Of course, we’re all familiar with “Joe the Plumber,” the icon of the McCain presidential campaign for the last few weeks. Dr. Stanley Fish, a professor of law at Florida International University, Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote a moving tribute to–or memoir, character sketch, brief biography of–his father that appeared on yesterday’s New York Times Opinion page. The article was called “Max the Plumber.”

When I got finished with it, I wondered: What’s the legacy I will leave to my children and grandchildren when it comes to the stories they know of me and the images that will stick in their minds? What will they say of me when I’m gone? . . . And can I do anything that might help improve their understanding of who I am and what I wanted to be all about?

Dr. Fish wrote,

My father, Max Fish, was a plumber. His Uncle Frank, to whom he apprenticed, was a plumber. My brother Ron was a plumber until he retired at an early age to build villas in St. Kitts. And, as the oldest son, I was supposed to have been a plumber; my father never did quite understand what I chose to do instead.

Given these pieces of autobiography, you can understand why I have been more than slightly bemused to find that another plumber — Joe by name (although his name isn’t Joe and he’s not a licensed plumber) — has become a storied figure in a national election.

Max’s was a better story.

Read the story and decide for yourself whether Fish has evaluated the situation accurately.

My sense: I would be pleased if it were possible for one of my children to be able to write a memoir like that about me.

But then the question those of us who are seeking to pass on a legacy to our children need to ask ourselves: Do my children know me and my key stories well enough to be able, first, to re-tell any of them, and second, do they know me well enough to suggest which stories are most important as clues to my character? Third, do my children hold me in high enough regard to say, as Fish does about the stories he tells about his father, that it is “[a] true American life for which the flat descriptive [phrase] ‘Max the plumber’ is wholly inadequate”? In essence, would they want to say of us what Fish said concerning his father: “To call my father ‘Max the plumber’ would be to caricature the man I knew and loved and whose memory I revere”?

If not, I think we have some work to do. Or, more importantly, some serious time to spend with our kids.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under family relationships, heritage, inheritance, kids, legacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.