Who's the boss?

The girls and I got very sick recently with the stomach flu, and the three of us were beached for a few days on "Mommy and Daddy's" bed. As I got a little better but not well enough to exercise my mind on anything more strenuous than reruns of Law and Order and its various incarnations, I wished out loud that Sadeeq and I had a television in the bedroom.

Until then our only television had been in the guest room, and things had worked pretty well that way. We used that television for the girls to watch a video in the evenings, and we occasionally stayed up late to watch DVD rentals or to channel surf. I liked the fact that neighborhood kids would come into the house and ask, "Where's the television?" I liked the feeling that the T. V. wasn't at the center of our domestic lives.

But then came the sickness, and my wish . . .

Sadeeq, who had been feeling very sorry for the three of us and who wouldn't be feeling the full force of illness until after we were on the mend, said, "It would make you really happy to have a television in our bedroom, wouldn't it?" Sensing that he was on the verge of an impulsive and typically Sadeeqian generosity, I replied enthusiastically in the affirmative. Then Sadeeq said, "You don't care what kind of television it is, do you?" I said I didn't care in the least, and I suggested that if he were really going to go out and get a T. V. he should go to Costco and choose some little thing with a built-in DVD player. He asked again, "You're sure you don't care what I get?"

I should have guessed then that our lives were about to change forever.

Sadeeq is even less a television-watcher than I am, and he has a puritan distrust of television as a source of amusement and entertainment. But he also has a typically male love of technology and gadgetry. So when he went out to get a television for our bedroom, I should have seen that he would seize the opportunity to do something nice for his wife and daughters and indulge his love of cool technology at the same time.

He was gone for a few hours -- much longer than I expected. When he returned, he asked me to help get the television out of his car. Wondering why he needed help, I trudged outside in my robe and slippers and saw the box in the back of his car.

It was a big box.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. This thing wasn't as big as some of the flat screen behemoths I've seen, but it was plenty big enough for us. And it was accompanied by a little shining, silvery, faintly glowing friend that plays DVDs in high resolution and makes them look good. Really good.

The next few days were a dizzying, television-watching bacchanalia. The Fifth Element. The Searchers. The Matrix. The Ice Storm. Return of the Jedi. Moulin Rouge! Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I put in Meet Me in Saint Louis, and I wanted to cry with joy. Oh, my goodness . . . the colors, the textures, the clarity, and the detail. Things I'd never noticed before -- like Leon Ames's reflection in the piano's music stand when he and Mary Astor sing "You and I."

After a few days, things quieted down a bit. I walked into our bedroom one evening to get ready for bed and found Sadeeq reading. I understood. He was making a stand. He was trying to show IT who was boss. I had no doubt that Sadeeq would emerge victorious.

It's my own fate I'm worried about.

Sadeeq loved the idea of the thing -- the neat technology, the bigness. I never cared so much about that. What I love is movies, and this new creature comes to me with the promise of movies as I've rarely seen them before. It pledges to let me revel in the pleasures of movie-watching without the advertisements, without the cell phones, without the deafening, jump-cut previews, without the fourteen year olds in the row in front of me who are giddy on Coca Colas and the hackneyed, cracked-voice clunkers they've mistaken for wit.

Make peace with me, it says in the voice of Saruman.

I know how I should reply. We will have peace, I should say, when you and all your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar and a corrupter of men's hearts. You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows will I make peace with you. A lesser daughter of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither.

But then I remember the grandeur of Monument Valley and the way it frames and sometimes dwarfs the human figures in The Searchers. I remember the explosion of color in the "Skip to My Lou" and "Trolley Song" numbers in Meet Me in Saint Louis. I think about the glorious moment when Dorothy skips out onto the broad path of the yellow brick road with all of Munchkinland dancing behind her. Or about the beauty and excitement of Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. Indy outrunning the boulder. Atticus leaving the courtroom. The door closing in Kay Corleone's face. A wide-eyed Brandon De Wilde shouting for Shane to come back. Donald O'Connor dancing up the side of a wall, and Gene Kelly hanging from a lamppost.

My brave retort sticks in my throat. I compose an altogether different reply to the flickering, flat-screened, dulcet-voiced monster:

Myyyy . . . preeecioussss!