Senior Year

by Dan Shaughnessy

  Just about the time Alexis was putting his applications in the mail, more news broke from the political correctness front. Principal Huntington announced an end to official graduation program tradition of putting asterisks next to the names of students who had achieved academic excellence.

  "I wonder who first objected to that?" Marilou asked aloud, to no one in particular.

  "Someone whose kid sucks at everything," snapped Kate.

  "Everyone comes in as a class and graduates as a class," said the principal. "I love the fact that at graduation I look out at the sea of black caps and gowns and know that everybody gets exactly the same diploma."

  The school paper editorial chimed in: "We see graduation as a time for students to be together and celebrate completion of four years of hard work. It is not a time for division."

  Groan. Once again, we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and once again we celebrate sameness rather than reward individual achievement. We did it when they were 6 and we made sure they all got trophies even if they didn't win a game. We did it when they played soccer and we didn't keep score so that nobody would feel badly. We did it with the tug of peace instead of the tug of war. And now we're going to do it at graduation. We're going to make sure that the kids with the straight A's don't get recognized at the expense of others perhaps less gifted, perhaps less hard-working. Why on earth would an institution of learning want to recognize academic achievement?

  "It's the same in everything at North," Kate reminded me. "No prom queens. No valedictorians. At North, we're all prom queens and valedictorians."

  And now they'll all graduate without recognition of academic honors.

  January

  Marilou woke up in a sweat one night and said she'd dreamed that Sam got busted for possession of marijuana. I told her that there was a greater likelihood he'd be spotted buying a ticket to Guys and Dolls. In other words, forget about it and go back to sleep.

  Sam was nine months' shy of college, and that meant we were still allowed to worry about doomsday scenarios. This vanishes when they finish high school. Kids go off to college and we have no idea how late they are out, who they are with, or what they might be up to. But as long as a child is still under our roof, living in the high school universe, house rules apply and we worry about anything that might blow up the plan. Years earlier, the son of one of our neighbors jeopardized his college admission when he got arrested at a high school pot party. More recently, we'd come to learn that one of Sam's high school friends, a kid who'd crashed in Sam's room more than once, was busted by his own mom. The young man was caught with marijuana, which he intended to sell. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about any of this, but it speaks to the sensitive nature of these final, fragile days of young people living in our home.

  Our second floor Teenage Wasteland was in sorry shape after the holidays. Sam's sisters were both home on break, and we also had Kate's boyfriend (his parents live in California), Alexis, and random high school seniors grabbing some floor when both beds in Sam's room were occupied. I had missed all this chaos when the girls were away, and it reminded me of how quiet it was going to be for most of the rest of our days here after Sam graduates. Not something I'm looking forward to. I think I'll leave the second floor bathroom light on as a household eternal flame.

  Louisville Sluggers littered the bedrooms throughout the house, mingling with dirty laundry and boxes of opened Christmas gifts (I gave Sam my dad's Boston College '36 ring). At a neighborhood New Year's party, Cheryl, a mother of five from across the street, told me, "I see Sam through the window at night, swinging his baseball bat."

  Something else I was going to miss.

  I like the chaos of young people home from college—even the noise at 2:30 in the morning when somebody gets up off the sofa, decides to make a baloney sandwich, and yells, "Hey, who wants a sandwich?" Bringing the dorm life to our home, they stay up till 3 A.M., watching reruns of Sex and the City, then sleep till after noon. In 1973, when I was a sophomore at college, I came home for a weekend, went to bed Friday night, and slept until 2 o'clock the next afternoon. When I came down the stairs, my dad, sitting in his brown chair, said, "I guess you were tired. It's two in the afternoon." I was stunned. I'd been planning on watching a college basketball game that apparently was already nearing halftime. Then my dad added, "Not only is it two in the afternoon, it's Sunday! "

  For a second, he had me. I thought maybe I really had slept for a day and a half. But no. My game was on the TV. In progress. It was Saturday. Good one, Dad.

