Me and Joe McCarthy

I am reading Grand Expectations by James Patterson; it is a history of the United States from 1945 to 1970.  This is the period of my childhood and youth so while there are some things that are new to me, much of it refers to things that I remember.  Oddly enough, one of the things thing I remember were the McCarthy hearings.  Reading about them brought back the memory of the only time I told my mother that I was leaving home.   We had one of those newly invented televisions--it was a large brown console with a small glass screen with speakers at the bottom behind a nubby cloth and a wooden lattice to hold it in place.  Anyway, my mother had those hearings on the television and for some reason I took an intense dislike to them. I'm sure I had no comprehension of what was actually taking place.  But I could not stand to see or hear one more minute of it.  So I told my mother that since I could stand it no longer, I was leaving home.  I packed my  little yellow case with the brown felt deer on it and said goodby. Much to her credit, she didn't laugh at me or ask me where I planned to go but asked if I would consider staying if we turned the television off and played a game instead.  Which of course, we did.