagined home movies playing in her eyes. Maybe she was remembering back to when she was little and her sister or brother would jump off the see-saw while she was stuck on the other end, in the air, and her side would crash to the ground rather than just bounce on it. Maybe she was thinking back to just last night, remembering the look on her boyfriend’s face when he told her that he loved her for the first time, and then the way her words were weightless as she said it back to him, and then their first real kiss.
We passed each other and the rest of the sidewalk was empty ahead of me. My headphones were in. I didn’t used to listen to music on campus—I felt it shut me out too much from the rest of the world–but after a year and a half of never having a real conversation with anyone on the bus or on sidewalks, I stuffed my ears with white and started turning up the volume. The girl was gone now. And I hoped she was still smiling.
The Deacons are all over the Revered. They want change in the church, their crony told him, avoiding eye contact, grimacing. “Some of the Deacons feel that your sermons have, um, jumped the shark,” he said. “…Their words, not mine.”
Ever since Eric found out he was sick, that his heart was starting to tire of pumping, they feel that his sermons have gotten too morose, too many life and death issues, too much soul searching. They’re trying to replace him with a “younger, hipper” preacher. They want to advertise at the local used car dealership. He doesn’t know what to do.
T-Bone just went with Kurt for a driving lesson and Kurt was blowing air horns at him to simulate a high pressure situation. “This isn’t helping!” T-Bone cried. “This is hazing.” T-Bone was homeless and crashing at the church until the Camdens took him in. His parents abandoned him, but he’s still so innocent and charming. They’re all so innocent and charming, even when they’re not. This is how life turns out, I think, with yet another stray kid living in the Camden house every time I turn on their electric lives on Mondays and Fridays. No one is broken or lost here—even when they are.
I take a gulp of my coffee and have to leave for my internship before the episode is over, never any later than 9:45. I dump the too sweet bottom of the cup into the sink and make a brown splash. I never get to see how it ends.
On a bench on campus, sitting just passed a shadow casted on the ground behind her, a girl leaned in and talked into her cell phone. “Seriously,” she exasperated, “graduation is less than a month away.” She sighed and I sighed with her. I don’t have a job lined up yet and I don’t know where to look. The economy’s terrible. On the shuttle home, it was only me and five other people and one of them was lying on the seats, laid out on his back with his hands still on his stomach. He was staring up at the cieling and watching the hand straps dangle from the roof and wave at him. Glenoaks’s economy is probably recession-proof. I bet none of the Camden’s ever woke up one morning to realize that during some time in their sleep years of their life had slipped out the open window, that they were floating somewhere now, out in the trees, in passing scents and thoughts in twilight.
Maybe I should have studied abroad. Maybe it’s right what they say, that college is the best years of your life and you never get them back and the real world sucks serious ass. I saw a car dented and splintered and lying on its side in the median last night, close to the exit of campus. The windshield was a mosaic, a beach of sand struck by lightning and turned into a million shards of glass, a kaleidascope of moonlight and flashing red and blue. I got home and my friend asked me to be in his wedding party. We used to play flashtag together in his yard almost every night in the summers.
Maybe I should have dated more girls and gone to more parties.
It’s so hard to break in and get your first writing job, my told me, organzing a stack of papers on her desk, adjusting her black-rimmed glasses. “That’s what internships are for.”
“I’ve waited too long,” I shook my head. “I just need to do something.”
“If you want to be a writer,” she told me, “sometimes you have to start with things you don’t know, take what you can get.”
Did I even want to be a writer? I nodded absently and thought about May, about the ceremony I wouldn’t be walking in becuase of how few people I actually know who are graduating on time. I thought about Lucy Camden, and whether she was over her miscarriage from last year. I thought about moving back in with my parents if I couldn’t find work.
“I’m just ready for something to happen,” my mind slouched. “I’m ready to finally start.”
You know those days when your thoughts are scattered? When your awareness becomes aware of itself? You know those days the world seems too big and too small at the same time, and all you can think about instead of school and work and life is the fact that Reverend Camden may lose his job; and that Ruthy and T-bone are moving too fast; and that Simon’s already in grad school and engaged, and when you saw him last he was just starting junior high, getting mad at his sister Mary for fighting his battles for him against the school bully–and all that he wanted was to assert himself and get into his own fights and maybe even feel what a broken nose felt like, because then at least the pain would be his—not happening to him, but his—and he’d have some kind of control? You know those days?
Me, too.
7th Heaven: WGN Weekdays at 9:00AM
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction, television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
