Thanks for The Thoughtful Gift

By Jeremy Hooper

I wanted to thank you, great-grandson, for the carefully considered gift of one strip of LED lighting to go around the back of my TV. Eighty-eight years is obviously too long to go without a tinge of illumination highlighting my screen’s underside.

Ya know, when I was a youngster growing up in Appalachia, I never would’ve imagined framing a television in subtle shades. And not just because grueling shifts in condemned mines suppressed my imagination. Or because we had no electricity. Or walls. I just never dreamt of seeing colors not borne of scurvy, nor did any of the six kids with whom I shared that particularly crispy hay bail.

As I entered young adulthood and experienced the boob tube’s early days, I still couldn’t picture colored TV underlighting. Or colored anything, it being the Deep South and I the lone townsperson not on the side of “Board of Education.” I’m sure I would’ve gotten around to thinking about a mild backsplash of tele-luminescence, were I not so busy preventing the rest of my house from being firebombed.

Then came those socially turbulent ’60s. Oh my, to think, not one of us ever stopped to ask why our TVs, filled as they were with harrowing images from Selma and Ho Chi Minh, lacked a faint rim of magenta to help underscore the tone of our times. We assumed the body bags and firehoses were enough…