When I was a teenager, parents were parents and kids were kids and they pretty much stayed out of each other's way. Our parents were simply not involved in the day-to-day operations of our after-school activities. Attendance at our ball games was neither required nor expected. Mom and Dad often did not know the name of our coach during a given season. When my parents did attend our baseball games, they would usually park their Ford Galaxie on top of a hill way down the left field line and occasionally toot the horn if something good happened. I'm told Dad did a bit of bragging about brother Bill's accomplishments, but he'd never have done that in front of us, because it would have emphasized athletics over academics and he certainly didn't want me to feel badly because I was not as good a ballplayer as my older brother.
Today we are a nation of grownups who raise children like thoroughbred horses, micromanaging every aspect of a child's life and making sure that the kid attains all accolades and awards that eluded the parent. It used to be "My son made honor roll" on a bumper sticker; now parents put banners on the side of their homes exclaiming, "Suzie made cheerleader captain!" I've heard of parents who attended high school sports team practices, just to see how things are going.
Deep down, I wanted to be at basketball practice to see if Sam was fairly characterizing his plight, but I got hold of my senses and dismissed the crazy notion.
When I came home after the second day of basketball practice, Sam was on the couch, watching TV. He said he'd talked with the coach. He said he twice asked what he had to do to make the team, and both times the coach said he couldn't answer the question. According to Sam, he had no chance to make this team. I told him it sounded like the coach was afraid to cut him because he'd done the time as a junior on JV and it would strike people as unfair. Other kids who had quit as juniors were being offered a chance to play. It looked to me as if the coach wanted Sam to quit so he wouldn't have to cut him. I asked Sam how he'd feel if I talked to the coach.
"No," he said. "You talking to him is not like any other parent talking to him. If you talk to him and he keeps me, I'll be uncomfortable with that."
So there it was. A lesson learned. This was stupid. I was being the kind of parent I hate. I was imposing my wishes on my son to make myself feel better. This was about me, not Sam, and I needed to move on.
Frustrated, I told him, "Do whatever you want. The guy wants you to quit. You'll be making it easy for him, and he can always say that you didn't want to play basketball in the first place. I'd rather see you make it hard for him and make him cut you. It's only another week out of your life. But I'm done talking about it."
Sam quit the next day. Wednesday. I had to cover a Celtics game that night and didn't see him. We spoke only briefly on the phone.
"Sam asked me if you are mad at him," Marilou said early Thursday.
When he got home late that afternoon, he asked me if I wanted to go in the hot tub. Good idea. Great thoughts have been exchanged in the hot tub. Much like the golf course or the steam room at a health club, where captains of industry broker mergers. Much like the drive to the dump in Groton back in the day.
My son was being unusually solicitous and tentative.
"Watch out for the rock," he warned, as I stepped past a boulder we use to keep the tub lid from blowing open during storms.
Very un-Samlike, I thought to myself. He's really feeling guilty about this.
The moment was good and bad. The good part was that I knew Sam was grateful for all we had done for him and that he wanted to please us. He wasn't quite as selfish as I'd feared. It actually bothered him to see that he'd disappointed me. I knew this would be a moment when I could actually get him to move a cord of wood, or clean his room, or drive his sister back to school without getting any backtalk. At that moment, I could have asked him to paint the house over the weekend and he would have readily agreed. But I was also ashamed. I'd done what I said I would never do. I'd made this about me. I'd made him feel badly because he didn't do something that he now sincerely seemed to hate.
Certainly there are times when a son or daughter should carry some guilt for disappointing a parent. Flunking out of school, getting arrested, or burning down the house while hosting a keg party might fall into this category. But dropping out of a sport should be the kid's choice. And I was embarrassed that Sam was upset because of something that was my problem, not his.
"Sam, you know how I feel about this," I said. "I'm disappointed, but it's your life, not mine. In this area, you should do the things you want to do, not the things I want you to do. My feelings really don't matter on this one, and we don't need to talk about it anymore."
Still tentative, still aiming to please and appease, Sam mentioned that he'd gone out for the track team. He said it would help him with baseball and indicated that the practices were more fun and he enjoyed the other kids on the team. I asked him what he planned on trying. It was difficult to imagine a five foot ten, 190-pound sprinter. He said he was running the 400 meters and would try the shot put. I told him it sounded like an okay idea. There wasn't much left to say. Basketball was over.
These were heady days in Newton. Our town was voted safest city in America again, and the North football team made it all the way to the Super Bowl in Rocky Marciano Stadium in Brockton.
With the high school football playoffs in full bloom, there was the usual handwringing about the SAT test being held on the same day as the high school Super Bowls. None of our kids were affected because the Newton game wasn't scheduled to start until 4 P.M., but some players at other schools faced the dilemma of choosing between the SATs and the Super Bowl. I would not have wanted to make this choice had any of my kids been involved. There's always another SAT test. A Super Bowl is a once-in-a-lifetime decision.
