Reflecting On Reflections

When I was a youngster of about eight, I was very interested in reading and writing short stories. I read many books gotten from the library because we were too poor to really buy a book. At holiday time, we received books for some of our presents. I probably owned about six books at that time. I have five of them sitting on my book shelves in my home in my family room.

They are old and yellowed but still dear to me. One was called The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. It was not about salad vegetables, it was about a family named Pepper and their adventures. I had the habit of reading the first chapter and then going to the last chapter and reading that and then reading the rest of the book.

Somehow, I got pleasure out of doing that.

Now I record my soap operas daily and I watch them at night. Sometimes, if I know something special is about to happen, I watch the end first or zip through the story of that day and see what I want that was exciting and then I watch it as a whole.

Now a psychologist might try to interpret that as a something of a flaw in my character. I say it is a plus in my character. How so, you ask? Well, I will not waste time watching parts that are boring, commercials or story-lines about characters I am not interested in at this time. So the psychologist could interpret this as being very intelligent and diligent about not wasting precious time.

Anyway, it is interesting that in this point in time of seventy years later, I can do what I did when I was a mere child of seven or eight. I need not read the end of the book first, I can most often see the book made into a DVD and I can see the end first. I can see the end first of a daily serial and can I decide whether to waste my time or not viewing the whole story of that day.

So times have changed from my childhood of radio being the informed source of our lives and us sitting there in a chair mesmerized by this little brown box spouting news, stories, sports and weather. On Monday nights there was a program called Lux Radio Theater sponsored of course by Lux soap. It played the sound of a recent movie or one from the past and you sat there and you imagined the scenery, the age of the character and what he or she looked like. You sat there and listened, not watched and your imagination took over and gave you the specifics.

Sometimes you would see a picture of the actor that had played the part and he or she did not look like what you had imagined. However, your imagination was a beautiful part of your young or older life.

It was as if you were painting a picture in an art class and you brought to life in your mind the colors and styles of the storyline

Sometimes, I think we have lost our imaginations because everything is put before our eyes. We need not imagine anything. It is there for us every moment in commercials, in television, in movies.

So here's to the lovely thing called imagination. Back then, I could not imagine I would be writing stories for the Internet on a thing called a computer. My mom and dad came back from the World's Fair in the nineteen thirties which was held in New York City.

They talked about this movie thing they saw for the first time called T V and how eventually everyone would have these 'movie screens' in their homes and no one need ever go to a movie again. That was what was happening then.

So to imagination, to television, to books, radio and reflection, we salute you for making our lives more tolerable, more beautiful and most of all, more exciting. We reflect on what John Milton said that “reflection is wisdom’s best nurse.”