Dec. 18: Maybe tomorrow

 Here are some of the lyrics for The Littlest Hobo, which was a Canadian TV show about a German Shepherd:

There’s a voice that keeps on calling me
Down the road is where I’ll always be

Every stop I make, I’ll make a new friend
Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down,
Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

The Littlest Hobo was unique among non-anthology television shows in that it didn't have any regular human actors. Instead, it made use of the dog, who had no owner and no home and who wandered from town to town looking for people who needed help. After the dog helped the people, he would run away. Sometimes the helped people would plead with the dog to stay. The dog never did. The dog always left. The dog is a lot like me.

But yeah, watching that show, the audience was like "Oh come on, dog. Just stay put!"

So each episode of Littlest Hobo was ultimately a downer.

-

The Littlest Hobo could almost always be found on the TV set my grandparents kept in their cottage in Cochin, Saskatchewan. There wasn't always a TV there. The cottage was so remote that you'd think that TV people didn't even want to set up their antennas there. This was in the early 80s, mind you, when people wouldn't shit a brick at the prospect of not having any wifi for a whole freaking week.

Littlest Hobo and some Canadian game show called Just Like Mom are the only two TV shows I ever remember watching in that cottage. Nowadays, all the cottages there probably have satellite and there's probably a big wifi tower on the hill where, as a kid, I would climb up every summer and watch the sun set.

Stupid progress. Maybe tomorrow I'll find a time machine to whisk me back to the 80s when I hadn't made any big mistakes yet and we could be entertained by a TV show about a dog.



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