father
Daddy made for us himself elaborate kites that needed to be taken miles out of town to a pasture long enough (and my father was not afraid of horses and cows watching) for him to run with and get up on a long cord to which my mother held the spindle, and then we children were given it to hold, tugging like something alive at our hands. They were beautiful, sound, shapely box kites, smelling delicately of office glue for their entire short lives.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4–5.
It was my father who insisted on turning everything into a treat. I remember his showing me how to eat a peach by building a little white mountain of sugar and then dipping the peach into it.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957), 10.
In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.
“Chip Kidd Talks with Milton Glaser,” The Believer, September 2003.
We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said, “I don’t know that one.” And he mentioned another. I said, “I don’t know that one either, Dad,” and he became very alarmed that I didn’t know what he considered my own musical genealogy…So he spent the rest of the afternoon making a list for me, and at the end of the day, he said this is your education. And across the top of the page, he wrote, “100 essential country songs.”
“Rosanne Cash Runs Down Her Father’s ‘List,'” NPR, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, August 19, 2011.
Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter—the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop—and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.
Blood, Bones & Butter (New York: Random House, 2011), 8–9.
“See that bird?” my father had said. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name and was just making it up.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapottida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Pieda. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Latano Tekeda,” he said, though I realized these names were also made up by him. “You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. All you know are what humans in different places call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (So, this was an important lesson for me. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something about the world.)
Richard Feynman, “The Making of a Scientist”
I was raised by my father on the doctrine that, for busy people, there is “no such thing as a convenient time for a vacation.” That being so—my father deduced—take a vacation exactly when you want to; and let the chips fall where they will, since chips are going to fall in any case.
Airborne (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976), 53.