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The End of the Antenna

JUNE 10, 2009
This is the last week that you will be able to plug in a TV and get an image.  Of course I would never watch TV like that anymore, but it's a technology that will end.  If you take an old tube radio, and I have a few, and plug it in, you can still hear music and talk.  Broadcast television and the ubiquitous rooftop antenna will become relics.  I have always found a cloud behind an antenna visually interesting.  I think it's the majesty of a cloud and the clunky inventions of man in contrast with eachother.  The clouds will still be there.


Seeing them, I think of a memory of my father, our antenna and the 1973 northeast ice storm.  The swirling winds that night pelted our new house in North Haven, Connecticut.  One of our prized new possessions was a rotary TV antenna.  You dialed a box to turn the antenna on the roof and all 10 channels came in fairly clear.  That night a tree in front of our living room window split  down the middle and on our roof, the antenna bent over and collapsed.  We all arose to the calamity and watched our dad consider the problem and fix it.  He passed weeks after that.  
The antenna is long gone and the tree healed itself and matured with odd twists and turns in it's trunk.  Kind of like all of us.

So long antennas.
© 2024 Tim O'Brien