Channel 2

Channel 2

               Mark was so excited that he passed on taking his ninth inning “time out.” Every three innings he would take five and sit on a nearby tree stump. But today he was too ramped up to stop playing his imaginary baseball game even for a second. He loved his baseball game that he invented. He called it “Rock Baseball,” because he would hit rocks with his bat. Depending on where he hit the rock and how hard he hit it, he would move his imaginary players around the imagined bases. Currently he had the Dodgers and Giants tied at 7 runs each after the 8^th inning comeback by his beloved Dodgers. Maury Wills hit a bases loaded single to left field to bring in Frank Howard and Wally Moon. Mark was especially proud of getting Wally Moon on base because he batted left-handed. Mark was a righty but was rigorously trying to learn to be a switch-hitter.

               He usually spent his breaks between innings gathering up more rocks to hit, so he was frantically walking in a circular manner while looking for rocks to hit. Finding rocks that were an ideal size was a little challenging, especially since Mark was using this spot at the junction of their long driveway and the county road. This was a perfect spot to play his baseball game. The paved road was clear of trees, and it made a good boundary for the infield. Anything he hit that landed on the other side of the pavement would be a single, unless the rock took a high, lazy arc after he hit it with his bat. In those cases, Mark called that an out. If he hit a line drive in a trajectory between the outfielders, that was a single. If he pulled the rock down the line on either side, that was a double. The neighbor across the road had a barbed-wire fence around his property, and so a rock that landed on the other side of that fence was a home run.

               Mark was very conscious of his batting efforts when the sticking Giants were up. He wanted his Dodgers to win, but he wanted them to win in an honest way, so he hit the rocks just as hard when the Giants were up as he did when his beloved Dodgers were. Now that he had a good pile of rocks on the ground in front of him, Mark made himself into Felipe Alou, righty outfielder. Holding his bat with his left hand in the proper position at the knob, he rested the bat in an upright position on his right shoulder. After picking up a rock with his right hand, he tossed it up vertically to a height he assumed would be about 8 feet high. As the rock fell to about his stomach level he swung the bat in an arc with a slight bend toward the left, and it worked. The rock bounced off the dirt on the other side of the pavement and just inside the oak tree that he used to mark the left foul line. It was a single.

               Marc was conflicted of course. He had hit the rock hard and down the line like he wanted. This was good practice. But…it was a stinkin’ Giant that got the hit. Adding to his misery, the next batter, Orlando Cepada, singled up the middle. That put Alou on third, in scoring position with no outs. To make matters worse, Willie Mays is up next, followed by Willie McCovey.

               A little healing took place when Marc, hitting for Mays flied out to center field. Mark’s heart had gone into a brief lapse of activity as he watched the high arc of the rock descend toward the fence directly in front of him. When the rock finally hit the ground and bounced through the fence, a rush of relief came pouring in. Unfortunately, the euphoria lasted only for one more toss of the rock. The big right-hander, Willie McCovey immediately slammed a line drive over the left field fence. Alou, Cepeda and McCovey were seen in Mark’s mind slowly sauntering around the bases and waving at the imaginary audience.

               Mark was so dejected that when he did get his beloved Dodgers up to bat, Willie Davis, the first batter, struck out. Marc stood there slumped over and was furiously beating the ground in front of him with end cap of his bat. Maury Wills and the following batter weakly grounded out. The stinkin’ Giants won.

               As Mark disgustedly tromped back toward his home, a thought suddenly sprung up in his mind, and this thought automatically made him laugh out loud. He let the Giants win because of a managerial mistake he made in the sixth inning. He let Don Drysdale, the Dodgers pitcher, go to bat. He should have brought in a pinch hitter! Which is what made him laugh, because he was the hitter no matter who he imagined in his mind was standing at the plate. But then his laughter suddenly stopped as Mark surmised that maybe he would have tried harder to bat if he was playing the part of aa hitter at the plate, instead of a pitcher like Drysdale.

