Dish

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately and I’ve noticed a lot of vehicles on the road with on-board entertainment systems of one kind of another. I drove by one car with a DVD player on the back of each front seat (both screens playing the same movie – I thought the point of having two was so that each kid could watch their own thing). This evening, I drove by a car where someone was playing a video game. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I got car sick as a kid. As much as reading can mess up your internal sense of motion, I can’t image what watching a move or playing a video game would do. And while I recognize that getting your kids to sit still for a long road trip can be difficult, but whatever happened to looking out the window?

File this under weird things your family did when you were growing up that never really occurred to you as being particularly strange: to get me to look out the window to prevent or at least reduce my car sickness, my parents created a game called “dish”. I have no idea where they got the idea for this. I don’t know if someone else came up with it or if my parents based it on an existing game. But here it is. The idea is to spot as many satellite dishes as you can. This was back when dishes were too big to really put on your roof so you could see them from a good distance. To avoid confusion over who got which dish, radio and television towers counted only once. If you spotted a cemetery, you could bury two dishes of one of your opponents. Simple. Effective. But it definitely worked better when you drove through rural areas. These days, with small dishes replacing the behemoths of old, it’s getting harder to play anywhere. Of course, now that I do most of the driving, car sickness is not an issue. But what will my kids play? “Cell tower”?