Sunday Morning Lessons

I loved cartoons when I was very young, and there seemed to me no better start to the day than how my Saturday mornings unfolded – plopped down in the living room, with no school on the horizon, a bowl of Frosted Flakes in my lap, and Bugs Bunny and all his friends on the TV. Whoever made those Saturday morning shows seemed to have written them for me because they made me laugh. Laughter seemed like its own solution, the completion of a circle. If I was laughing, everything was okay.

Sunday mornings seemed like they could have been like Saturday mornings. There was no school and my mother slept in. But all I could find on TV was news and church shows. We didn’t go to church, and I couldn’t dream up something duller than news. There was, however, a Claymation series about a boy and his talking dog called Davey and Goliath. This show looked like it was written for me. At that time, cartoons and Claymation were always for kids. When I stumbled on it, I wondered if I had found a gem hidden in this all this tedious, adult blather.

I quickly sniffed out that something was wrong. Nothing in it made laugh, and the boy, Davey, was learning lessons. I didn’t need or want lessons; I got those Monday through Friday at school. Worse yet, the first show ended with Davey receiving a lecture from his father about trusting in God. Davey said he would, and then everything was okay.

This isn’t for kids, I thought. This was like one of those films they show you in school about why drugs are bad for you. It was an untrustworthy show because it didn’t trust me. What an abomination. That it was dressed up like an actual kid’s show made it all the worse. I turned it off, and wondered what I should do. The whole day was ahead of me; I could do with it what I wanted. I didn’t know what that was, but if it was fun, then it would be the right thing to do.

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Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com