An Albanian came to the house to install satellite television.
This is not as surprising as it sounds.
There are many Albanians in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. From what I gather, after living in a hellish, hardscrabble dictatorship all your life, with the added indignity that no one understands you language or can even spell the name of your late hellish dictator,* depriving you of even the faint hope of a Milan Kundera wildcard . . .
. . . after all that, Roslindale looks like paradise. Look, papa, a tire store! It is a miracle! A Dunkin' Donuts! And another! Praise God. See, here is a street too narrow for two cars to pass one another, and yet, there is parking on both sides of it! Ha ha ha, it is a wonder, this Roslindale. My god, let us live in our two decker and plant squash in the back yard and go have coffee in FormerEmack's.
No, what is truly surprising is not the Albanian but the television. There has never been any cable TV in this house. In fact, for the last decade and more since her youngest grown kid moved out, my mother kept a single dusty television in the basement, in front of which she would occasionally fold towels while watching Charlie Rose and Masterpiece Theater, and every four years, the ice skating in the Olympics. We're talking some extremely narrow criteria for Must See TV.
And although I am something of a TV slut myself, it is a promiscuity that is also of a very particular type. A kink, if you will, for elaborate, noirish fictions that construct an engrossing, long-running alternate reality requiring their own bodies of esoteric expertise. The Wire and Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men and Lost; and of course, American Idol.
So I brought a big screen television with me from Washington, but we mostly used it to watch DVDs and the occasional public ritual: the Beijing/Phelps Olympiad, the election cycle and the Obama investiture, the American Idol finale.
But then recently the whole HDD thing came along, a vast and costly conspiracy to wipe out the last holdouts of our type, those stubborn New England households who watched only PBS over the actual airwaves without paying anyone for anything. Stubbornly driving ten year old cars, failing to eat at McDonald's or take Viagra, and generally parasitically leeching off the television commons.
And instead of acting like true Puritans and turning the old TV into a planter and settling in to read The Atlantic for all futurity, we with much outward complaining, but secret rejoicing gave way to the corruption of the times and now have DirectTV, justified by the fact that we will be able to watch BBCAmerica, Jon Stewart, and super sweet high definition Charlie Rose.
* Enver Hoxha
