TV Hall of Fame--I Forgot the Cleavers!

I'm not sure what June is holding onto in this photo, but
I like what looks like my mother's old Mixmaster behind her.

How wrong is it that I didn't list Leave It to Beaver on my post last night? I loved that show. What I really took in: June's dresses, aprons and pearls, the fact that she made cookies, and, especially, the way Wally would open the fridge after school and casually pour a glass of milk--from a glass bottle that the milkman delivered--into a stemmed goblet.

Milking It
I wanted rich, creamy milk like that in a glass like that, not the powdered stuff my parents made in the gray-blue melamine pitcher, mixing it with a long, slim spatula. If we didn't have company, we often used boring old gray-tinted glasses or yellow and white plates gotten at the supermarket, even steak knives from the gas station. Sometimes the milk had green lumps in it.

Later on, they started mixing nice store-bought milk into the powdered stuff, but by then, my memory was soured.

After H. and I bought our house in Montclair in 1994, we signed on for milk delivery, I think from Welsh Farms. It was great....the milk came in glass bottles.......my perfect American family fantasy.

But after a while I stopped getting it, because I'd forget to cancel delivery sometimes if we were going away, and bottles of milk would freeze in the silver box. Also, sometimes the milk delivery would wake me up--at the break of dawn, I'd hear the lurching brakes on the truck [we live at the top of a hill], and the milkman taking the old bottles and depositing the new ones, glass clinking against glass on the stoop, right under our bedroom.

I'd get delivery again if I could...in glass bottles. Whenever I see milk for sale in glass quarts, like when we visit H.'s brother John in pretty Belfast, Maine, and shop at the Belfast Co-op [http://belfast.coop/], I love to buy it. If the bottles have pictures of cows or barns on them, all the better.

Raising My Mug to Mrs. Cleaver
I was saddened to read today that Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, died in California Saturday at age 94. Here's the link to the very good New York Times story, which even explains why she wore the pearls: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/arts/television/17billingsley.html.

On that nostaglic note, and a cup of warm milk [which my mother liked having at bedtime], sweet dreams.