Last night, as darkness fell and the temperatures dipped into the upper forties, we changed our Thursday night routine a bit. Typically, Thursday nights are when Mom comes over, has dinner, and we'll watch a movie together. "Mom Movie Night" has been going since Dad died, and is a continuation of the movie night I'd do over at their place when I took a caregiving shift every Thursday.
It's a fun little tradition, but every once in a while, it's good to mix it up.
Instead of a movie, we went old school. In our hearth, the first fire of the season crackled away happily. The wood, from a long dead chestnut oak, one I'd bucked and split and stacked myself back in February. I'd worried that it might not have cured enough, but I needn't have...it lit instantly, and burned bright, casting warmth and flickering light into our living room. Mom settled into a rocking chair near to the fire, a pleasure for old bones.
Our diversion for the evening was an episode of The Shadow, a classic radio-age drama from nearly a century ago, the one that begins with the voice of Orson Welles melodramatically intoning the catchphrase: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow, of course, after which there's an evil laugh so utterly absurd you can't help but grin at it.
This being a product of America in the 1930s, it was sponsored by Clean Burning Blue Coal, the very finest Pennsylvania Anthracite. Nothing, we hear, is more healthy for your family in winter than Clean Burning Blue Coal in your home furnace, available now from your local dealer. Ah, America, how little ye have changed.
I've listened to old radio dramas before, and they're a very different creature from the entertainments of this era. I enjoy movies, particularly those that involve visual artistry. I enjoy gaming, too, again, particularly when games do something unique and brilliant. But practical effects and CGI aren't quite as magical as that sense you start to get in the depths of a well crafted radio drama.
It's far less passive. Through an admixture of sound effects and deftly directive writing, you find yourself gradually succumbing to a sense of place. You're in that car, chasing the villains. You're in that crypt, slowly filling with water. I've often wondered about the impact of this sort of storytelling on the minds of a culture. Our capacity for imagination is engaged as a partner, in the same way that it would have been around the fire in times primeval as the tribe's storyteller spun out another tale, in the same way that it is when we are deep in the thrall of a riproaring pageturner.
If we are shown everything, I often wonder, does it impact our capacity to imagine? We, who see and hear everything we want, who can disappear into virtual worlds crafted in intricate detail, which require nothing from us at all?
Weighty questions, but last night, they were of less interest.
Instead, we enjoyed the primal pleasures of a woodfire's warmth and the spell cast by a well told yarn.
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