Sam had one final test to take to fulfill his BC requirements. He'd already knocked off the math requirement, and Marilou bought him a three-hundred-page book to prepare him for the SAT-II literature test. The day before the exam, I found a Sam-note in the kitchen that read, "Mother, I think I'm going to take US History because I did the practice questions online and knew a solid chunk of them. And I thumbed through this (literature) book and felt retarded. Sorry. Your son, Sam (the book's untouched, returnable)."
The day of the SATs and high school Super Bowls was cold and windy. Sam and I drove to Brockton to see his classmates play Woburn in the MIAA Division 1-A final. I'd offered to cover the game for the Globe only because the paper likes to have columnists at high school games on occasion, and it was a way to combine work and pleasure. Sam's former freshman coach, the redoubtable Giusti, was on the sideline in his khaki shorts. It was somehow comforting to see his bare legs in the brutal cold wind of Rocky Marciano Stadium in the first week of December.
Despite Giusti's inspiration, the senior leadership, and a high-flying offense that scored 317 points in twelve games, the Tigers were no match for Woburn's Tanners on this day. Woburn had a senior running back named Tommy Hart who shredded the Newton defense, running for over two hundred yards in a 34–7 blowout win. I was in the press box, hoping to write about the Newton boys, but Woburn owned the day and I was forced to praise the Tanners instead. I'd become acquainted with their veteran coach, Rocky Nelson, because both of our daughters are cancer survivors and we'd been involved in a couple of fundraisers together. This was Rocky's thirty-sixth year at Woburn and his twentieth as head coach; he'd never won the big one and I was happy that he finally did. The Tanners had been without a home field during school construction; for a couple of years, those folks drove fifty-five miles to Brockton after a kickoff breakfast at the Tanner saloon. It was all good ... except for one thing.
Rocky ran up the score. Leading 27-7 with three minutes to play, the Tanners took over on the Newton 35-yard line and kept pounding, scoring another touchdown. I wanted to write a column about sportsmanship and the meaning of high school athletics, but this wasn't the time. It was more important to let Woburn have their day. I didn't have the heart to say anything t
o Rocky about it when he was surrounded by joyous family members after the game. But I wanted to ask him why he went for the last touchdown and why his starters were still in the game when he could have emptied the bench and allowed another ten kids to someday say they played in a Super Bowl victory at Rocky Marciano Stadium.
Newton's head coach, the English teacher Peter Capidulipo, a veteran of twenty-two years, said all the right things in defeat. He talked about how tough it would be for the kids because we tend to remember how things end, and he didn't want this blowout defeat to be their memory of the season. "I hope after some time goes by that they'll be able to look at the whole season and all the good things they did in their four years here," he said.
We got a card in the mail from Boston College indicating that they had everything they needed regarding Sam's application and that he would be hearing from them in April. It reminded me that we probably needed to light a fire under the other high school senior sleeping regularly on our second floor, Alexis Mongo.
Alexis has been part of our family for thirteen years. Sam and Alexis met on the day before the first day of kindergarten at the Underwood Elementary School, and when school officials solicited Newton parents to sign on as Metco host parents, Marilou raised her hand and we had another kid, part-time, for more than a decade. The Metco program offers suburban educations to a few of Boston's city children. It's been somewhat controversial over the years because it inflates the city tax base, and there can be resentment when/if Metco kids take team spots that could have gone to kids from Newton, or Wellesley, or any other town involved in the sports program. Woe to the seventh grade basketball coach who keeps five Metco kids and cuts seven sons of Newton taxpayers.
Not every Metco kid has a host family, but it's a bonus because these young people endure long days with tedious commutes. They get up at least an hour earlier than their schoolmates, and if they're involved in an after-school activity, they face a fourteen-hour day. Bringing Alexis into our home made life easier for Alexis and his mom, who was in her early twenties when we first gave him a bed. It also gave Sam a sense of what it's like to have a brother.
Alexis's mom, Raquel, is Puerto Rican and his dad, Thomas, is half black and half Portuguese. When his hair is appropriately cornrowed, Alexis looks a little like rapper/actor Ludacris, and more than once opposing fans chanted "Luda" when he was on the basketball court for Newton North. His parents were already split when we first met him, and he has a younger sister, Paris. Living in the city and putting two kids through Newton schools while navigating the red tape of Metco has been exhausting and confusing for Raquel. Doing it as a single mom only made things that much tougher, and we've been blessed to have Alexis as part of our autumns, winters, and springs during Sam's school years.
When I thumb through snapshots of Sam's youth, Alexis is always there. Attending birthday parties, playing soccer, eating Happy Meals, graduating elementary school, playing street basketball, trick-or-treating, eating at the island counter in our kitchen, holding football helmets after a junior high game, graduating middle school, shoveling snow, stacking cordwood, taking out the trash, needing rides to SAT practice ... he's been there every step of the way. I remember the day he cut his ear when he fell on a rusty milk crate on the front porch and had to go to the hospital. I remember earlier this year when we got up on a Saturday morning and took him to get his driver's license. We picked up celebratory doughnuts on the way home.
We worked on his college essay just before Christmas.
