The View from Mrs. Thompson's

Like many Midwest towns, B-N is lousy with churches: four full pages in the phone book. Everything from Unitarian to bug-eyed Pentecostal. There's even a church for agnostics. Except for church — plus I suppose your basic parades, fireworks and a couple corn festivals — there isn't much public community. Everybody pretty much has his family and neighbors and tight little circle of friends. By New York standards folks keep to themselves.* They play golf and grill out and go to mainstream movies ...

... And they watch massive, staggering amounts of TV. I'm not just talking about the kids. Something that's obvious but still crucial to keep in mind re: Bloomington and the Horror is that reality — any really felt sense of a larger world — is televisual. New York's skyline, for instance, is as recognizable here as anyplace else, but what it's recognizable from is TV. TV's also more social here than on the East Coast, where in my experience people are almost constantly leaving home to go meet other people face-to-face in public places. There don't tend to be parties or mixers per se here; what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody's house and watch something.

Here, therefore, to have a home without a TV is to become a kind of constant and Kramer-like presence in others' homes, a perpetual guest of folks who can't understand why you would choose not to have a TV but are completely respectful of your need to watch TV and offer you access to their TV in the same instinctive way they'd bend to lend a hand if you tripped in the street. This is especially true of some kind of must-see, Crisis-type situation like the 2000 election snafu or this week's Horror. All you have to do is call somebody you know and say you don't have a TV: "Well shoot, boy, get over here."

Tuesday

There are maybe ten days a year when it's gorgeous here, and this is one of them. It's clear and temperate and wonderfully dry after several straight weeks of what felt like living in somebody's armpit. It's just before serious harvesting starts, when the pollen's at its worst; a good percentage of the city is stoned on Benadryl, which as you probably know tends to give the early morning a kind of dreamy, underwater quality. Timewise, we're an hour behind the East Coast. By 8:00 everybody with a job is at it, and just about everybody else is home drinking coffee and blowing their nose and watching Today or one of the other A.M. shows that broadcast (it goes without saying) from New York. At 8:00 I personally was in the shower trying to listen to a Bears postmortem on WSCR sports radio in Chicago.

The church I belong to is on the south side of Bloomington, near where I live. Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church. It's not one of those Protestant churches where people throw Jesus's name around or talk about the End Times, which is to say that it's not loony or vulgar, but it's fairly serious, and people in the congregation get to know each other well and to be pretty tight. Most of the congregants are working-class or retirees; there are some small-business owners. A fair number are veterans or have kids in the military or — especially — the various Reserves, because for many of these families that's simply what you you do to pay for college.

* The native term for a conversation is visit.