When I Was Your Age: Time and Television

We have come up with a name. My son will be called Robert Sawyer Carmack. We'll call him Sawyer.

I've been giving a lot of thought to all of the things that will be different for my kids than they were for me when I was growing up. One of the things that I'm realizing is that I learned how to tell time based on when my favorite TV shows would come on. I'm realizing that we learn certain things on a "need to know" basis. That is to say, if I feel like I need to know something, I will learn it. So, let's revisit a conversation I had with my own father when I was five years old:

Me: "Dad, can I watch Batman?"

Dad: "Not right now. It doesn't come on until 4."

Me: "When is that?"

Dad: "In a couple hours."

Me: "Will you tell me when it's 4?"

Dad: "You can tell for yourself. Here (pointing to the digital clock on the front of the microwave). When this number says 4 and the other numbers say 00, that's when Batman comes on."

For the next 81 minutes, I stayed glued the front of that microwave. It could happen at any moment, and I wanted to be ready.

This is how I learned how to tell time. It was helpful that Batman always promised to appear at the same "bat-time" on the same "bat-channel." This made it easy for me to remember that Batman didn't just come on at four o'clock on this particular day, but that it would always come on at four o'clock.

And then there was Saturday morning. This is back when Saturday mornings were wall-to-wall cartoons. You could start your day with Rocky and Bullwinkle and stay glued to the television until the Jetsons had ended and the dreaded "news" began. That's how I learned to tell time on Saturday mornings. Bullwinkle starts at 7am. The news comes on at 12. In between, there was nothing but entertaining goodness.

So my question becomes, how will my kids learn to tell time? We have DVR. We have DVDs. Will my kids still want to watch the clock awaiting the beginning of their favorite cartoons, or will we have to educate them in a less subtle way? I can just hear myself: "You know, when I was your age, we had to know what time it was if we wanted to watch our favorite TV shows. Life was tough back then."

Speaking of television, how long do we need to wait until our son finally learns who he's really named after?