She won’t mind if I go upstairs, take my melatonin, brush my teeth, and go to bed. But her show is on, or one of them anyway.

I will suggest we watch a sitcom DVD, maybe I Love Lucy, as a break from Seinfeld. Even I tire of them. Lucy has more physical comedy, which is hard to follow when I am not actually watching, but the music can’t be beat. Sometimes I long for the Fifties, which is to say I long for my childhood, with my brothers and my sister, my parents and the cast of grandparents, aunts and uncles, who made guest appearances in the family drama.

When I consider the post WW Two morphed into Cold War world we lived in, we knew that tension was part of things, The peripheral conflicts made themselves known, like the time Hungarian refugees moved into an apartment next to us after the Hungarian Revolt.

We were living in an apartment while Dad had a house built for us. It must have been 1959. The refugees moved into the adjacent apartment. There was a son, they called “Shiny”, his real name was Alexander. There was a mother and Shiny’s two sisters. The father had tuberculosis and was away getting treatment. He was a hairdresser.

We made friends with the kids. The mother smoked. Mother made friends with her. We liked them. Eventually we moved and they moved. They were Catholic, my first exposure to Catholics. Catholics were different.

But the Fifties, despite the refugees and the Civil Rights movement that gripped The South, was about progress and new stuff. GE’s motto was Progress is our most important Product* When I watch Lucy, it brings back the wonderful progressive world of jet aircraft, Sputnik, interstate highways, color TV, polio vaccines.

I guess I could say more. All I really want to do though is go to bed.

*{I could do a whole rant on GE, from Mr Magoo to tbeir spokesman, a former movie actor named Ronald Reagan).}