  There were fourteen books in the "Buddha bin" next to Sam's bed. We hadn't talked much about it. Seems private. But this young man who hated to read immersed himself in The Lost Art of Compassion, Dr. Lorne Ladner's tome on "discovering the practice of happiness in the meeting of Buddhism and Psychology." The bin included Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart by the Dalai Lama and Thoughts Without a Thinker with a foreword by His Holiness.

  My theory was that Sam was turning to Tibetan Buddhist teachings to train himself not to overreact when he got called out on strikes in his first at-bat of a game. Skill and talent aside, athletic performance almost always relies heavily on psychological toughness. Look at professional golfers. To a man, they'll tell you that the game is largely mental. In any sport, a confident player with a clear head will perform better. He who dwells on past failures or fears future calamity is destined to fail, especially if he's trying to hit an eighty-mile-per-hour changeup when he's looking for a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball.

  This sudden interest in Buddhism didn't stop some of the nonsense in Sam's 18-year-old world. His economics teacher called to tell us that Sam was too much of a class clown. She said he was doing well in class but too often distracted other students with nonstop commentary (a side of Sam we never saw at home) and attempted to make a joke out of everything. He also was discovered sporting a T-shirt that read, "We put the fun in funnel." Apparently, an enterprising senior was selling the shirts to members of the class of '06, and you didn't have to be very hip to find the obvious objectionable element of the message (a funnel and hose apparatus is a standard tool of binge beer drinking on college campuses).

  Principal Huntington instructed parents and teachers to take the shirts off the backs of the seniors.

  The principal's edict led to the predictable editorial in the student paper, which held "Free speech is crucial for all students. It is the free speech law that prevents the school from stopping Animal Rights Club protests and telling editors of this newspaper what to publish. And it is this law that allows seniors, however inappropriately, to wear shirts saying, 'We put the fun in funnel.' "

  I remember those days of righteous indignation. Slogans, too. The Groton High School class of '71 numbered only ninety-one at graduation, and I don't think any of my classmates would argue that ours was perhaps the most listless and unaccomplished group in the history of the school. We had few scholars and athletes. By and large, we were outside the cool loop. We had a lot of long-haired kids experimenting with marijuana and beer, and experiencing the agonizing reappraisal of all young people who came of age in the 1960s and watched Woodstock, Kent State, and Vietnam unfold on our black-and-white television screens. Not particularly active or accomplished, we were thoughtful. Our big contribution to the school was converting the cold war relic/civil defense bomb shelter into a senior lounge where we could smoke without fear of getting caught. I am not kidding. In 1970, the time was ripe to do away with the nuclear hysteria that had traumatized our first- and second-grade years (I remember gathering my favorite teddy bears, baseball cards, and toy soldiers and putting them in a cardboard box during the Cuban missile crisis). In retrospect, it does not seem remarkable that parents and faculty were willing to give up the concrete-enclosed space opposite the boys' locker room, where intrepid Mr. Belitsky had stocked tons of water jugs and dried foods. What is amazing, however, is that they allowed us to convert the area into a dark den with little supervision. In ou
r new clubhouse, boys wore flared pants, girls wore micro-miniskirts, and we listened to the latest work of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Smoking was not sanctioned, but I don't remember any teachers bursting into the dark, hazy shelter. Our senior lounge. Power to the people. Right on.

  As president of the class of 1971 (truly, only one other kid ran, and he was from Georgia, which made him the ultimate carpetbagger in a town with no outsiders), I presided over a number of class meetings that gave me a small sense of what it felt like for those assigned to teach us on a daily basis. It could not have been easy, and more than once a veteran teacher told us, "You are the most apathetic bunch of kids I've ever had here."

  Our response: "Who cares?"

  And there was born the unofficial motto of the Groton High School class of 1971: "Who cares if we're apathetic?"

  We thought it was pretty clever and, in retrospect, it's not bad. I have never heard of another motto like it, and we owed the slogan to one of our most talented, iconoclastic classmates, Allan "Albane" Friedrich.

