Alternate Lives

I recorded all the Bob Newhart shows (which doesn't include his last anemic one where he played the cartoonist), and now that's about the only TV I watch, aside from SNL. Nothing more therapeutic for my soul than the opening to Newhart, the theme music, the Vermont scene driving down the country road to the inn; it's where I want to be. If I could jump into the screen and live that life, I would. Sweet, gentle, off-beat and hysterical, a perfect refuge from the otherwise shark tank of a world we live in. Also love the idea of a writer as
innkeeper, even if Bob is just a writer of how-to home improvement books. In my sitcom, I'd be a literary fiction writer and dog-breeder, but it would be in a bucolic setting. As I was watching Newhart the other day it struck me that the art, (and I will categorize Newhart as that - it just happens to be a television art form), we love the most is what we can identify with the closest. That's why Catcher in the Rye has such a broad appeal, everyone experienced the trials and tribulations of adolescence. So Newhart becomes for me, a version of my own life, a man of letters (to a certain extent) engaged in his own business surrounded by a cast of eccentric characters, who view in turn view his "normalcy" as "different". Then I thought of my favorite work of fiction, the namesake of my dog, The World According to Garp. Since reading the book (and later re-reading it), I have always been taken with the idea of the fiction writer living in suburbia, fiercely protective of his neighborhood and living among eccentrics. Again, a setting I can relate to, although I am far from being a literary novelist, but another idealized version of my type of world, one where my soul will always be.