Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  One day I went to pick up something for my mother at Mrs. Bugeau’s house, which was always beautifully turned out and ready to be photographed for Ladies’ Home Journal. She left me in the foyer for a minute, and I wandered into the living room, which was so impeccably neat that I had to experience it up close. I was looking at the framed photos carefully displayed on the mantel when I heard a blood-curdling scream.

  “Ahhhh! Noooo!!”

  I turned to see Mrs. Bugeau in the hallway—she had almost dropped the mason jar she was holding. There was a look of abject horror on her face.

  “Walk to the path!” she said quietly. “Walk slowly to the path!”

  I had not only entered her living room, which was off-limits, perhaps to anyone but the gentleman caller from The Glass Menagerie, but I had also stepped off the clear rubber runners that ran through all the carpeted rooms in her house. My dirty boy’s shoes were sinking into her immaculate carpet, and she was speaking to me as if I had stepped into quicksand.

  “Walk . . . Tommy . . . walk slowly to the path!”

  I walked to the runner, and then to Mrs. Bugeau. She reached out and hugged me to her like a released hostage, and quickly began to calm down.

  “I’m so sorry, Tommy! I should have told you to stay in the foyer! I can’t have any shoes on the carpet. God bless you, boy!”

  I felt relieved that she was so relieved. Mrs. Bugeau had children—her daughters were friends with my sisters—and I wondered what it would be like to grow up in that home. I appreciated its beauty, but to me it didn’t seem like a home—it was so delicate. It didn’t feel comfortable. I preferred our disheveled den.

  After the brief scrimshaw period my mother moved on to knitting. She had actually always knit and taught us all to knit as well, the boys as well as the girls. I remember sitting around the television, all of us watching Ben-Hur as we stitched away. I never really had any projects of my own, but my mother would give me her projects along with instructions, and I’d do the easy rows in the middle. To this day, my sister knits almost everywhere she goes. Sometimes, I’ll be waiting to go on at a comedy club and one of the comics will come off shaking his head, saying, “Weird crowd. There’s a woman right up front knitting.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I’ll say, “that’s my sister.”

  One day, for some reason, my mother decided to kick the knitting up a notch. When a huge package arrived via parcel post, she eagerly unboxed her latest project to take over the dining room—a massive industrial knitting machine. With it, she declared, she could complete projects hundreds of times faster and sell many more items, even though moving my mom’s projects to market was usually more of a demand than a supply problem. In the world of today, with Etsy and eBay, she may have been able to find customers by the thousands, but back then she had to be content with whoever wandered by her tiny booth at the craft fair. Nevertheless, for the next year, every night of the week we heard the constant crunch of the knitting carriage running back and forth across the hundreds of hooks and needles, creating sweaters, scarves, hats and mittens, and even Nativity scenes. Yes—knitted versions of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the Wise Men along with little knitted donkeys and sheep. Some of the items would be sold at craft fairs, but most would be given as gifts. At birthday parties and housewarmings, any one of the Shillues could be counted on to show up with a knitted gift, and sewn into each, the label “crafted by Rosemary Shillue.”

  At some point, probably around my mother’s normal eighteen-month window of exhaustion, she took the knitting machine up to the attic, and we never saw it again. Its place on the dining table was then taken by a machine of approximately the same size and shape: an industrial yogurt maker. My mother had read that the active cultures in yogurt could make Westerners live as long and healthy as Tibetan monks, who could walk up a mountain without breaking a sweat. We all must eat yogurt, she decided, but it was much too expensive to buy. So, she would make her own. Overnight the dining room became a pasteurization lab. Maintaining the correct temperature of the milk products became very important, so we were not allowed to walk through her delicate thermophilic environment during peak manufacturing. Once again, the emphasis was on production, not need, so even after gifting yogurt to everyone in the neighborhood, there was plenty of product left, which we of course had to eat. Little Miss Muffet herself would not have been able to put away the volume of curds we were consuming on a weekly basis.

