Hold the Boxes

One of the milestone events of my adolescence was the day cable TV came to the North Country. Suddenly a vast universe of TV viewing unfolded before me -- 11 channels, if I recall correctly. Chief among those was Channel 9 from New York (at the time known as WOR), the television home of my beloved New York Mets... the passport to many hours of watching the heroics of such stalwarts as Ron Hodges, Jerry Morales, Tom Hausman, and Mark Bomback.

Later in the evening after the game was over (and everyone else was in bed) Channel 9 presented the Benny Hill Show -- which at the time was considered pretty racy fare, but nowadays would be left in the dust by your average 8 pm sitcom. It was silly & fast-paced, plenty of sight gags, plenty of cute girls mostly standing around (or being chased by Benny), and the teenage me enjoyed it immensely... OK, I suspect the grown-up me would at least get a few chuckles.

I still remember one sketch where Benny played a TV director and the girl playing the actress in the scene -- they never had names -- read her line, as follows: "What's that in the road? A head?" Then Benny as director stepped in and said, "No, no! It's supposed to be, 'What's that in the road ahead?' "

The point, of course, is that inflection, phrasing, emphasis can make all the difference in the world. I found this out to my chagrin from my post of a couple weeks ago. I was attempting to make a point about how, since my wife is a minister, we always have the potential to be moving -- but I feel better-equipped to handle that, if and when it happens. Unfortunately, the way I phrased it made it sound like we were almost certainly moving (already packing boxes, even); I should've known something was up when two people commented on that single sentence!

So in the interests of clarity, I edited that post to make the sentence reflect reality a little better:

There's no way from here we can know when the actual emergency will be, not just a test; but we understand that’s part of the life we’ve chosen (or for which God has chosen us), and we are learning to trust that he’ll give us what we need to make it happen whenever the time comes.

I'm also posting this entry because it's rare enough for someone to read one of my entries once, much less re-reading to catch edits. And also to let you know that if you're saving up cardboard boxes for us, you can take them to your local recycling station.