Family Matters

y mom loved She didn’t otherwise care much for television—except for the news—but she rarely missed an episode of her favorite show, about a tight-knit family living through the Depression and exemplified homespun, traditional American values. Mom wasn’t a crier. She came from a strong-willed Irish-Catholic clan in Philadelphia, but something about the Walton family and their bygone world brought out her latent sentimentality…and an occasional tear. I never quite understood it. It was a generational thing, I concluded. Mom and her family had lived through those twin cataclysms. The world of the Waltons was long gone, if it had ever existed at all—except in the idealized portrayal of that weekly TV drama.