Soap's A Wash

It's an odd thing. I'm watching TV this week. That in itself is odd, but to make it more strange, I'm watching a soap.

Just a quirk I guess. I haven't watched it in probably 15 years except for the occasional eppisode on a day home from work or something like that.

Almost as far back as I can remember I've seen episodes of different soaps with my mom and grandma, way back when. I somehow even feel like I had seen these at lunch maybe, on school days, back when a kid could go home for lunch during the school day. Remember those days?

Anyway.

I read it in the paper recently that Guiding Light was going to go off the air and it struck me so weird. I just had to tune in to see how it all ended after all these years.

Thanks to internet, it takes about half the time to watch an episode and I can choose the time to watch too. Even though I saw it often as a young child, it's different now, and not for little eyes or ears.

It's been very strange and yet comfortable to see so many of the same characters after all these years still being played by all the same actors and actresses. It's wild to see the people who were babies when I last watched the show, grown and now with kids of their own. It's how our own lives move on too, isn't it?

It's sort of like reading a favorite book series and learning that the last novel has been to print and the author will write no more. The character's lives end with the last lines on the last page or in this case with the closing credits.

In my mind I think it will just be a sort of frozen time moment. These characters and their lives were oddly real to me, perhaps because of the familiarity of having them present, even if just in the background, for my entire life. How strange to my mind that this whole city and all it's people will just suddenly stop existing.

I know, not clear at all, or perhaps just sounding like I'm really going around the bend here. It's not like that, but I can't make it clear.

We've all gotten attached to certain TV series over the years and been dissapointed when they ended, but we were alive when they began and so just expected that they would end like a TV series always does, but a soap is an anomaly to that. Soaps are always there, always running and in this case Guiding Light was there way before I was born and I guess in a way, I sort of expected that it would just keep on going.

I wonder how many of us across TV land have grown up with these families, lived our lives running parallel to them and now are standing in an embarassed sort of wonder that it should actually stop.

Ah, well. I'm going to indulge in the last few episodes. Just cause I can.