A wonderful story of a woman who decides her grandchildren need to spend more time looking at nature and talking to people.  I loved her humorous and decisive course of action and the fact that she was so loved by her family that they forgave her technological sabotage.  

We all loved our Mama.   She was always cheerful.   She played the piano – she’d gone to music school – and she sang.  Made up fairy tales.  For a little while, we had a TV, someone had given it to us as a present.  The kids got sucked into the screen, it was impossible to tear them away, and it made them kind of aggressive, they started acting like strangers.   So she went and poured water in it like it was an aquarium.  The TV burnt out.  “Children, go look at the flowers and trees instead.  And talk to your mother and father.”  Our kids didn’t even get upset because it was Mama had said so…

This isn’t the first funny account I’ve celebrated of someone deciding they’ve had it with televisions – enjoy this outrageously lively damnation of the box. 

Source: Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The last of the Soviets, trans. by Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2017), p. 442

Photo credit: Pexels at pixabay