Ask my father-in-law how he’s doing and you will not get “fine.”
You’ll get, “I’m doin great. But I’ll get better!” Or on a harder day, “Hanging in there like a hair in a biscuit.” Surprise him with good news and here comes “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” Ask if he’s been busy and you’re liable to hear he’s been “busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.”
He’s got a hundred of them, and he says each one about a hundred times. If you’ve been around him more than a week, you can see them coming. The grandkids can too, and there’s always a groan, an eye-roll, somebody mouthing the words along with him from across the room.
For a long time I thought of them as just his little sayings. The corny things Grandpa says, the ones you smile at and let pass.
But I’ve come to think they’re something more than that.
Because those worn-out phrases are a language, and it’s a language only our family speaks. Nobody outside these walls answers “how are you” with a hair in a biscuit. When one of the kids says it, or when I catch myself saying it, we aren’t just being folksy. We’re speaking Grandpa. We’re carrying a little piece of him around in our own mouths, usually without noticing.
And that’s the strange power of a thing repeated a hundred times. Say it once and it’s a joke. Say it a thousand times, across years and holidays and ordinary Tuesdays, and it stops being his and starts being ours. The shared dialect of one particular family, handed out for free to anyone who sticks around long enough to catch it.
Here’s what I know. Someday my father-in-law won’t be at the table. And on some ordinary afternoon years from now, one of these eye-rolling grandkids is going to get asked how they’re doing, and out of their own grown mouth is going to come, “hanging in there like a hair in a biscuit.” They’ll surprise themselves. They might even tear up a little. And the whole table will know exactly whose voice just walked into the room.
That’s what the repeating was always for, even if he’d never put it that way. It’s how a person hands himself down. Not in the big speeches, but in the little phrases that get into a family’s bloodstream and just stay there, outliving the man who said them first.
So these days, when he says “well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit,” I try not to roll my eyes. I try to really hear it. Because I’m not just listening to a corny saying. I’m listening to the sound of my kids’ future, the words they’ll be saying long after they’ve forgotten where they got them.
