One of the things I learned to appreciate all over again during my recent period of confinement was TV. When the admitting clerk at the hospital asked me what kind of room I wanted, the first thing I said was, “It has to have a TV!” I would’ve liked wi-fi—and the hospital did have an ultra-pricey presidential suite, with Internet access, on its menu—but I’m old enough to be of a generation that’ll take TV over the Internet, if forced to make a choice.

In fact, I’m old enough to remember the transition from radio to TV. Like the telephone—which, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t have in the house until I was a grown man—the TV was the thing from tomorrow, something that only rich and tech-savvy people had.

In our corner of Mandaluyong, in the early ‘60s, that meant our neighbor the airline pilot, on whose TV I awaited and devoured “Highway 54”, following the afternoon news sponsored by Bre-a-col Cough Syrup. On yet another neighbor’s TV—this neighbor had a sister who was a nurse in the US—the fare was decidedly Pinoy: “Oras ng Ligaya,” “Munting Banal,” and “Ang Hiwaga ng Bahay na Bato” (the latter two being the ‘60s versions of today’s telenovelas; I got my kicks not from some silly romantic plot twist, but from Ben David playing a hunchback and cursing, “Ngitngit ng mga pangit!”) Upstairs, where our landlord lived, I could sneak in to watch “The Rifleman,” “The Rebel,” “Tugboat Annie,” and, on Sundays, “Eskwelahang Munti.”

Come to think of it, everyone had a TV but us. We got our first TV in the summer of 1966, only after it had been established that I’d won myself a scholarship to something called a science high school, thereby absolving my parents of the need to slave away so I could keep going to a private school where people didn’t just have TVs, but cars. To celebrate the occasion, they bought a TV, and I can still remember the day they marched it home in its original box (which, like true Pinoys, we never threw away), borne between the arms of two burly men, like a touring monarch.

Never mind that that TV was probably all of 17 inches in screen size—and, of course, in glorious black-and-white (a feature my father enhanced by taping a plastic “filter” on the screen with blue, red, and green bands, mimicking a sky, grass—and red people). Having a TV meant that we had finally arrived in the 20th century, that I no longer had to pester the neighbors to see “Mission: Impossible” or “Lost in Space,” and that I could hold my head high in school and speak sagely about the weekend antics of the Monkees come Monday morning.

Now you must be imagining that I have one of those 60-inch plasma behemoths in my living room or bedroom, to compensate for all those decades in the TV-less desert. I don’t; I wish I did, but I can’t afford them. Or maybe if I put all my pens and Macs together I could get a honking big plasma TV in exchange, but again, maybe because we got into the TV game fairly late in life, Beng and I have been happy for years to have nothing bigger and sexier than a conventional 21-inch TV at home.

Or at least that was the case until a few months ago, when a friend sent me an SM gift certificate worth P10,000, in thanks for a small job. Immediately the words “shopping spree” flashed in my brain; Beng and I spend a third of our lives at SM North, and the GC was like a kid’s ticket to the carnival, never mind that P10,000 doesn’t get you as much these days like it used to.

I was all set to make a beeline for the computer shops—a new external hard drive? A new printer? Beng was probably thinking how many grocery carts we could fill up with that budget. Everything stalled when we walked past the Appliance Center and saw a rack of plasma and LCD wide-screen TVs on display. Our P10,000 was good for a few square inches of plasmic real estate, but inside the store were lots of old, cheap box-type TVs made in China and Korea. “Don’t you think,” I told Beng, “that it’s about time we helped our aging eyes and treated ourselves to something bigger?” Beside me stood a Korean-made 29-incher; sure, it had a big butt, but its screen was stylishly flat, and its sale price was a tolerable P15,000. I whipped out my plastic to add to the GCs, and the deed was done.

So today, in the tender clutches of post-operative recovery, I’m enjoying a megadose of cable TV in its infinite variety, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from “Waking the Baby Mammoth” and “Treasure Quest” to “World Poker Tour” and “America’s Next Top Model.” (I should admit that it didn’t help my mood much when I tuned in at the hospital just as I was coming out of my Demerol haze to watch an episode of “Extreme Surgery,” followed by a parade of comestibles on the Asian Food Channel.)

OK, it’s not HDTV, and you can see the lines on the screen if you come close enough, but hey, it’s mine and not my neighbor’s, and it looks awfully sharp from ten feet away. (My mother used to admonish me and my siblings not to sit too close to the TV. “You’ll ruin your eyes!” she’d say. I’ve since wondered why I, indeed, sat with my nose glued to the screen. Now I understand: there was no such thing as a remote control then, and someone had to turn the dial to switch channels.)

Finally a perfect birthday gift

Speaking of SM, I remember flying into my annual panic a few weeks ago when Beng’s birthday was about to come up and I was, as usual, clueless about what to give her. Not only am I a guy to begin with; I’m also the world’s worst gift-giver, and long-time readers of this column will recall that episode many years ago when I gifted Beng with a can opener, which didn’t go over too well. (And the rueful couplet I wrote afterwards: “A can opener / Can’t open her.”)

Now here I was again, racking my brain for the ideal gift idea: it had to be cute, it had to be meaningful (whatever that means), and it had to be, uhm, affordable (a criterion I mysteriously forget when it comes to my own purchases). Thankfully, I remembered a previous trip to a pharmacy at the mall, when Beng picked up a bar of imported Spanish soap, brought it to her nose, closed her eyes wistfully, and put it down again.

So who buys birthday gifts in a drugstore? I do. I drove back to SM, scooped up all the varieties of that Spanish soap that I could get my hands on, put them in a nice box, and waited for the receiver.

When she opened it, she broke in tears (Beng, I must remind you, weeps over dead ants), and said, “I feel rich!” I did, too.

Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.