ALAN writes:

It is a curse of life that as we age, we remember certain people who were acquaintances of our parents, people who were grown-ups when we were children, and we would like so much to talk with those people now—to ask them about their lives and their memories, to talk with them grown-up to grown-up instead of child to grown-up.  But of course it is too late.  They lived and died during the years when we were busily engaged in other things that seemed important at the time.  I made that terrible mistake.

These thoughts occurred to me recently when I watched a few 1963 episodes of the television comedy series “Petticoat Junction.” They were new to me because I never watched that series in the 1960s.  But my mother enjoyed watching it, I know, because I remember overhearing the show’s familiar opening theme music.

The stories involve a widow and her three high school age daughters at the hotel they run in a small town in the country.  A train brings guests to and from the hotel.  Those episodes present exactly the kind of gentle, old-fashioned, self-effacing, heartwarming and uplifting comedy writing that my mother enjoyed.  Viewers laughed with the characters, not at them.    (more…)