  We didn't know much about Albane until the ninth grade because he went to Catholic school until then, so it was quite a big deal when he showed up on the first day of our freshman year of high school. All we knew about him was that he was a rugged kid, a good baseball player, and he had a bunch of sisters with blond hair and spectacular figures. As for his nickname, "Albane," as far as anyone could tell, he'd given it to himself. Albane was an operator. In September 1967, 14-year-old Allen Friedrich was president and CEO of Albanian Enterprises, a multifaceted conglomerate specializing in homemade booze and term papers passed down by older siblings. It was a precursor to the young "enterprising" kids in Risky Business.

  Dandelion wine was the beverage of choice when Albane first game to Groton High, and he was selling the homemade vintage out of his locker for a couple of years before he got the attention of our principal, Mr. Lewis Karabatsos.

  Albane's version of his meeting with the principal went like this:

  Mr. K: Allen, is there any activity you've been up to in school that you think you maybe should tell me about?

  Albane: No.

  Mr. K: Well, then, can I order a gallon of that stuff you'd been selling to the students?

  That pretty much closed down the alcoholic beverage arm of Albanian Enterprises.

  Selling homemade wine back in the day seemed pretty harmless. Almost amusing. But of course, it wasn't. And it isn't. Kids die when they drink and drive. Check the local newspapers over the course of any nine-month school year and invariably you'll come across a photo of a high school cheerleader with perfect teeth who wrapped her birthday-gift sports car around a utility pole after guzzling vodka with other kids at somebody's house. Drinking and driving is certainly not the sole province of high school students, but their tragic endings tend to get more exploitive play on the nightly news. There were plenty of these sad stories in our local papers during the 2005–2006 school year, and we dutifully put them in front of Sam as he sat at the kitchen island, scarfing his meaty dinner fare. We reminded him that this could happen to anyone—good kids die because of one bad mistake. We told him to be careful about decisions, especially late at nights on weekends. Don't get in a car with anyone who's been drinking. Don't be at a party where there's drinking. One bad decision can mess up your entire life, not to mention your precious college baseball plan at Boston College.

  In the middle of the month, we all flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, for the wedding of our niece, Katie. Our hotel in Raleigh was entirely nonsmoking, and in our never-ending quest for true examples of irony, Sam and I decided that a no-smoking hotel in the middle of Tobacco Road would probably qualify.

  The highlight of the wedding was the presence of Dean Smith, the second most famous resident of North Carolina. Michael Jordan, naturally, can claim to be the most famous living person in state history (Presidents Jackson, Polk, and Andrew Johnson would make the top five if we expanded the category to include the deceased), but Dean has to be second only to Michael. They named the new UNC home gym (20,000 seats) after him. It's the Dean E. Smith Center, but everyone in Chapel Hill calls it the Dean Dome. Smith's daughter, Kristen, was a high school classmate of my niece, which is why Dean was at the wedding. I made sure to introduce Sam to the living legend, and we got Dean to tell stories about recruiting Jordan when his Airness was a high school student in Wilmington, North Carolina. "He was a late bloomer, but we thought he'd be able to play in the ACC," said Dean.

  A few hours after we stopped listening to Dean, the late-night dancing was in full hip-hop swing. I noticed Sam making repeated trips to the bar with his cousins. Most of the cousins were over 21, but it was pretty clear that the bartenders didn't care. After one of Sam's visits, I asked the barkeep what the young man in front of me had ordered.

  "Rum and Coke," said the polite man in the bow tie.

  This was not much of a dilemma for me. I did the math and realized that Sam was already past the age when I'd first made a fool of myself drinking screwdrivers (vodka and Tang, sometimes) at Holy Cross. The legal drinking age was just about to switch to 18 when I was a freshman in college, and we learned the old-fashioned way. We drank too much, collapsed into bed, felt the room spinning, then spent a good part of the night calling Looie on the big white telephone. The good news was that we never got in cars on those nights. Our binges were confined to campus. In this spirit, I was okay watching my underage son having a few rum and Cokes with his cousins. They weren't going to be getting into cars and it wasn't going to impact Sam's coaches or teachers back home in Newton. It was a controlled environment. Better he learn here than on a Friday night back home when he'd be getting into a car after having a few at some other kid's house. I did, however, think it was a little bold when Sam came up to me and asked me for a few bucks to tip the bartender. I appreciated his taking care of the help, but did he have to be so blatant about drinking in front of his parents?

