My sister Cindy once told me I quote my dad too much here. And I get that. We got weary of President Biden talking about his dad telling him, “‘Joey, a job is about more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘It’s going to be okay.'”
Partly, we didn’t like those quotes because they were a little suspect. Did “Joey’s” dad know the shaver was going to be a Democratic politician? Because otherwise, it would be a weird thing to share with your kid, who probably never thought to ask what a job was “about,” in the first place.
But sometimes, quoting your parents is more credible than quoting someone famous. You know the one that LBJ’s speechwriter Liz Carpenter used to tell, about handing him a rural Texas campaign speech that included an Aristotle quote. “Aw hell,” Johnson said, marking up the page, “nobody’ll know who the hell Aristotle is.” He delivered the quote, but he changed the attribution: “As my dear ole daddy used to say …”
My parents, both writers, were pretty quotable themselves.
They were also habitual plagiarists!
“The heart has reasons,” my dad used to say, “that reason doesn’t understand.” Never crediting Blaise Pascal, who said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
My mother used to say, “Before you’re thirty, you have the face you were born with. After thirty, you have the face you deserve.” Robbing Coco Chanel and misquoting her in the process. “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty,” Chanel said. “Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.”
Worst of all was a stunt my old man pulled: a posthumous plagiaristic prank! After he died of pancreatic cancer at age 85, my physically cautious, self-righteously moderate, routine-oriented father who would make a visit to the grocery store if he ran out of orange marmalade, we found a Post-It note under something on a plate in his foyer, held in the wooden hand of a carved butler.
In Dad’s hand was scrawled:
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”
My sisters and I scratched our heads when we saw that. But enjoying the sentiment and not wishing to speak distrustingly of the dead, we thought aloud to one another, By golly, at least Dad’s spirit was adventurous!
Only to learn a year or two later that this quote actually came from drug-frenzied, booze-chugging, motorcycle-riding, gun-wielding, explosives-enthusiastic gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who also ordered his ashes to be shot out of a cannon.
Now, why in tarnation would my dying writer dad have claimed a quote that wasn’t his, to express the sort of motto he’d never lived by? Well, the heart has reasons that reason doesn’t understand. As my dear ole daddy used to say.
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