The television takes the throne; the suburb takes the family.
The TV aerial goes up like a flag. Dinner moves to a folding tray in front of the set; the car gets fins; the kitchen gets a dishwasher the neighbors come to see. The teenager is invented, and given a transistor radio.
The television set - the appliance that rearranged the furniture, the dinner hour, the election, and the child.
Beneath the lawn: the bomb drill, the blacklist, and a segregated lunch counter. The decade smiles in its photographs and holds its breath.
The fifties of a Levittown housewife, a Montgomery seamstress named Rosa, and a Bronx kid with a stickball bat are three different decades wearing the same haircut.