Watching Reba reruns.

Reruns are wonderful because it usually indicates that they had something going for them to begin with and that’s why you’re still looking at them.      ~ Mary Tyler Moore

My ex and I used to watch Reba reruns together.  The show is set in Houston, Texas, and stars Reba McEntire as a wisecracking single mother whose dentist ex-husband Brock has left her to marry young, ditzy Barbra Jean after an affair with her.  (Source: Wikipedia)  In the early shows, Brock’s pet name for Barbra Jean is BJ.  Now isn’t that subtle and original?

I’m not a big fan of country music but I do think that Reba’s better than most.  I never watched her show when it originally aired.  I had heard it was funny but I didn’t know which channel it was on and never bothered to find out.  Later, when I started watching the reruns I was blown away by her sense of humor.  Well, that could have been her writers, but her comedic timing wasn’t.  When I started watching I remember thinking that maybe she had missed her calling and should have been doing comedy all along.  She’s that good.  She delivers her one-line zingers like a pro and to this day I laugh gleefully and unreservedly even though I already know what she’s going to say.  In fact, I probably find them even funnier today than I did back when I first heard them because they are usually directed at Barbra Jean–or should I say BJ?  She also aims a fair share of her clever insults at the narcissistic Brock who sometimes “gets it” and sometimes doesn’t.  He may be a blade, but he’s not the sharpest one in the drawer.

Okay, back to my original statement:  D and I used to watch Reba reruns together.  I looked for the show, found the channel, started laughing, and you know what they say about laughter.  It’s contagious.  And so D joined my “Reba fests.”  I think I speak for him when I say that he, too, found the show entertaining and funny.  Sometimes I wonder if it was this show that gave him the idea that divorce would be fun.  Reba and her cast made it look like fun.

After our separation and divorce I continued to watch Reba and still do to this day but I acknowledge that I see it from a slightly different perspective now than when I watched with D.  Sometimes I tear up for Reba, the character, because I know how she feels despite the fact that she makes jokes.  So often humor is born of hardship and sadness.  Right or wrong, that’s how I see her character now.

At the beginning of the end, when D was leaving, he told me he would like to remain friends.  I think that would be nice, too, but it would take a great deal of kindness and forgiveness and love and desire on the part of all parties.  Maybe one day.  Right now I don’t see D having the freedom he thought he would have, and he has to feel free to be my friend.  It seems a shame to allow thirty plus years of friendship to be flushed down the toilet.  Maybe.  One day.  We’ll talk again.