Eating Words: Mothers-In-Law, The Twilight Zone, And Memory...In Living Color

I arrived on November 1st, 1964. It was a Sunday...9:32 AM. The high temperature on that crisp autumn day was 65 degrees. It was partly cloudy. I don't remember any of that, of course. It's true for most people--I guess--that we don't remember many things from the first few years of our lives. I'm fortunate that I can remember short snippets of time from my 2nd, and even more from my 3rd years on this planet. It's weird what our minds choose to remember, though. I can recall being in a crib. This is my earliest memory. It's really just a flash in time. What I remember is crying and standing in a wooden crib. I was uncomfortable and was crying because I was hot.

It's interesting that so many of my earliest memories revolve around television programs. As a bookend to the Baby Boomer generation, children of my era became perhaps the first generation in which the television served not only as entertainment but also as babysitter.

With the recent advent of NETFLIX and HULU into my life, I've discovered a truly interesting phenomenon. I've been able to revisit and review both popular programs and obscure shows that never really made it into heavy circulation or even syndication for that matter. One of these shows was called "The Mothers-In-Law", which aired on the NBC television network from September, 1967 to April of 1969. I don't think that this program was a favorite of my parents because I can only remember watching one episode. I don't recall the details of the episode. What I clearly recall is the title, the performers and the graphic colors. I think we had only recently acquired a color television set and NBC was really exploiting this feature as more and more families obtained these color sets. I distinctly remember the ads that were played before many of the programs. It was just a seventeen second spot that showed a peacock logo erupting with all the colors of the rainbow while the announcer said, "The following is brought to you in living color on NBC." What I remember distinctly are the exaggerated facial features of one of the key characters, played by Kaye Ballard, who portrayed one of the meddling mothers-in-law. As an adult, my mind tries to connect to the memories surrounding this program as it aired in primetime.

It's happened with other programs and episodes as well. I can recall watching syndicated "Twilight Zone" re-runs, black and white--on that color set. One particular episode that I recently re-watched on NETFLIX originally aired in April of 1964. Since this was approximately seven months before I was born, and since that was in fact the last season that the series aired in primetime, I can guess that I was watching this episode in syndication sometime in the late 1960s. The title of the episode was "Stopover in a Quiet Town" and it was about a married couple who wake in a strange town after a night of drinking only to find out that they are now the "pets" of a giant little girl from another planet. As a small child I was wide-eyed and fascinated by this--so it stuck with me. Seeing it on NETFLIX so many years later, I can see how time distorts memory, as many of the details my child mind remembered didn't correspond. But surprisingly, many of the details were intact.

These "television moments" of my youth, of which there are many, serve me as I try to put the childhood memories to paper. I am sure that, just as memories of the television shows I watched are slightly distorted, my memories of actual life events may be slightly distorted as well. I think it's important to acknowledge that. It's not going to stop me, however, from writing about my pre-journal keeping life. Fact checking and photographs will help, and so will mom's recollections. Everything will be true as I remember it.