“Don’t kiss a girl without being prepared to give her your last name.”
My granny said that.
My father once said this: “If you so much as touch a cigarette, you might as well tear up half your paychecks from now on.”
My mother’s axiom, however, is my all-time favorite: “It’ll be be okay.”
It might sound like a simple phrase, but my mother said this often. Whenever things were running off the rails. Whenever a girl broke my heart. Whenever I lost my job. Whenever I cried.
Whenever I had a common cold I believed to actually be, in fact, tuberculosis. She said this—I needed her to say it.
She also said: “Cleaning your plate means ‘I love you, Mama.’”
And this is why I was an overweight child.
I could keep going all day.
“Don’t answer the phone when you got company over,” my Uncle John once said. “It’s just flat rude.”
This one is from my elderly friend, Mister Boots: “Smartphones have made stupid people.”
My grandfather said: “Anything worth doing is worth waiting until next week to do it.”
My mother once said: “Carry
deodorant in your truck, for crying out loud. You smell like you’ve been roping billy goats.”
Said the man named Bill Bonners, in a nursing home, from his wheelchair: “I never wanted to be a husband, I really didn’t want that. But I just couldn’t breathe without her around me.”
He died four days after his wife passed.
And one childhood evening, I was on a porch with my friend’s father, Mister Allen James—who was whittling a stick—and he said:
“Boys, if you marry ‘up,’ you’ll have to attend a lotta parties you don’t wanna go to. Remember that.”
I never forgot it.
On the day of my father’s funeral, a preacher came through the visitation line and said: “No man ever truly dies. Not really.”
I’ve said this at a few…