Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Fathers & Fatherhood")
June 16—22, 2024 | THIS WEEK: “Fathers & Fatherhood"
On this one special day in which we honor the role of fathers in human life, take a moment to reflect on the fathers you’ve known and, for many of you men out there, the father you’ve been.
When we see adult children honoring their fathers in meaningful ways, our hearts are warmed—and our eyes often moistened. There is no better tribute than “Leader of the Band,” Dan Fogelberg’s 1981 song about his father, Lawrence Fogelberg, a musician and leader of a number of high school and college marching bands. It’s an amazing song, and it begins beautifully:
Mr. Fogelberg died a year after the song was released, and I’ve often thought about what it must have been like when his son said, “Dad, I’ve written this song for you, and I hope you’ll like it.” Fogelberg believed it was the best song he ever wrote. To hear him express that thought and see him perform the song, double-click the link below—and don’t forget to have a tissue handy:
Opening Line of the Week
This is the delightful opening line of one of the best father-daughter memoirs ever written. About the book, fellow wine lover Christopher Buckley wrote:
“If Anne Fadiman’s book about her father were a wine, it would merit a ‘100’ rating, along with all the oeno-superlatives: ‘smooth,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘rounded,’ ‘with a dazzling, heart-warming finish.’ But as it is a book and not a wine, let’s call it what it is: a stunning, original, beautifully written, clear-eyed yet tear-inducing account of a daughter’s love for her famous father; and into the bargain, the best family memoir yet to come out of the Baby Boom generation.”
For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.
This Week’s Puzzler
On June 21, 1912, this woman was born in Seattle, Washington. After losing both parents in the great flu epidemic of 1918, she and her three brothers were sent to live with a paternal great-aunt and uncle in Minneapolis. For the next five years, the four siblings lived in what she described as “circumstances of almost Dickensian cruelty and squalor,” with regular razor strop whippings and other forms of physical and emotional abuse. At age eleven, she and her brothers were rescued by a maternal grandfather, who returned them to a sane living environment back in their hometown of Seattle.
After graduating from Vassar College in 1933, she began an association with The Partisan Review that continued until 1948. Early in her employment, she began a torrid and volatile affair with Philip Rahv, her editor at the magazine. When she wrote about their relationship fifty years later, she described it memorably: “On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.”
Urged by her husband, critic Edmund Wilson, to become a full-time writer, she went on to write essays, non-fiction books, and a number of popular novels, including The Groves of Academe (1953), a satiric look at intellectuals during the McCarthy era, and The Group (1962), a semi-autobiographical novel about eight Vassar grads making their way in the world in the 1930s and 40s.
When she died at age 77 in 1989, The New York Times described her as “one of America’s pre-eminent women of letters.” In a memoir titled Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), she wrote:
Who is this person? (Answer below)
How Would You Describe Your Father?
I love quotes on any subject, and quotations about fathers are no exception. Here are three personal favorites:
These quotations are—as the old saying goes—pregnant with meaning, and each one could serve as a stimulus for a fruitful discussion about the role of fathers in human life. You will also notice that they are about fathers in general, and not actual fathers, as we saw with the three earlier observations by Dan Fogelberg, Anne Fadiman, and this week’s Mystery Woman.
For the most part, quotations about fathers as a class attempt to encapsulate broad, universal truths about the essence of fatherhood. For example, the English proverb “A father is a banker provided by nature” draws on a shared human reality that goes back to ancient times—fathers tend to toss their children a financial lifeline when they hit desperate financial straits.
By contrast, quotations about actual fathers provide a more personal, or even intimate, perspective. Many attempt to capture the unique or special characteristics of fathers, and they often include highly specific memories, as when Marlene Cox wrote in a 1954 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal:
“Whenever I try to recall that long-ago first day at school only one memory shines through: my father held my hand.”
We also saw deeply personal depictions of fathers in the three quotations at the beginning of this week’s newsletter. In Dan Fogelberg’s song, for example, the lyrics about “an only child alone and wild” and “his heart was known to none” spoke to his father’s difficult early life and the emotional isolation that left a lifelong scar.
Anne Fadiman’s quotation about her father was also highly personalized, focusing on how her physically maladroit father almost magically transformed into a suave and graceful man-about-town whenever he opened a wine bottle.
And finally, the quotation from this week’s Mystery Woman perfectly described how a father’s deeply ingrained romantic streak could not only play games with his sense of reality, it could be passed along to his descendants as well.
While quotations about fathers in general are generally best at expressing great truths about fatherhood, it is also true that a daughter’s loving description of her father could resonate with so many that it achieved the same result.
The poet Anne Sexton once wrote, “It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.” And while we may quibble with the first part of her words, there’s no question that how children remember their fathers is as interesting as it is important. Indeed, when I meet people for the first time, I’ve discovered that one of the most revealing things I can ask a new acquaintance is, “If you were to capture your father’s essence in a sentence or two, how would you describe him?”
