Parenting & Family Quote by Robert B. Parker

A perfect Parker move: a deadpan one-liner that snaps autobiography into noir timing. On the surface, it is a father joking about age. Underneath, it is a writer announcing his preferred mask: toughness delivered with a shrug, sentiment smuggled in under comedy.

The line works because it sets up the audience for a conventional milestone (pride in a son, a little self-deprecation about getting older) and then yanks the rug with an impossible equivalence. The “odd” isn’t just arithmetic; it’s the emotional strangeness of parenthood and time. Your child’s adulthood can make you feel frozen in place, like you’re still the same person who was improvising life when he showed up. Parker compresses that unnerving sensation into a logical error, which is funnier than a confession and safer than sincerity.

There’s also a cultural wink here about the public author persona. Crime writers, especially Parker with his Spenser novels, trade in competence, control, and a kind of masculine cool. Admitting that time has passed and mattered is a vulnerability; turning it into a paradox preserves the cool while still letting the feeling leak through. The aside “I think, here tonight” adds another layer: the performer’s patter, the slight feigned uncertainty that signals intimacy with the room while keeping real intimacy at arm’s length.

It’s a joke about aging, but it’s really a statement of craft: make the hard truth land like a punchline, and people will let it in.