(Mom and Dad.) Crossroads Diner & Deli. Bethel, Maine.
What’s the best advice that anyone has ever given you?
K: Is that recording already?
Yeah.
K: Oh. Do you want to stop it until we’re ready?
D: You may as well stop it because that’s going to take a while.
K: The best advice… the best advice…
D: Hmm. That’s tough.
K: That’s a tough one.
I know. I’m a tough interviewer.
D: That’s so vague. I can think of specific things, like advice about financial situations, advice about driving–my father would say, “Never turn your wheels when you’re stopped in the road to make a left-hand turn.” I still remember him saying things like that, but the one single thing that’s going to change your life?
Just like general life advice.
D: Like “Don’t sweat the small stuff?”
Yes.
K: Who’d you hear that from?
D: Not you. [Laughs.]
K: My father told me, “You’re not married to it.” And that means a job. If you don’t like it, don’t stick to it.
Okay. But that makes me laugh because it implies that if you don’t like your partner [in marriage], you’re still stuck with him or her anyway.
K: Well. They’re married 60 years. [Laughs.] Okay? And honestly, when you do get married, you’re in it through thick and thin, and there are good times and there are bad times, so. The other piece of good advice that I got was from [family friend] Bee, who said, “I have no idea why you bought that white couch.”
D: When we had young kids and animals.
K: She came in and said, “Was it really a good idea… to get that white couch?” [Laughs.]
D: My mother would always say, “You catch more flies with honey.”
K: And that is a good one!
D: Yeah. Try to be nice… not that I always adhere to it, but… [Laughs.]
Is that your final answer?
K: I think that one is pretty good. Grandma Rosie said, “Never marry an Italian man.”
She’s Italian.
K: I know. And she also said, “Be careful how you get [men] because that’s how you lose them.”
D: And Bud said, “Never take a plug nickel.”
A plug nickel?
K: [Laughs.] What does that mean?
D: They used to cut–I guess–almost like fake nickels. It’s an old saying.
Ed. Note: According to Wikipedia, it was common in the 18th and 19th centuries to forge coins with silver discs at their cores so that the actual value of the metal coin equaled its face value. A “plug nickel” is one made without the silver disc and, consequently, worth less. #Andnowyouknow.
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth?”
K: That’s different. If somebody’s giving you a freebie, friggin’ take it.
we break fast. 