If there is bread on the side, chances are I’m going to take something from the main meal to turn it into a sandwich. My favorites include cheese ravioli on garlic bread with strategically drizzled marinara or making a bagel sandwich from items on a breakfast plate. I make no apologies to those who may witness my actions, though I wouldn’t do it at a formal meal (unless it’s such an ingrained behavior that I’ve never caught myself).

When I’m making a legit sandwich for sandwich’s sake, I never fail to hear my Dad’s voice telling me I’ve made a “Dagwood”. From the time I was a child he would say that. And even as a child I knew exactly what he meant. That’s because one of my personal childhood rituals was watching the Sunday morning classic movies on TV, which in my recollection alternated between Blondie (1938-1950) and Abbott and Costello (1941-1956) series. Blondie’s husband Dagwood was famous for his high-stacked sandwiches that he could hardly open his mouth wide enough to eat. Now, the sandwiches I’ve made over the course of my lifetime rarely emulate Dagwood’s skyscrapers, but the reference is one of those multi-generational “good old-fashioned fun” things that Dad and I could equally understand and chuckle at. I’ve no doubt that if Dad knew I’d made a sandwich for lunch today, he’d immediately call it a Dagwood. What’s fun is that Dad was born in 1940, so the Blondie movies would have been part of his own childhood. I’ve never asked him whether he was surprised that his young daughter had found and enjoyed the same movies, at roughly the same age as he would have. I’m not sure it matters. It’s just the thing to do when there’s a sandwich in the making.

Are there cross-generational understandings like this in your family? Or are we losing these overlaps because of hyper-myriad entertainment and social media options? Must the older set necessarily become more intentional with young people in order to keep such references alive in the culture? It’s not a matter of “Well, people don’t care about old movies”. In this case, Dad and I have had a lifetime of shared awareness relating to a cultural phenomenon that predated my birth by more than a quarter century, and which I had discovered on my own without his guidance, but understood the first time he made the remark. In other words, if I was a child today, would I still discover a Dagwood the way it entered the culture, or simply by seeing it referenced on a diner’s cleverly named sandwiches menu?

These are the thoughts, folks.