Our marriage is measured out in episodes of Morse, Endeavor, Vera, Foyle’s War, Unforgiven, Shetland, D.I. Ray, The Crown, Annika, Call the Midwife, Luther, The Durrell’s in Corfu, Seaside Hotel, Grantchester, Astrid, Nordic Murder, Borgen, Professor T, Peaky Blinders, Last Tango in Halifax, The Crown and Indian Summers to name a few. It all begins in a roach-ridden apartment in Atlanta’s Little Five Points, watching Masterpiece Theater and Mystery on Sunday nights.
40 years later Helene blows in. No power, no TV. There are infinitely worse things of course, but sometimes when big things happen, it’s the little things we miss. After a week, power returns but no internet. We unearth our DVD player and the basket of DVDs bought eons ago at a going-out-of-business sale for Video Life, the cozy, DVD rental store that was down from our house. We watch Miss Marple (the good ones with Joan Hickson), Northern Exposure, Fawlty Towers, and Weatherby, a strange movie with Vanessa Redgrave, Ian Holm, Tom Wilkinson and Judi Dench.
More weeks pass. No internet. I discover bookshelves of DVDs at the North Asheville library. We watch The Other Boleyn Girl with Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman; Denial, a unsettlingly timely movie about a British pseudo historian who denies the Holocaust happened and sues a Jewish Emory professor for slander for calling him a fraud in her book; and The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson movie we’d seen years ago but before we’d gone to India which made us appreciate it all the more.
Last night, a month later, our internet returns courtesy of a kind AT&T technician who came up from Greenville. Connie and I are positively giddy, as we sit down to eat dinner in front of the TV and catch up on Van Der Valk. Afterwards, Connie plays Catan online while I watch a creaky but touching 1998 version of Our Mutual Friend on a library DVD of course.