You're no good, you're no good, you're no good, baby, you're no good

"Linda Ronstadt performing at a WPLR Show
in New Haven, Connecticut in the New Haven
Veterans Memorial Coliseum" (1978) by Carl Lender.
Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

My brother telephoned me on New Year's night. I was glad to hear from him, but I was surprised he called me 10 minutes into the airing of the Linda Ronstadt documentary on CNN. He was always a HUGE Ronstadt fan back in the day.

I didn't think he'd miss that show for anything, and I can only assume he forgot that it was on. And I admit I didn't mention it to him for a couple of reasons--I didn't want to interrupt the conversation, and I didn't want to upset him that he'd already missed part of the program.

This takes me back to a minor, yet still significant (at least for me), event during our shared childhood.

One early evening I came home from playing outside and sat down to watch TV. This was around 1971 or so. I was probably no more than 10 at the time; my brother, 15.) My brother quickly engaged me in conversation and kept talking to me, asking me questions about my day and my interests while we watched a show he liked. I don't remember which show it was, other than to note it probably wasn't one that I enjoyed. I have the vague sense it was Gunsmoke, a show with an appeal I never fathomed, but if I did the math and went back to TV schedules in 1971, that might just not work out.

I didn't think much of this until after a half hour or so, and the next TV program began. All of a sudden, my brother stopped talking, smiled coyly and said, "Well, I guess you missed your show."

I don't remember which show it was, The Brady Bunch, UFO, The Partridge Family (yes, I've consistently had questionable taste in entertainment), but at that moment, I realized my brother had purposefully kept me talking, knowing that I'd forgotten about my show--a show he disliked immensely, as I recall--distracting me so that I wouldn't remember it was on.

Keep in mind, this occurred in the early 1970s: We had one large console TV and no VCR because, well, they likely hadn't been invented yet. There weren't regularly scheduled repeats of shows. You couldn't watch it on demand or stream it online because those things didn't exist either.

Which brings me back to my conversation with my brother and these burning questions:

How long do I wait before I call him up and say, "Well, I guess you missed your show"?

And should I FaceTime him so he can see me smile when I say it?

Online streaming notwithstanding, revenge nearly 50 years in the making is still sweet.