  Her projects never ended. To this day she has an attic full of watercolors of the famous swan boats on the Boston Public Garden, which she has mounted on framed mirrors. She calls them “Boston Mirrors” and she thinks they would look just perfect in your home (and is looking for a gift shop interested in selling them—she still has a little trouble with Etsy). So far I’ve given about ten of them as gifts. But here’s the thing about my mom and all of her projects: they sprung from the same qualities that she put into everything she did, things that rubbed off on me. A relentless creativity, combined with a desire to produce goods that serve a purpose, and also make some money in the process. She loved art, but her attitude was, “Why work so hard on something if you don’t make some money?” Even though her projects were never a “success,” she just moved on to the next one, and never considered any of them a failure. As of course, she shouldn’t have. She had had to put her creativity on the back burner in order to raise a family, but she always kept it simmering, always kept busy, kept working and creating. I like to think I’m the same way, so you can go ahead and hang the tag on me: “crafted by Rosemary Shillue.”

  SO MANY OF MY BEST CHILDHOOD MEMORIES INVOLVE baseball. I used to love listening to the Red Sox games with my brother on our transistor radio. Not all the games were televised back then and there weren’t any cable packages, so listening to the radio was the main way that fans experienced the games. You’d hear each play described in detail by the play-by-play announcer, with the faint sounds of the stadium in the background, and your imagination had to do the rest of the work to bring the baseball diamond alive. I had forgotten how good listening to baseball on the radio was until my wife and I moved into an old loft down by the East River in the DUMBO area in Brooklyn. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees for the pennant (which everyone calls the ALCS these days, but I like “the pennant!”). We moved into our apartment halfway through the month, on October 15, and the power and cable had not been turned on yet, so I went up on our roof and listened to the Yankees play the Red Sox in game 6 of the pennant on my transistor radio.

  I was looking at the Brooklyn Bridge stretched out before me, a fog rising up from the East River with the Manhattan skyline behind, listening to the announcer deliver the play by play as the Red Sox came from behind to win 9 to 6 over the Yankees. It was probably the best baseball game I have ever listened to, followed the next evening by the most disastrous. The Yankees won game 7 in extra innings.

  That was in 2003, and it was the perfect setup for 2004, when the Sox swept the Yankees for the pennant and went on to sweep the Cardinals for the World Series, their first in nearly a century. It all happened so fast, no one knew how to react. My wife and I were in a new apartment by then, living downtown in the Financial District of Manhattan, and after I watched the Sox win it all from the coziness of my home I forced my wife to go out to celebrate with me. (These are the kinds of things you can do before you have kids. I’m sure Denise misses our late-night coerced celebrations as much as I do.) We crossed the street to Jim Brady’s Saloon, which had already closed its doors, because everything shuts down early in the Financial District. I had to bang on the windows and beg the bartender to open up. I demanded to be let in to celebrate the Red Sox historic World Series win. He didn’t even know it had happened; he was watching reruns of Will & Grace, as he did every night. My wife and I sat at the bar and drank Guinness while he cleaned up.

  *

  The first Red Sox game I attended at Fenway Park was in 1973 when I was seven. The Father Mac’s playground had a school bus in
the parking lot to take us to the game, and my mother sent me along on the bus with the playground “chaperones,” who were really just young teens who also hung around the playground. My daughter is seven years old now, and I can’t imagine sending her off to Yankee Stadium by herself, but such was the way of the world back then.

  The Sox were playing the Texas Rangers, and our tickets were out in the right-field bleachers. I couldn’t believe how close we were to the pitchers warming up in the bullpen. I also couldn’t believe how big and beautiful and packed with people the park was. The biggest thing I’d ever been in up to that point was a one-ring circus tent.

  The first pitch was thrown at 2:12 p.m. in the afternoon. The great thing about baseball’s obsession with statistics is that every moment of every game is recorded for history. I can look at the box scores of that afternoon game from 1973 and relive every inning. Looking over a bunch of numbers in rows and columns, it all comes rushing back to me. Bill Lee “The Spaceman” was pitching for the Red Sox. Dwight “Dewey” Evans was playing right field, Carl “Yaz” Yastrzemski was in left. Great team, great nicknames.

