This week’s New Yorker has a new David Sedaris story, in which he waxes rhapsodic about his mother’s dining room set — until:
This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood, it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What happened was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. The family didn’t have a blender or a country-club membership, but they did have one another—that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.
Ah, yes, I remember that close-knit family well. I also remember the day in fifth grade when the subject of The Waltons and the Great Depression came up in a classroom discussion, and one of my classmates said, “I don’t see why everybody thinks the Waltons have it so tough. They live in a nicer house than I do.”
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