To say that the descriptions I’ve heard in response to this question are “all over the place” would be a vast understatement. Some fathers are revered, often in wildly different ways, while others—in less varied ways—have been loathed. Some fathers have been missing in action, both literally and metaphorically, while others have been so omnipresent they’re like a second skin. Many fathers are admired for being strong, principled, compassionate, and reliable; others are resented—or worse—for being overly critical and controlling, verbally or physically abusive, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or unable to conquer the demons dwelling deep inside them.
Let me bring my remarks to a close by suggesting that you do what I’ve asked so many others to do over the years: try to capture the essence of your father in a sentence or two. And when you do, please share your efforts with me. Who knows, your creation might even find a home in Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations. Before doing anything, though, let your thinking be stimulated by an assortment of memorable ways in which other adult children have described their fathers:
My father, dead so long now, looms up as unexplored landscape, the mountains of the moon, a text that has lain in a drawer, undeciphered, for which I have had no Rosetta Stone. — Shirley Abbott
There’s some screw loose in the whole marvelous machine. — Hartley Coleridge, on his father Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He was generous with his affection, given to great, awkward, engulfing hugs, and I can remember so clearly the smell of his hugs, all starched shirt, tobacco, Old Spice and Cutty Sark. Sometimes I think I’ve never been properly hugged since. — Linda Ellerbee, on her father
My father was often angry when I was most like him. — Lillian Hellman
My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. — Clarence Budington Kelland
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply. “We’re raising boys.” — Harmon Killebrew
When my father would come home from the track after a good day, the whole room would light up; it was fairyland. But when he lost, it was black. In our house, it was always either a wake…or a wedding. — Peter O’Toole
I have spent hours kicking myself for not fighting past Dad’s reserve, for not going into that cave where he lived and rooting him out. — William Plummer
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain, attributed in Reader’s Digest (Sep., 1937)
ERROR ALERT: This represents the first appearance of a hugely popular quotation that we now know to be completely erroneous (nothing even remotely similar to it has ever been found in Twain’s works). It’s a wonderful observation, though, and almost cries out to be used on the appropriate occasion. When you do, though, make sure to mention its apocryphal nature.
My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me. — Jim Valvano
I took what you didn’t give to me and gave it to my sons. Thank you. — Chip Webster
For more quotations on the theme of FATHERS—DESCRIBED BY THEIR CHILDREN, go here. And for quotations on FATHERS & FATHERHOOD, go here.
Cartoon of the Week:
Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:
Mary McCarthy (1912-89)
Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:
Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Attitude.”
Mardy Grothe
Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com
Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note
Made me think of how I would describe my father:
My father was a sleepy working-man who supported a family of seven working rotating shifts in a chemical plant. But he was not unconscious. He was a very effective one man nuclear activist who managed to defeat the building of a nuclear power plant on the Delaware River in the metropolitan Philadelphia area (operating as the Delaware Valley Committee for the protection of the Environment). He was not popular for his constant editorial letters to the Philadelphia newspapers. But when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened a few years later he was finally acknowledged in print for the work he had done to protect the community. From him I learned that one person working quietly can make a considerable difference. —Meredith Mustard
My Dad was a busy fellow . . . a reader, a listener of opera broadcasts… and he’d been brought up by his parents as a European gentleman. That’s hard to shed, folks. When he was introduced to a woman, Dad stood, bowed from the waist, and clicked his heels together. He wore a suit and tie and sometimes a vest to school every day, always with a starched, white shirt. For the trip to school or anywhere, for that matter, he wore a grey felt fedora. Men who wore suits didn’t wear colored shirts, or plaid, or checkered or striped. Suit colors ran the gamut all the way from dark grey to dark brown to dark blue. I can remember the smell of his eight or nine suits as I opened and stood in front of his closet. There was an odor of cigarette smoke and I think, a bit of sweat. It was Dad’s smell. To this day, when I think back on it, it comforts me. Dad wasn’t authoritarian; he was, well . . . Dad. He was a close approximation of what I think he wanted his father to be. To others, it might have looked funny when Dad played catch with nerdy little me. He’d still be in his suit. He never rolled his white shirt sleeves up, and he'd loosen his tie only sometimes. Dad even wore a suit to the grocery store, and would not ever be caught “out” without his suit jacket on, and buttoned. I loved Dad, and it was certain that he loved me, but it was a bit less than physical. I could instigate a hug, but I don’t recall him ever initiating one of those. Also, if it were a serious enough offense as judged by my Mom, he’d be the dispenser of a good whack, or a loud (and I mean LOUD) admonition when he got home from work. Dad had what could be called a "teacher voice." He also gave pronouncements as advice when I was young. “Work hard at school today.” And “Don’t tell lies.” These were meant to stick in my mind and to ultimately teach. But mostly, because they were always said the same way, I stopped internalizing them. Dad taught high school. As I look back, I think he saw me as a mini-him. He talked mostly at me; not to me – although it was always known that these pronouncements were for me, and they meant he loved me. I knew that. I don’t know just how, but I always knew it, in my heart of hearts.
From "Stumbling Forward - A Life"