Sitcom Families

Once in a while when channel surfing, I'll flip past Home Improvement, the delightful 90's sitcom staple starring Tim Allen. I always feel the need to back up and watch for a bit. In fact, just this week I fell asleep watching the show late at night. I can't make much sense of this guilty pleasure. It's a horribly written show, the characters and situations are stereotypical, it has a laugh track, etc. I don't even like sitcoms much anymore, and haven't since the heyday of the Huxtables and the Keatons when I looked forward to these shows every Thursday night.

But there's something about that Home Improvement, so obviously pleasant by design. It makes the 90's seem so much more gratifying in retrospect. Most families I know aren't like the sitcom families. But there is one household that always felt like a sitcom to me: the Schaeffer* household. Not because everything they said was funny and followed by laughter from a studio audience. It's more because their house has always been so welcoming and friendly. The Schaeffers are the family of my good friend Aaron, who has been cheerful and Christ-like since I first met him in Junior High. I heard Aaron use the f-word only once. I was shocked. I knew he meant business.

Call the Schaeffer household and you'd get an answering machine message saying "thank you for calling the Schaeffer's, the happiest place on earth". Something like that. But it was sorta true. Aaron's family was always smiling and hanging out, making cookies or whatever. They were the closest thing to a family outside of my own, but even more dreamlike. Their house had a celestial glow about it at all times, and was always immaculate.

But, as Bryan Ferry once said, with every dream home a heartache. Not really heartache so much as the devil incarnate. Beneath the roof of the Schaeffer home also lived a Siamese cat so evil, it would attack you from across the room for merely staring straight into its eyes. Aaron's sister always had cat scratches up and down her arms, so that cat didn't care much for humans in general. But you need the good with the bad, right? Kinda like in the sitcoms. You need the "very special - to be continued episode" every once in a while to balance things out and bring you back down to reality. Wasn't there an episode where one of Tim "The Toolman" Taylor's kids cheated on his homework?

I'm convinced that there's a link in my brain between the Taylors and the Schaeffers. Maybe since they occupied the same era in my life, because the archetypes of those families don't necessary match up. And the Schaeffers don't have a Wilson, that neighbor who always spoke words of wisdom to Tim from beyond the privacy fence. But they have Jesus, and Wilson's a bit like Jesus. He could easily be Jesus, or the voice of God for that matter, just heavily disguised in a funny fisherman hat.

*name changed slightly to protect the innocent.

Note: Since writing this post, I have learned that the Schaeffers have moved into a new home and the evil cat has had health problems and has been put to rest. Rest in Peace Nala. Be nice in the afterlife.