  My dad's advice on drinking was short and old-school Irish. He told me to never drink alone and never drink in the morning.

  Sam's track career was screeching to a halt as the snow piled up outside. He attended one meet and finished third in the 300 meters. He said that qualified him for a letter, but it was pretty clear that he wasn't bound for the Olympic trials. I was amazed that he was able to compete at all. Newton traditionally has the best track team in the state, and all Shaughnessys apparently lack the DNA needed to fix cars, speak foreign languages, and win footraces.

  I was forced to run cross-country when I was a sophomore in high school. Since we had no football team, Coach Fahey made it a fall requirement for boys hoping to play varsity basketball. It was the best way to get us in shape, but I was tortured. Cursed with asthma, heavy legs, and the Shaughnessy gene pool, I was the worst runner on our team. Daily training runs of five miles were routine. This was the autumn of 1968; "Hey Jude" was atop the charts, and the droning Paul tune served nicely inside my head as I plopped one sneaker in front of the other up and down the hills on the second and third holes of the Groton Country Club. The actual competitions were even more pathetic. My goal was to keep jogging—never walk. Sometimes there would be a fat kid on the other team who'd end up walking part of the course. I think I beat about five kids all season. My most embarrassing moment came at the end of the meet in Littleton, when everybody was already on the bus waiting to ride home while I was still out on the course. Truly. They'd already calculated the scores, handed out the medals, put their sweats back on, and boarded the bus when somebody noticed I was still at large. The bus was pulled up alongside the finish line, engine running, when I came out of the last cornfield to complete my race. I crossed the line, ran up the steps of the bus, collapsed into a seat, and we were on our way back home.

  Little has changed in adulthood. For the last twenty-four years, I have run one mile per day. Almost every day. I am the Cal Ripken Jr. of twelve-minute milers. Starting on New Year's Day in 1983, when I was in a hotel in downtown Los Angele
s, I committed to running a mile a day. It was one of those rare resolutions that stuck. I remember seeing calendar pages from 1982 strewn around the streets of LA when I started the routine. It was my first year of married life, I was on the West Coast for the Rose Bowl and some Celtic games, and I was feeling a little fat. Almost every day since, I have run exactly one mile. Six minutes out. Six minutes back. I have run in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, in downtown Madrid, the streets of Sydney, the rocky coast of Ireland, Luxembourg Garden in Paris, and—most days—the Hunnewell Hill section of Newton. I ran the night Sam was born and the morning we found out about Kate's leukemia. When Kate was at Children's Hospital, I'd run down Brookline Ave., the only twelve minutes of the day I'd leave her side. There were days when I substituted basketball or swimming, but a short workout was mandatory, and I have missed only four times since '83, not once since '94. That's over 8,000 miles. A marathon a month. Across the country and back, just like Forrest Gump. And I have never had the urge to run faster or farther. Don't even ask.

  My diaries disclosed more sad secrets of slowness. My high school mile time was eight minutes and twenty-five seconds. Sam runs one in 6:30. I was clocked at 7.1 seconds in the 50-yard dash. Sam ran 60 yards in 6.9 seconds at Stanford. Pretty amazing considering that I was six-one, 155 pounds and he's five-ten, 190.

  Weight was something I was warning him about during these interminable months between baseball seasons. With no basketball and no track, I worried about Sam getting too big. A coach who recruits a Trot Nixon type doesn't want to see John Kruk showing up in September. With this in mind, I reminded Sam that he was about to officially become the fattest person in the family. After dropping some holiday weight, I burst into his bedroom before school one morning and dragged him to the scale. I was 193. He was 193.6.