A Love Letter to TCM

Happy Birthday TCM. You are 15 years old and I feel as though I cannot remember life before you arrived. That's probably becuase I was only eight, but still, you seem to have always been there with your classic movies, your upstanding hosts in suits leaning casually on an armchiar before the fire, your love of all things draped in old Hollywood glamour. You really are the most chraming channel and the one I am most grateful for and dare I say it, but you are the reason I have cable. Last night you played Gone With the Wind followed by Singin' in the Rain and I wonder if we are best friends you and I. And today you are all about Charlie Chaplin and a little Double Indemnity thrown in there. I admire the way you have stuck to your guns over the years and continued to broadcast and protect the classics as well as the forgotten would be classics. You remind us of what a move can do, of what a really good movie can do, of what a certain camera angle, a certain line, a certain scene of a sunset or a desert, or a certain note on the piano at just the right moment can do. I could not devote my whole evening to the saga of Scarlet O'Hara, but I did catch the last bit before the intermission, the great scene where she vows to never be hungry again and I cannot imagine my life without those words and that scene. It is a thing that always must have been and always must be. And it reminded me that when I got my wisdom teeth pulled it was Gone With the Wind that I chose to watch as my mouth was packed with gauze. It was the sounds of Tara that put me to sleep and the sounds of Tara that woke me up. It is a movie that is a close friend of mine. And TCM, you bring those close friends to me when I least expect, which is the most wonderful of all your attributes. You see, I love the ability to own movies on DVD and watch them whenever I want, but they always lose a little luster that way, they lose the luster of serendipity, of turning on the TV just in time to see exactly what I would watch if I could choose.