  I cheered along with the other Father Mac’s kids and the rest of the bleacher creatures. I heard some salty language. I ate some salty popcorn that came in one of those paper cones that you could use as a megaphone when you were finished. The Red Sox won 6 to 5, making it a perfect ending to my first live game. When it was over we all got up and started the slow march out of the stadium. The moving mass of people was daunting—I was so small that I was looking at people’s belts. My mind wandered as I walked; I read the big sign that said SECTION 10-C, I watched the men closing up their concession stands. And all of a sudden I noticed that I wasn’t around anyone I knew. I stepped to the side and let some people by. I looked for a familiar face in the crowd where there was none. I slipped back into the turgid whirlpool of people and continued in their direction. Eventually someone put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You lost, kid?” he said.

  He surprised me because I was trying very hard to look unlost but I think my height gave it away. I said, “Yeah.”

  “Follow me, I’ll get a cop.”

  In just a few steps, he flagged an officer who took me aside. We were at the gates, and people were flowing through the turnstiles. He asked me my name and I told him; he asked who I was with and I said, “Father Mac’s.” I guess that was all he needed.

  He picked me up and sat me on one of the turnstiles, with my legs dangling off the back. I watched person after person go by as they exited the park. I guess the idea was, if my people were still in the park, they’d have to see me on the way out. After a while I saw a different cop approach with a little girl in his hands. He plopped her on top of the turnstile next to me. It was Kathy Barrett, from Father Mac’s. She was alone, too. She’d come to the game without her brothers Billy and Dicky, and I’m pretty sure we had both been thrilled to be there without our older siblings, but now we were both lost. She looked over at me and smiled. We couldn’t really talk because there were people streaming between us, but I was glad to have a companion during my stint as an orphan. After about an hour, which was probably really only five minutes, a Father Mac’s playground chaperone grabbed my shoulder. “Come on, you two!” he said, clearly irritated. He ran us up the street and around the corner to an idling line of yellow school busses. We went to the back, found a seat, and rode home together, and we bonded over our shared experience. I don’t know if Kathy Barrett remembers that bus ride, but I’ve always considered that my first date.

  *

  Baseball is always portrayed as a father-son experience. Ray from Field of Dreams fantasizes saying to his father, “Hey, Dad, you want to have a catch?”

  That wasn’t my experience. Mine was more like Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” without all the sadness. Little League was one of those things your parents signed you up for to get you out of the house and off their ledger for an entire season. That’s the way kids and parents wanted it. Except for the kids whose parents were coaches, moms and dads did not spend much time at the ball field. It wasn’t like today, where parents are fully kitted out for weekends of kids’ sports competitions, chairs, coolers, and enormous cameras ready to record every second. Little League baseball was about six innings away from that scowling authoritarian you lived with, in favor of the scowling authoritarian you barely knew. It was a gift to parents and kids alike. I didn’t want my dad at the game. I already had a grumpy adult critiquing my performance.

  One of my Little League coaches was a middle-aged man who appeared to have no kids, or no family whatsoever. He would show up for practices and games with only his tobacco kit, sit on the end of the bench and pack his pipe for the first three innings, and the rest of the game smoke it. He said almost nothing, just occasional orders yelled out between puffs. If we were downwind of him, we’d all be enveloped in a cloud of smoke, but I loved it. To this day the odor of pipe tobacco means baseball to me.

  I wasn’t terrible at sports. I just wasn’t great. I had a certain amount of physical coordination and speed, but I never had a lot of strength, so at team sports I was always a fair-to-middling presence. I also lacked the killer instinct, so instead of the “thrill of competition and absolute will to win,” I played more from the “deep desire to not end up embarrassing myself.”

  The greatest indignity was being called out on strikes while at bat. Letting a ball pass by and hearing “strike three!” was the most sinking feeling. There’s a reason that “go down swinging” is an expression and a positive one. But for most kids, it’s much too tempting to try to hold out for the possibility of taking a base on balls—it’s the chief way that Little Leaguers reach first base. There were only two or three players from any team who consistently made contact with the ball; most kids would pass their time in the batter’s box hoping the pitcher would miss the strike zone.

