Tea, TV and a Library

Suxu via Pixabay

This morning, Alexa (my Echo Dot) told me that it was TV Talk Show Host Day and also Johnny Carson's birthday -- something I forgot until it was time for me to write this post.

Though I grew up during the Johnny Carson era, much of his late night reign was before my time. I remember my parents sometimes staying up late to watch him and, for some reason, I remember them mostly in the house we lived in when I was in middle school. A big, old house that had been subdivided into three separate apartments before we bought it, it boasted a room my mother liked to call the library because it had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall. A big, long room off the living room, the library looked out onto a flagstone courtyard and had double doors connecting to the bedroom my sister and I shared. (THAT was a trip. We still shake our heads at that one.) It boasted a black leather sofa that faced the bookshelves and a TV...somewhere in the room. Though I have a clear recollection of that room in many ways (including the fact that it was my stage when no one else was home and I wanted to perform the songs I listened to on the record player in that same room), now, many years later, I can only guess at where the TV must have been.

When I got old enough to stay up and watch the show myself, I remember less of Carson and more of his guests. I first saw Joan Rivers and David Brenner on Carson -- Jewish comics who threw around words like schlepped and schmaltz and gave me my first lessons in Yiddish.

Johnny Carson was it back then --  not like now where the news is followed by a selection of talk show hosts on each of what used to be considered the major networks. Colbert and the Jimmys at 11:30, Seth Myers and James Cordon and a host (no pun intended) of others at 12:30 and beyond. I'm now older than my parents were then, and my talk show hosts of choice are Stephen Colbert and, when I can stay awake long enough, Seth Myers. They're much more political than I remember Carson being but, then again, I was a kid -- and then a teenager more interested in boys and music than politics -- when Carson was on and I'm sure a lot went right over my head.

It's fun thinking back to Carson -- and more fun thinking back to that house (which had a great screened-in porch) and my parents drinking tea out of mugs, watching late night television and maybe having a nibble of something sweet (I come by it honestly, apparently). We only lived in that house for a few years, yet some of the memories are as vivid as yesterday, even though I am now two decades older than my parents were then.

My daughter won't have multi-house memories. We still live in the same house we brought her home to after she was born. Sometimes, when she's home, she'll join me for a bit of Stephen Colbert or Seth Myers or send me a link to James Corden's Carpool Karaoke.

I wonder what her memories will be.