               His dismay was about to take a sudden plunge into the deeper part of the doldrums, however. When he opened the front door of the house and stepped inside, he saw his parents were finally up and out of bed and they were sitting together on the couch in the living room drinking coffee and smoking. Before Mark could even close the door his father somberly began giving orders to his son. “Mark, there was some wind last night and you know what happens when that happens.”

               Mark dropped his head and subtly nodded his head yes in a less-than enthusiastic manner. His father continued nonetheless, “Yes, the wind pushed the TV antenna around, so now we cannot get a signal. You need to go across the street and turn the antenna pole so that it is pointing in the right direction. You remember how to do that?”

               Mark nodded in an even more profound lackluster manner while thinking to himself, “Why wouldn’t I remember how to do it, I’ve had to do it a million times.”

               “And you know which direction to point the antenna?” Without waiting for another depressed nod from his son, he continued, “You point it just over that big pine tree that is by the dog house that is next to the carport.”

               Without waiting for any additional further unneeded instructions, Mark turned and started walking toward the area where the antenna is located, which is across the street. Their house was built at the base of a rather large hill, and so in order to receive the signal from the TV broadcast tower, Dad had to put the antenna on a tall pole that he attached to a fence pole on the neighbor’s property on the other side of the of street. From there, the angle of the antenna could be raised enough to access the transmission coming over the top of the hill. Then Dad attached the antenna wire from there to the roof of our house.

               When Mark finally got to the antenna, he immediately began turning the antenna pole with both hands. This wasn’t easy to do but with the proper amount of effort, the pole would turn, which would explain why the wind kept messing with the antenna. Just as he got the pole to spin he heard his father hollering out from the open window in the living room, “If you need a screwdriver to loosen to clamp on the pole, you know where that is don’t ya?”

               Mark dropped his head down to his chest again and just kept trying to turn the antenna pole. It took a minute for him to realize that he wasn’t watching where the antenna was pointing. Just as he raised his eyes to look up, he heard his dad hollering loudly, “Stop Mark, stop! Leave it right there. Don’t turn it anymore!”

               Mark blurted out, “What in the world is going on?” Mark could see that the antenna was not pointed in the right direction. He had turned it too far counterclockwise to where it should be pointing. He waited for a few minutes for his dad to holler back at him, but it never came. Mark then gave up, released his hands from the pole, threw his arms up in the air and began walking back to the house.

               When he walked through the front door this time, he couldn’t believe what he saw this time. His parents were no longer smoking or drinking their coffee, and they were hunched forward toward the TV with an unbelievably large grin on their faces. They were captivated, they didn’t even notice that their son had entered the room. Mark then turned to look at what the parents were enchanted with. He couldn’t see anything different; it was just the TV, and it was on the station.

               Just then the younger brother and sister came marching into the living room from the hallway to the bedrooms. They too were stunned at their parents’ hypnotic behavior. “What’s going on?” his sister shouted.

               After a long pause, the mother finally replied without moving her eyes from the TV screen, “We have another channel! Another channel, can you believe it?”

               “What?” the little brother barked, “you mean we have two stations now? Two?”

               “Yes, yes,” the dad answered, again without altering his gaze as well. “We now have channel 2 in addition to channel 7. Now be quiet, sit down and let’s watch the TV.”

               Mark was also completely mesmerized, there was guy dressed as a circus clown sitting on a chair talking to some little kids. “What’s this?” he asked quizzically.

               “It’s called ‘Bozo’, he’s talking to the kids now, but they show cartoons most of the time.”

               Mark liked the sound of that and sat down on the floor with his siblings totally enraptured by their new entertainment source. All three later jumped up in sheer excitement and jumping up and down when they saw that “The 3 Stooges” came on after Bozo.

               It was then. when the parents witnessed their children’s excited reaction to their new treasure trove of television choices, they turned their attention from the TV to look at each other with a troubled affect on their faces. They were both instantly thinking the same thing, “Our kids now have two TV stations to watch, they will now be doing nothing but watching television. Dad said to mom, as she shook her head affirmatively to every word he was saying, “We are going to have to take the knob of the TV that changes the channels. This is too much!”