  Thus, each at-bat was a charade, and I had to establish credibility. By taking a healthy swing at the first pitch, I was establishing an aggressive posture so no one could ever accuse me of passively courting a walk. Swinging first ensured I would never “go down looking” as there was nothing worse than letting three strikes go by without a swing.

  When I let a strike go by I’d turn and see a smoky cloud yelling “Keep your mind in the game!” “Stay focused!”

  The thing is that I was very focused—my mind was in the game, it’s just that my body wasn’t.

  Here comes the pitch . . . my mind would tell me. It’s definitely coming over the plate, but it’s a fast one, and if I’m going to swing, I probably should have started by now . . . guess not.

  “Strike two!”

  Baseball is actually a cruel sport for kids for this reason: Little Leaguers are the same age only in theory. The skill differences at that age are so pronounced as it is, but when one kid is eleven months older than another, it creates an unfair advantage comparable to steroids in pro sports. If I’m a kid born after Thanksgiving and you’re a kid born in January, you’re basically juiced.

  Luckily, as a result of my aggressive desire not to look like an idiot, I was not seen as one of the pathetic players. I wasn’t pulling my team to any victories, but I wasn’t dragging them down either. I spent a lot of time on the bench shooting the breeze with the rest of the mediocre players. (The good ones tended to stick together, as did The Pathetics.)

  I remember my one big game like it was yesterday. I was on the bench with Steven Power, and as usual I was having an unremarkable afternoon. We were down by 2 runs late in the game. And, for reasons still unknown to me I began to engage in some fearless braggadocio.

  “When I get up there I’m gonna do major damage to that ball. Major damage.”

  “Major damage?” asked Steven.

  “Major league damage. First of all, I’m going to hit a home run. Over the fence—the center-field fence. I’m going to hit a line drive right over the center . . . a frozen rope to center. It’ll be over the f
ence before the pitcher turns around to look at it.”

  “There we go!” said Steven. I wasn’t done, though. Oh no. Not at all.

  “The ball is going to be so far in the woods, they won’t be able to find it. And when I run the bases, I’m going to take these cleats”—I said, pointing to my new metal cleats—“I’m going to take these cleats and put holes in all the bases as I run around them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said, standing up and demonstrating. “One, two, three, four, five, six”—I pointed to the six cleats that lined the front bottom of my shoe—“I’m gonna make six holes in every base.” I demonstrated to Steven Power how I was going to round the bases, stabbing my cleats into each base and turning my foot, grinding and ripping the base open. I don’t know where the idea came from, but I was swept up in the excitement of my brag.

  “Can you do that?” asked Steven.

  “I will do it,” I said. “They’re gonna need new bases.”

  Then came that booming voice: “SHILLUE! Get a helmet on! You’re on deck!”

  I hadn’t even been paying attention to the order. I was so focused on building my fantasy athletic triumph for Steven Power.

  I took my resolve with me to the plate. I now had to show Steven Power that I wasn’t completely full of it. I stepped up to bat. I saw that we had runners on first and second base. As I slipped into the batter’s box, I had a steely expression like Clint Eastwood, but I was relaxed. The first pitch came quickly. It was a fastball straight over the plate. I took a nice, easy, confident swing . . . and connected directly in the center of the bat. It was the most effortless I’d ever swung, and the most perfect connection I ever made to a ball. It just clicked off the center of the wooden bat—not a big crack, just a knock, like a single knuckle on a pine door.

  And as I ran to first base I saw it sail over the head of the center fielder and over the fence, just as I said it would. The ball was in the woods before the pitcher even turned around. I could see the first base coach jumping up and down in shock. I could hear my team thundering from the bench. I had just hit a game-winning home run! My team was crowded around home plate screaming, and I could see Steven Power standing there with his mouth agape. Then I remembered my promise to Steven; I hadn’t been puncturing the bases! I’m nothing if not a man of my word, so despite being a few steps past second . . . I ran back to it and jumped on the base. Nothing happened. I stomped harder. I got both feet on the heavy canvas bag and jumped as hard as I could, trying to keep my toes stiff so the cleats would stab through the fabric. Nothing. Three more times I jumped, ferociously trying to break through.