Quotes About Family

Getting your head shrunk could only take you so far, and then it came time to drop to your knees and humble yourself. Ask forgiveness of God the Father. Or, in my case, God the Stepfather. And, goddamnit, my knees just didn't seem to bend that way.

Evenings after the dishes, Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was held together with rubber bands. Then she'd settle in front of the television to watch her westerns—"Bonanza," "Rawhide"—while I sat out at the kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to Jeanette.

The Peacock Tattoo Emporium's waiting area was a row of kitchen chairs, standing ashtrays, dirty magazines. You could pick the tattoo you wanted from a fat loose-leaf with plastic-covered sample illustrations. "They're both crazy," I told Roberta, looking out the plate glass to make sure my grandmother couldn't see me. "Ma and Grandma. They're just crazy in different ways.

Well, how about the Lennon Sisters then? They can't be much older than you are." I lied and told her one of her precious Lennon sisters—Diane, the oldest, her favorite—was having an illegitimate baby. "Pfft," she said, flicking away the possibility with the flap of her wrist. But her lip quivered and she left my room making the sign of the cross.

Maybe you inherited craziness like you did brown eyes or frizzy hair, I thought. Maybe you just went nuts and did that sort of thing if your mother got a divorce and a new boyfriend.

father's command is a son's law!

If you squinted while looking at her from across a room, you would swear Mrs. Nord was Jackie Kennedy. My own mother sat alone on Bobolink Drive all day, talking to her parakeet, Petey, and worrying about dead children. Around the time of our move to Bobolink Drive, I stopped kissing my mother on the lips. It had been over four years since she'd lost the baby.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That

It's a free country," I said. "Granny babes." That night up in my room I pulled Ma's flying leg out from behind the dresser and saw, for the first time, that it was beautiful. I hung it above my bed.

Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. .

Making the decision to have a child—it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

Ma bent over and kissed Grandma, who sat ramrod straight in her chair and didn't respond. "Don't wait up for me, now," Ma laughed. "Do-on't worry," Grandma answered, rolling her eyes at the TV.

We buried my husband, Claude, today, finally. Me and Belinda Jean. His emphysema took him nine days ago, but the wake and funeral had to be put off because of the flood. McPadden's Funeral Parlor was in the water's path.

If I reach far back, I can see my father waving to my mother and me and climbing down from his ladder, spray gun in hand, as we arrive with his lunch in our turquoise-and-white car. Daddy reaches the ground and pulls off his face mask.

We lunch in the grass. My father eats sandwiches stuffed with smelly foods Ma and I refuse to eat: liverwurst, vinegar peppers, Limburger cheese. He drinks hot coffee right from the thermos and his Adam's apple moves up and down when he swallows.

Old. I'm almost forty, probably as close now to Mrs. Masicotte's age as I am to the age of my parents as they sat on that lawn, laughing and blowing dandelion puffs at me, smoking their shared Pall Mall cigarettes and thinking Mrs. Masicotte was the answer to their future—that that black-and-white Emerson television set was a gift free and clear of the strings that would begin our family's unraveling.

I didn't like having Grandma there. She slept on a cot in my room and boiled all our suppers. It was unsanitary, she said, the way Daddy drank right out of the water bottle and then put it back in the Frigidaire.

Jack kept refilling my mother's glass with the wine she'd brought. With each sip, she acted more and more like Marilyn Monroe. Grandma was so taken with her special meal, she seemed hardly to notice Ma's behavior. She even reluctantly accepted a glass of wine herself, and went so far as to wet her lips at the rim.

I spent the remainder of the visit staring stupidly at the TV, answering Grandma's questions in single syllables and making faces at her cooking.

On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. "Cold," she said.

The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn't have left if she hadn't always been Miss Doom and Gloom. "Pretty?" she said. "Really?" "Yeah, pretty ugly." Her lip shook. She reached for her spray. "God, I was only kidding," I said. "Can't you even take a joke?

I was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and Scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

I wanted to love my father. I wanted to, but I didn't. Sometimes I didn't even like him. he hadn't been a guy you could really get next to, because in a way he was never where you thought he was.