No, after you

Random quote of the day:


“Etiquette is the barrier which society draws around itself as a protection against offenses the “law” cannot touch…"

—Charles William Day, Hints of Etiquette and the Usages of Society with a Glance at Bad Habits, 3rd ed. 1836










( Illustrated version. )

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

The lies we tell ourselves

"All this time I thought I'd been lying to myself, but I was just kidding myself."

—Peter Serafinowicz on Twitter


In yesterday's post, I wrote:

And then there are the stories my father used to tell, some of them true (sort of), and some of them more creative, and the screwy family legacy that's caused...Ah, but that's a story for another day. Perhaps tomorrow.

My father, my biological father, had already lived a good long while by the time I was born—a child of his senior years. He was many things, amongst those things a great storyteller. Some of the stories he told about his early life were even true, but I learned in my twenties that I had to take everything he had ever told me with a large grain of salt. Dad was a storyteller, not a historian. Now and again, in my research I'll come across a factoid and say, "What do you know? Dad may actually have been telling the truth that time." Other times I'll come across information that lets me know that what Dad said about the family history had been—how shall I put it?—highly colored by imagination and the desire to tell a good tale.

Like the story about my father's first wife, the mother of my half-brother, J. (who was actually only two years younger than my own mother).

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