Wordplayed

It started in the early fall of the previous year, the television ads for the mini-series, “Roots,” written by Alex Haley. As the TV event neared, my dad announced that he wanted to get a color TV.

Excited, we kids couldn’t have agreed more with the idea of a color TV set. We had an old black and white console set that had been new long before moving to the coast.

It’s label was so worn out that we couldn’t even figure out its brand name.

Within a couple of days, our parents drove the 60 miles south to Arcata and bought an MGA color television set. It was a pricey-purchase, something my folks could hardly afford, but they did it anyway.

It made us kids feel like the richest people in the neighborhood. We didn’t know other families already had color TVs in their homes—-maybe ever more than one in some cases.

The six of us sat in front of our new color TV and watched the historically based mini-series from start to finish. I think it was the first and perhaps the last time we all agreed on what to watch as a family.

Mom reminded me about the events that caused her and dad to purchase the color TV a few months before she passed away. She thought wanting to watch one TV show wasn’t worth the price of that new color television set.

Looking back, it wasn’t about the television set or the mini-series. It was about a slightly twisted sense of humor and some purposeful wordplay: Dad wanted to see “Roots,” on a “colored TV.”