Through the tube

I am watching some of the Twilight Zone marathon and it is evoking some strange feelings.

Not just because of the subject matter, which is thought provoking enough, but because now I am looking at it from so many different places.

These black and white vignettes mostly deal with archetypal subjects, man's greed, or hate, denial, or willingness to be shallow. Those are eternal subjects, but viewing them encapsulated here they speak of the way we viewed them in 1962, or 1964, or whenever.

I remember watching these at nine o'clock at night from 1959 on. In the beginning I was allowed to stay up late just to watch them with my dad. We lived in Springfield, Illinois and I went to the only grade school I had ever known. I wore poodle skirts. Mom bobby pinned my hair every Sunday night after she washed it in the kitchen sink and I shared a bunk bed with my sister. Life was good.

By 1964 I was fourteen, we had moved three times. I had gone to four different schools, moved through saxophone, to violin, to oboe due to a variety of reasons, curled my own hair on brush rollers and become a teenager. I was growing into the studious introverted person I was going to be and struggling to fit into a world whose façade was passed off as absolute by most of the television shows of that era.

My father, who was thirty two when it began seemed so old and wise to me at the time, but looks so young in retrospect. He was thirty seven when it ended and trying desperately to take care of a family with four not so healthy children and an unhappy wife who had expected a grander life style than they were living.

He and I always shared an affinity for these shows. We were dreamers and thinkers and I think both of us found more truth in these stories than Donna Reed, Gomer Pyle, or Andy Griffith. Later on we would watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek, but Twilight Zone was the beginning.