JUDGING THE SUMMER BY THE WINTER [T, 11-4-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life from the Years of Winter—JUDGING THE SUMMER BY THE WINTER [T, 11-4-25]

 

Old people should be grateful to live in the days of screens. No, not the screens on doors. They aren’t important anymore. We don’t need them now that we have air conditioning. A lot of folks don’t even have screen doors now. Air conditioning means we no longer have to leave the outside doors open, hoping for a breeze.

It’s the screens we watch to get entertainment and news for which we need to give thanks. Some of us are old enough to remember when there were no such screens. It was a rather boring time.

And a laborious time. You had to work hard to see things. Sometimes you actually had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV. Now we can recline on our sofas and push a couple of buttons on the remote—usually the wrong buttons to begin with—and see people and events from all the world.

We need to be careful, though, as we give thanks, not to disrespect those days of yore, those days before the big screens.

What appeared in screens even a few years ago appears as primitive compared to now, but those images were important to us then.

I first saw TV in 1947, in Uncle Johnny’s hardware store in Francisco, IN. It was World Series time, and we wanted to see local boy Gil Hodges playing for the Dodgers. Uncle Johnny installed an antenna on the roof. It had a cable that came down the side of the building to a handle you could rotate to turn the antenna in different directions to grab the TV signal from different directions. The TV set itself was quite large, but with a screen that was no more than a foot wide.

The “pictures” were almost entirely “snow,” but we could hear the announcers, and we could imagine that we saw the players running the bases, hitting homers, whatever the announcers told us. It was wonderful.

The pictures of this year’s WS between the Dodgers and Blue Jays were as sharp as the blade on that knife Tom Woodall, Sr. gave Helen 45 years ago. It was a special knife, and he thought Helen should have one, because she has always been a favorite of old men. He said that if she took care of it, she would never have to sharpen it. That was 45 years ago. He was right.

 

The screen on our present smart TV is about ten times larger than the screen on Uncle Johnny’s first TV. On it, the Dodgers are very clear and dodgy, the Jays very clear and blue. Some people say this was the best WS ever. No, the best WS ever was in 1947.

It is dangerous to judge the past by the present.

It is dangerous to judge the summer by the winter.

It is dangerous to judge the decisions of young people by the decisions of old people.

It’s tempting to do that. I have less energy in winter, so I assume I am wiser. I judge much of what I did in summer to be fruitless. But that’s winter talking. What I did in summer was necessary then. What I did in earlier years was not “youthful silliness” just because I’m too old now to engage in the fun of silliness.

We are not wiser just because we are older. It is wise, though, to say that we should not judge the summer by the winter.

John Robert McFarland