Dallas

Ah, what a theme that show had! I am hum­ming it dra­mat­i­cal­ly (there is no oth­er way to hum it, real­ly) as I show­er this morning.

For some rea­son Dal­las was one of the few prime time shows our fam­i­ly watched reg­u­lar­ly — until, of course, we stopped watch­ing tele­vi­sion alto­geth­er when I was about eight. Some­times, dur­ing a lull in the con­ver­sa­tion, I will ran­dom­ly ask: “Who shot J.R.?” This is usu­al­ly suf­fi­cient to start the crowd edg­ing away from me. But I am gen­uine­ly curi­ous regard­ing this point. I don’t know the answer and have always won­dered about it, though not to an extent that has ever cost me any sleep. (We stopped watch­ing at the end of the sea­son before this would have been revealed.) Of course, now so much time has passed that I would be none the wis­er even if some­one told me an answer: I don’t remem­ber any of the char­ac­ters any­more, aside from the Ewing brothers.

What a strange thing to allow to occu­py space in one’s memory!