Talking to Walter Cronkite
My great grandmother used to sit in front of the television watching the news with a look of intense concentration, though I never knew if it was because of the subject matter or because she had difficulty understanding the language. Anna was the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family. With her children, she had come to Canada from the Old Country, long after her husband had died and left her to fend for herself. She took turns living with her son — my grandfather, and her daughter in Saskatchewan, but spent most of her years living with my grandparents. She never worked outside the home but made as much of a contribution as everyone else to the running of the household.
I never ascertained what kind of formal education Anna had, though I suspect it was very basic. She could write Slovak, and she would let me trace over her handwriting, copying those mysterious looking shapes that I have come to recognize as penmanship typical of eastern Europeans. Even Anna’s attempts at writing English transliterated into Slovak bore her special hieroglyphics. She would try to teach me to enunciate the Slavic sounds, in words that sounded like dziwka, tcheck-i, znash.
Anna learned English by reading the Bible. Wherever an important passage appeared, she would mark the beginning and the end with a large, pencilled circle. Her entire Bible was circled in this way. Anna wore out more than one copy of the Bible, the already thin pages getting thinner and greyer until the fibres would give way and the words on one side of the page became inextricably linked with those on the back. My great grandmother never read novels or magazines or even the newspaper, for that matter. Reading was an activity reserved for religious publications, which she read from cover to cover every week. To keep up with world events, my great grandmother watched the news.
Anna watched the news every day, but only the six o’clock news. She loved Walter Cronkite. I knew there was something unseemly, something almost indecent, with the way my great grandmother carried on about Walter Cronkite, and not just in the way she talked to him. She talked to just about everyone on television. Sometimes she railed and shook her fists, daring the performers or announcers to answer back. The fact that they never responded didn’t seem to phase my great grandmother. To her, television was like having a personal stage production. The audience is allowed to heckle but the actors’ jobs are to keep the show going, not to respond to the audience.
But my great grandmother knew, as well as she knew the sky was blue, that the people on the television screen could see into her living room. Randomly, she would tell me, “Pull your dress down over your knees. They can see up your skirt.” I would dutifully untangle my frame from whatever sprawled-out position I had adopted, and modestly pull my skirt down as far as it would go, even as I would mutter, “No, they can’t.”
Walter Cronkite’s refusal to talk to my great grandmother bothered her, though. Anna offered him her advice, asked him angry, rhetorical questions, and chided him any time he reported an item from a particularly stupid viewpoint. And when Walter Cronkite signed off with, “Goodnight,” my great grandmother would always answer in kind before she turned off the television.
Watching the news with my great grandmother was boring for me since the stern looks of the announcers could not bring even the most light-hearted news story to life. Watching wrestling with my great grandmother wasn’t much better. My mother and my grandmother could never figure out what made my great grandmother tune in to watch men fling one other onto mats and pretend to stomp all over each other. Anna would point her finger and shout excitedly in Slovak words to the effect of, “that’s it,” and “let him have it.” My grandmother especially, being the gentle soul she was, would try to convince my great grandmother to turn off the television. My grandmother’s excuse was that I should not be exposed to such violent degeneracy, but Anna was stubborn. My mother and grandmother would eventually retreat to the kitchen, clucking and shaking their heads in embarrassed bewilderment while I remained in the living room, feeling privileged for my right to this entertainment, but actually finding more diversion in watching my great grandmother watch wrestling.
My favourite time to watch television with my great grandmother was during the afternoon. This was a treat possible only when I slept over at my grandparents’ house. We would watch soap operas over top of my great grandmother’s running commentary. Here the heckling would become serious as Anna would spit out her most scathing remarks at the television screen. “Look at her. Hussy. Look at all that stuff on her face. If I was her husband, I would make her wash it all off. How can she show her face on television?” What bothered my great grandmother most of all was to watch people kissing on television. She would contort her face into a grimace and look away from the screen, commanding me to do likewise. “Ah yoi,” she would utter in disgust, “look what they do. Germs, germs you get from doing such a thing.” Then she would wipe her mouth on the tissue she kept inside the cuff of her sleeve for just such occasions. Over time, I learned that the best strategy was to keep quiet. Any attempt to explain why the characters were kissing or, heaven forbid, to absolve them would result in a lecture about God, morals, and upbringing, invariably ending with, “I never kissed my husband on the mouth. Never.” But if I kept quiet, Anna’s curiosity would get the better of her and she had to peek at the screen to see what happened next, if someone needed chiding or if anyone tried to sneak in another mouth-to-mouth kiss as soon as she’d turned her back.
Every so often, my mother and her brother would try to explain the mechanics of television to my great grandmother. The entire family would be concentrated around the kitchen table. Diagrams would be drawn showing boxes representing television sets and wavy lines as transmission frequencies. Anna would be sitting in the middle, the thin white hair nodding up and down with her head as she indicated she understood.I would lose interest in the exercise soon enough, and would wander off to watch whatever television program was on, taking advantage of the fact that the level of concentration in the adjoining room distracted the adults from realizing I was tuned in to programs my mother normally would not allow me to watch.
Eventually the time would come when everyone would rise and mill around the kitchen, refilling their cups of tea. My uncle would stand, face reddened from his mission of enlightenment, and shake his head as if he’d finally taught a stubborn child the dangers of crossing the highway. From the next room, I would hear my great grandmother pull back her chair and call out to me in a clear voice, “Ah yoi, cover your knees. He can see up your skirt.”
Walter Cronkite was an important link to my greatgrandmother. I miss my greatgrandmother, and now I miss Walter Cronkite.