Saturday

So we have a brand new 42-inch high definition TV. The screen is gorgeous, the color sumptuous. I watched Game of Thrones on it last night and just about fell into the rich, deep hues, the cinematic sweep and detail. Yes, my husband took back the other TV, the one he brought home last weekend to surprise us. The one I hated. When he took it back to the store on Monday night, he took our daughter and me with him. Once there, I saw his plan. He said, "Okay, choose the one you want," and then he just stood aside while I wrung my hands. I couldn't choose! All the pictures looked horrible and blurry to my eye. That's because the store did not have any of these models, all of them high definition sets, hooked up with high def cables. (See, ellen, I'm on to that now. Thanks for the tip you left in my comments!) After getting over how idiotic a sales strategy that is, I walked up and down the aisles comparing screens in our price category, looking for the one that did the best under these circumstances. My daughter periodically whispered at my ear, "Okay, Mom, what about this one?" coaching me gently. I asked question after question about how these screens would fare when hooked up with HD cables. The bored salesman kept shrugging and saying in a thick Eastern European accent, "Will look better." My husband stood at the back of the store, determined to wait patiently. Occasionally our daughter would go back there to him and I'd see them exchange comments and laughter. Oh, I knew they were in cahoots! I finally chose an LG model, praying I would like it once we got it home and properly hooked up, knowing that if I didn't like it, I had been maneuvered, and would have to live with it. But I did like it! And I love that my husband didn't make this whole episode mean anything deeper than it was, a preference for one HD screen over another. I mean, men and technology, all that. Our girl, as usual, was Switzerland.

My husband left early this morning to go down to the flower district to buy blooms for the altar arrangements he's making for Easter Sunday, in honor of his mom. He does this every year. This will be his third Easter without her. When he came back home, a long box of flowers in his arms, he saw the maintenance guys wheeling out our old, massively heavy and humongous TV set from the basement, where he had deposited it last night. That's what happens in apartment buildings. You put your old stuff in a designated place in the basement and the maintenance crew drags it out to the curb to be picked up as trash. He said, "Excuse me, gentlemen, but that TV works. The picture is a little faded, but that might be because it's not HD and our cable box is HD." They said, "Don't worry, brother. Pretty sure someone is going to take it." My husband then went to the supermarket (he's making scones for breakfast, yay!) and on his way back he came upon a conversation between the maintenance guys and a man who lives across the street. The man wanted the TV and was telling the men that he had a hand truck that could carry it, and he'd be right back. Turned out someone else had put out a smaller, broken TV, along with its remote, and that remote worked for our TV, so the man got both a TV and a remote, and I got to feel less guilty about the consumerism that allows us to buy a new TV while the old one still has some life left in it.

It's a beautiful blue Saturday morning in New York City. The trees outside our windows are budding and I want to say thank you to everyone who commented on that post earlier this week, in which I was worrying about my son. He's doing fine. He sounds back to normal, pressing ahead. In fact, he sent a short story he'd written for his creative writing class for me to read this morning. The tenses were a little all over the place but I was so impressed by the emotional content of the piece, the inner narrative that drove the story, and the twist at the end. I like to think if we weave our collective good thoughts into a protective net around him, around all our beloveds, they will be okay. More. They will thrive.