Room to Improve (Ewing)

Let’s assume we spend our days doing what we should. We grocery shop for our shut-in neighbors. We call friends stuck in nursing homes. We write checks for food banks. Some of us produce face masks on our sewing machines or 3D printers. Others march in Black Lives Matter protests, and still others make daily calls to their senators’ offices. Essential workers minister to dying people in ICUs and perform vital research on deadly viruses. 

But what about the evenings? What do we do at night, when social distancing and hand washing have been too much with us, all day long? Maybe you’re like my sister, who’s taken to watching Met Opera on Demand on her TV every evening. Not so much into opera before, she now spends her evenings curled up with Donizetti, Wagner, and Puccini, watching operas I’ve never heard of. She feels transported and comforted, though she admits she sometimes falls asleep.

Maybe instead of opera you catch up on classic films or novels, like my lucky husband, who’s reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time. Maybe you work on your Spanish. Maybe you fuss with your sourdough, because sourdough, as we all now know, demands constant vigilance.

My feeling is that we shouldn’t judge others for how they spend their escape time. If they want to watch reruns of Law and Order SVU or Cheers or The Office, so what? Let them watch The Bachelor, I say! I feel strongly about this because my own escape is an Irish reality show (over there they say “factual programme”), called Room to Improve¸ in which an architect named Dermot Bannon provides ordinary Irish citizens with their dream home. They all have charming accents. I frequently have to turn on the subtitles. 

I have one big question about the show. How do ordinary Irish citizens, often teachers and construction workers, come up with the hundreds of thousands of euros it takes to pay for these projects? “Our budget is 150,000,” they tell Dermot when they first meet. Dermot is required to work within their budget, but he almost never does, and they end up spending 250, 000 euros instead. Dermot provides them with huge glass walls and en suite bathrooms, and he makes sure their new homes are flooded with light.

This show has virtually no redeeming social value. I could say I’m learning about architecture and home construction, but honestly I’m not. The most education I’m getting is picking up some Irish slang. Clients argue with Dermot over garden design, and I realize they call their yards “gardens.” Should they include a water feature, or not? It’s all blessedly superficial and materialistic. They fret tearfully over delays in the shipments of their new kitchen cabinets.

I spend an hour on Amazon Prime almost every evening with the charismatic Dermot and his sometimes temperamental clients. That is an hour clear of ventilators and masks, blank-faced white policemen, bounties on American soldiers, racist tweets, Karens with guns, abused children at our southern border, and Covid-infested refugee camps. When the hour ends, I feel my brain has had a little rest. I feel like I’ve been away. 

Kathy Ewing's work has been published in The Bark, America, The Millions, Brevity, and other publications. Her memoir, Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother, appeared in 2016, and her second book, Lead Me, Guide Me: The Life and Example of Father Dan Begin is now available. She teaches Latin at Cleveland State University and blogs at http://www.kathyewing.com.