Holiday

It is Saint-Jean Baptiste Day - a holiday - where I live and a very important one weather wise: it is close enough to the Summer solciste of June 21 to be candidate for our one day of summer, that perfect day with glorious sunshine, just enough heat, a bit of wind, no rain... Maybe not this year. Still, a holiday at a reasonable time of year.

So I am going to come out and admit it: I enjoy watching, on television, the animated series King of the Hill. It is a guilty pleasure and it took me a while to get into it. First I had to get over the notion that I could be square enough to relate to these people. Hank Hill is painfully whatever he is. Peggy Hill is a cube, only made likable by her lack of intelligence and occasional moments of human compassion, which are rare. Their thirteen-year old son is obese, and a fuddy-duddy in the making. Hank is worried he might become a homosexual but he needn't: the kid won't evolve enough to ever be that imaginative.

The secondary characters are great. I luuuve that guy too blind to see his wife is cheating on him, an exterminator who always manages to overcome his financial woes through imaginative projection. The obese neighbor on the verge of tears, the ladies' man who used to like sports, they are all icons, embodied insights into human culture.

And this is the second level of appreciation. The makers of the series are not poking gentle fun at these people, they are calling their game. Peggy Hill's feet are too big to wear delicate high-heeled shoes and Frank is indulgent when she 'finds a pair'. Such moments would be absolutely forbidden on Sex in the City. Those writers are getting away with murder.

There have been twelve seasons of this program and the kid is always thirteen. So there have been many opportunities to explore the frozen-in-time moment that the series represents. This is where Friends finally crashed into the ridiculous. Phoebe is pregnant, for heaven's sake: grow up people.

So last night I actually became a wiser person from watching this program. They were airing a totally inappropriate episode - a Christmas dinner - where Hank's senile father comes to visit and ends up demolishing half the place showing Frank he hadn't built or equipped his house strongly enough. "You have to tell him you love him," counselled Peggy, who reads a lot of magazines. The dénouement was outrageously implausible, with a past American President making a cameo animated appearance. But the whole mess did make me a better parent: all those caution warnings to the child who is making a social world for him or herself. Of course it is not sturdy enough, a child is a child. That's how it goes.

I will never probably see all 235 episodes (to date). I found the one which might enlighten me.