“I’m glad it was a good period of your life…”

I am familiar with “Leave it to Beaver.” I remember how boring it was. June Cleaver was pretty stereotypical of the moms in our suburban neighborhood. I always saw “The Beaver” as a “goody-two-shoes.” And Beaver Cleaver? Was that name intended to imply what it seems to? Was it really a show for young children?

We have a TV channel that is dedicated to classic shows. “Leave it to Beaver” is on five mornings a week. It is still boring.

I preferred the westerns. Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” was another favorite. That one is also on the rerun channel.

The classic comedy from that time was “I Love Lucy.” That was funny. “The Burns and Allen Show” was hilarious. I have a DVD with the first few episodes. In the early episodes, there was a 15-second commercial at the beginning and another one at the end, but no commercials during the show.

I was fortunate to have been born into a 1950s middle-class family. Dad was a lawyer, and mom was a teacher. Like most moms of that time, she was home with us kids.

We lived in a typical suburban subdivision. Our street was unique in that it did not intersect with the other residential streets. There were 10 of us boys who hung out together when we were not in school. Since all the moms were home, we had the run of the neighborhood. There was a general comradery among the families.

I experienced the 1950s from a child’s perspective. Mom seemed content. There was no indication that she was taking tranquilizers. Mom and dad were affectionate and respectful of each other.

One dark spot in my bright experience was dad being away at work rather than enjoying the idyllic life that the rest of us were leading. He was home evenings and weekends and we kids enjoyed having him around. I wished he could have spent more time at home.

The idyllic life was on its way out when dad got a new job in a city hundreds of miles away. The new neighborhood was another comfortable middle-class subdivision, but it lacked the comradery of the old one. I missed my friends.

Nothing I remember would indicate that mom and dad might have divorced. They seemed quite content and harmonious together. But we’ll never know for sure. Less than a year after we moved, mom was killed in a traffic accident. The idyllic 1950s had come to an end.

Thankfully, the life I am living now is satisfying. It, too, could be described as idyllic.

I realize that not everyone had the comfortable life that I had. Our neighborhood was one hundred percent white (although a Chinese family moved in down the street the last year we lived there). I only saw black people when mom took us downtown. I wondered why.