La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
August 8, 1933
Dear Pie:
I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me
a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are
happy — but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery
either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed
pages, they never really happen to you in life.
All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue
(according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties,
which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will
you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the
line occurs “Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting
up aSaturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if
you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his
bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to
that?
I will arrange the camp bill.
Halfwit, I will conclude.
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own
fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in
regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get
along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I
neglecting it?
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening
you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state
of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think
it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries.
“Egg Fitzgerald.” How would you like that to go through life with — “Eggie
Fitzgerald” or “Bad Egg Fitzgerald” or any form that might occur to fertile
minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be
up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?
Love anyhow.