March 23

When I was young, my parents took our television up to the attic where it stayed for at least the next decade, nestled among cardboard boxes, home insulation, and Christmas decorations. I have very few memories of television--I remember my parents once watching Star Trek, I remember pretending I woke up early enough on Saturdays to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I remember watching a Disney movie one day with my mother as men replaced the shingles of our roof. But for the most part, I didn't remember anything about having a television, and I didn't miss that it was gone. I spent a lot of time outside.

One of the things I remember best about playing outside (besides the fact it enabled me to watch for and then greet the mail carrier, which was my life aspiration at that point), was the cicada shells. You would find them all sorts of places, where the cicada had decided it was now too big for its skin, and it was glorious for me as a child to find these relics. Sometimes they would be on our wood fence, sometimes the stone of our home, sometimes on a tree, but always magical. A dried, empty, hollow husk of bug, dull brown but, in my small eyes, a complete wonder. We would collect these empty bug shells, take them into our home to show our mother, proud as she was of her beaming children.

The most magical aspect of these skeletons, for us, was that we never saw the real insect. We could hear them alright, every night, but they were shy creatures, I guess, because the only bugs I could ever catch hold of were the big slow moths that clodded around light fixtures. One day my father showed me a picture of a cicada. "What's that?" I asked, staring at the picture. This creature was bright green, vibrant, with beautiful, clear wings. "That's a cicada," my father told me. Looking back I imagine him patting me on the head, but I doubt that happened. I was dumbstruck. How could such a beautiful creature leave such a dull, frightening shell behind?

These days, I don't find cicada shells any more. I don't know if it's because I've gone inside, or because the insects have gone somewhere else. I have a television now, but I still don't have any channels. I'm fairly certain I still wouldn't wake up to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But I've never resented that my parents took away the television's monsters so that I could invent better ones in my own backyard.