Blue Bloods

In 1948 my dad retired from the Navy but instead of taking his family home to New Jersey, he bought a house in Pasadena. Over the next few years he talked up Southern California so much that all his siblings and their families moved to Pasadena. For the next year, there was a big Deemer family in town, and we often gathered for Sunday dinners and other celebrations of family. This became my most intense experience of living in a large family, which didn't last long. As soon as So Cal experienced its first earthquake, in this case a large one in the desert that actually knocked me off the top of my bunk bed, all the relatives beelined it back to New Jersey. So much for big family Sunday dinners.

Sunday dinner in Blue Bloods

My favorite escapist TV these days is the cop drama Blue Bloods, and a major attraction is the large Sunday family dinner in the show with four generations of cops and their families. You see so little of that in so many places today that I feel lucky to have experienced it at all. Watching the show brings back all these memories.