"Sometimes people judge me on my appearance," he wrote. "But I refuse to be what they want me to be—just some ethnic kid from the ghetto in baggy clothes. What you see is not what you get with me. A lot of people judge me first just as a jock from a rough city neighborhood, but there are many dimensions to my personality. The Real Me: the athlete, the student, the brother, the son."
The essay didn't need much work.
How to gauge Alexis's influence on our household through the years? Sam came to rap music at a fairly early age, but given the pop culture of most suburban schools in the northeast, that probably would have happened anyway. Sarah and Kate have always teased Sam about his choice of music and clothing, and the popular phrase hurled his way was "Sam, you're not black!" which generated a few good laughs.
As a man who grew up in a land of white birches and white folks, I've learned much from having Alexis in our home through the years. Groton was too white. Boston is too white. Our kids are better for growing up in a time when color doesn't seem to matter as much. Like homosexuality and gay marriage, race seems to be an issue for parents more than kids.
A couple of years ago, I went back to my old high school and watched a basketball triple-header between the towns of Groton and Lunenburg. Midway through the varsity joust, after watching the freshmen and junior varsity games, I realized that I hadn't seen more than one or two minorities all day long. That was including parents, cheerleaders, coaches, and players. Forty years after I grew up, the small towns in central Massachusetts were still a whiter shade of pale. Maybe even whiter than before.
There were three black families in Groton when I grew up. The Hamiltons. The Hazards. And the Gaskins. I knew the Hamiltons best. Mr. Hamilton worked at the hardware store and marched in the Memorial Day parade with my father. Billy Hamilton was a year ahead of me in school and a pretty fair hitter in Little League. We call him "Big Hams," and he still lives near Groton.
When I was still in high school, I remember my older sister Mary being amazed when she came to the house and Big Hams was hanging out with me and several other friends. Her experience as a teen had been completely different. Mary went to the University of New Hampshire in the fall of 1960, and her first roommate was black. I did not know about any of this until much later, but it turns out my parents didn't want her to bring her roommate to our home for a weekend. The times they were a-changin', but not yet in Groton, Massachusetts. This was 1960, and my folks were afraid of what other people might think. To this day I am amazed, because my father served in World War II and was a God-fearing man who worked for the church and seemed to look out for the disenfranchised in his supervisory position at the local paper factory. An entry in my high school diary, from August 1969, reports an exchange between me and a black man who came to the ice cream stand. My dad had given the man some extra tires we had in our garage, and I wrote, "That fat negro man that Dad gave the tires to came down to Johnson's. He's nice. He said, 'You got a good old man there.' That made me so proud of Dad."
Weird that I was still using the word Negro, but more telling is the realization that in the seven hundred daily entries over my junior and senior years of high school, this is one of the few times I said anything complimentary about either one of my parents. I was annoyed at their ceaseless questions about how my day had gone. Most of my diary writings are about girls I was trying to date (with little success), our basketball and baseball teams, and the state of my complexion and hair. But clearly, something in the man's message moved me on that hot Thursday afternoon. A black man had said something nice about the generosity and character of my father and it meant something. This is why it's still difficult to account for my parents' backward thinking in 1960. I have no answers, but clearly my folks were far more enlightened by the time their fifth child was ready for college, and there never again was an issue about who was allowed, or not allowed, in our home.
Still, my parents were the whitest people I ever knew. In the early 1970s, when I was home from college in the springtime, I met Steve Hazard at the town field, and we spent the early evening playing basketball until it got dark. I gave Steve a ride home that night in Mom's tan Buick Riviera and didn't think about it again until my next encounter with Steve, when he asked if he'd left his comb in my mom's car. These were the days of the Angela Davis Afros, and Steve's comb was more weapon than grooming device. I knew there was no way my parents would have been able to identify such an item, but that didn't mean they didn't have it. When I got
home I asked the folks if they'd seen Steve's comb. I explained that it was a large object with a wooden handle and long steel prongs.
Sounding not unlike Edith Bunker, my mother put her hand to her face and said, "Oh, is that what that is?"
Mom went to the green kitchen cabinet above the sink, opened the door, and removed Steve's comb from the shelf.
"I thought this was a cheese cutter," she said.
Made sense. Who could hold this thing in their hand without wanting to drop it down over a log of Cracker Barrel?
Next time I saw Steve, I presented him with the comb and said, "Haz, you're not going to believe it, but my mom thought this thing was a cheese cutter."
"She cut any cheese with it?" he asked quickly.
I told him no. But the truth has never been learned.
Steve was three years behind me in school and his later high school experience, and maybe a good part of his life after school, was shaped by an unfortunate event in a basketball game when he was a junior. The Groton team was on the verge of winning the league championship in the closing moments of a home game against Quabbin Regional High School. Groton was set to wrap things up when Steve lost track of the score and intentionally fouled a player from Quabbin, thinking Groton needed to get the ball back. Naturally, the Quabbin kid made the free throws, Groton lost the championship, and Steve was the goat. He was one of the most promising players in the school—a junior playing in crunch time of a big game—but he quit basketball after that season. According to guys who played on the team, Steve was never the same kid in the years that followed. He never stopped blaming himself, and he wouldn't let his friends talk him out of it.
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