My grandparents got a new TV.

For watching our music, they said. I suspect my grandpa was in the market for a new gadget anyway. 

Where the TV is now used to be a framed poster from a Jackson Pollock exhibit. There’s a waist-height wooden table below it, holding cut-glass containers of wrapped ginger candies, photos of me at ballet recitals, my brother’s soccer league portraits. Every surface in my grandparents’ apartment is laden with tchotchkes, like they’ve Pollocked the place with material nostalgia. 

Across from where the TV hangs sits a deep gray armchair. Woven throws and pillows nuzzle into its corners and phones find their way into the cushion cracks like clockwork. A purse sits on the floor to the right of the chair, stuffed with decades of Playbills and concert programs. Clockwise around the room from the gray armchair is the yellow and green-striped couch with the dog print pillow and the beautiful red blanket. Counterclockwise, there are two spinning felt chairs, one hot pink and one magenta, reliable sources of entertainment in childhood when the adult conversation got too boring. And at shin level, perfect for bruising your legs, is the glossy, dark-wood coffee table holding newspapers, big books of art, dishes of Costco mixed nuts, and most recently, the new remote.

My grandpa tells me proudly about all of the platforms he can access through this smart TV, a very intelligent object, as he calls it. The usual suspects —Netflix, Hulu, Showtime— are not of particular interest to him. He likes the Carnegie Hall livestream instead. Squinting, he pulls up the list of upcoming programs, a virtual cornucopia of auditory offerings. But even when the curtains drop on the concerts, the TV stays awake. It displays the weather in a harsh white font, or news headlines, or it scrolls randomly through a library of old family photos. The TV expands the room of reflections into something more like an ice cube, the phase-shifting fluid of ritual turned cold and shatterable. 

Sometimes, when powered down, the TV sits idle and mirrors the view of the East River coming in from the window behind the gray armchair, but my grandparents rarely turn the TV off all the way. They miss their live music so they keep the real-time updates from Carnegie blaring from their living room. When those are on hiatus, the reliable understudies are CDs from concerts in countries my grandparents are aching to visit, or WQXR, or records selected carefully from the huge rows of yellowing sleeves. These don’t fill the room the same way, and my grandparents prefer their positions in the first row of the concert hall, my grandpa in the hot pink chair and my grandma on the couch. I miss the Pollock poster but I’m glad they’re finding comfort, even if it’s in a huge new TV.