Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Here’s my father, Joseph Murray Devine, showing off his first fish to his proud grandfather.

In book families, the mother is the warm, bright, loving heart of family-ness, but in our family my father played that role, and my mother loved having him do it. She took pride in a different parental role, the sensible one who makes everything stay on track.

It was typical of the two of them that they had secret handsignals, which they taught us. Three quick squeezes mean “I love you”; the reply is two squeezes, which means “Me too.”

It was typical of my dad that he would whisper to me during Mass (soft whispers were deprecated but not uncommon during the old Latin Masses of my youth), “Tell your mother that I love her.” And it was typical of my mother that she would tell me to reply, “Tell your father not to talk during Mass.”

But all of us knew what this reply really meant: “I love you too.”