Tales from the Dad Side (19 page)

“Dad, he said
nice cutter
!”

It went unbelievably well, and a cutter at that, whatever that is. Everybody he knew either saw
the Pitch
on television or heard about it, so to commemorate that personal moment, that game ball is encased in a Plexiglas block next to his bed, where our once-a-week cleaning lady promises she'll dust it as soon as hell freezes over.

Exactly one year later I was asked once again to throw out the first pitch, and once again I asked my son, the best athlete in the family.

“Go ahead, Dad, I did it already,” was his selflessly mature answer, but then he added, “but you're going to need to practice.”

Over the next few days he taught me how to throw a two-seamer, which would be remarkably simple for somebody with full range of shoulder motion, but I was not that person—I've got a hitch in my pitch that makes throwing the ball straight about as unlikely as seeing Rosie O'Donnell on a Thighmaster.

During one practice, my wife came out to the porch to gauge my progress exactly at the moment I threw the ball as hard as I could toward my son's mitt, only to see it hilariously swerve about seventy-five degrees to the left.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You're officially YouTube material.”

It was hopeless. I knew it, my wife knew it, and unfortunately so did my children, who despite my inability were determined to help me. One week before
My Pitch
I made the sober assessment that no amount of practice would help me throw the ball straight.

“Que sera, sera,” I quoted Doris Day, which translated means “I'll move to Mexico if it goes really bad.”

My kids continued to beg me to practice over the next few days, but I refused. I was going to wing it. Thirty-eight thousand five hundred people were waiting for my major-league debut. I had just one goal that night, and it was to make sure that I did not bounce the ball; that would horrify my children, who were standing, but not breath
ing, on the warning track. I walked to the rubber, and paused for the view. This was what John and Paul, George and Ringo, saw when the Beatles played Shea. They were so lucky—all they had to do was sing. At that moment I would have preferred to belt out “Help!” but I wasn't dressed for a musical performance.

Completely calm, because I knew I stank, I raised the ball above my head, wound up a little, took a huge step forward, and let it fly—
TWANG
went my shoulder. The headline: it did not bounce, crisis averted. Howard Johnson, the famous Met, caught it squarely in his glove, but it was low and outside, which cued the raspberries. If you are one of the seven spectators in attendance who did not boo me, many thanks, and as for the rest of you, I'm a forgiving soul, and you're off the hook for raising the middle finger of contempt in my direction.

As I review my major-league career, the proudest part was that my kids were worried about me, returning the favor of worrying about them for the previous twenty years. There are times when you see your family shift from one stage to the next, but sometimes you find yourself waking up in the seventh-inning stretch, and wonder, Where did the fifth and sixth innings go? Times change, people change. Not so long ago I was carefree and clueless, ultralighting, and booking flights to run with the bulls in Pamplona, but that was long ago and far away, and now I've moved on to my best chapter as a husband and father of three, where my current concept of a wild night on the town is extra breadsticks at the Olive Garden.

“You were great, Daddy!” Sally said after my pitch, grabbing my hand as we walked up the tunnel into my baseball retirement. Maybe I wasn't the strongest or the fastest or the tallest pitcher in our family, but I was the father of the best brownnosers on our block.

“Thanks, Sal,” I said. “You just made me feel
relevant
again.”

“Feel what?”

A genuine puzzled look on her face—she had clearly forgotten the relevance of the word she'd faked at the table, which had made
me feel older and unnecessary. Passing a resting security guard who was standing watch on a folding chair, my eldest child turned Alex Trebek.

“Dad, tell me again, who was the president who invented the folding chair?”

He wasn't horsing around—he didn't remember! I smiled broadly—they still needed me. Stop the clock, baby, I'm back!

What Happens in Dublin Stays in Dublin

I
t was like one of those cell phone service ads where a person asks a really important question and you don't hear the answer because the call gets dropped. But in this case I knew my dad was still there. I could hear him breathing. I don't know why he didn't answer me immediately; all I asked him was “Is there anyplace you'd like to visit before you die?”

Maybe I could have massaged it and asked, “anyplace you'd like to ever visit,” so it did come out a little brusquely, but there was no putting the Ben-Gay back in the tube. He sat mute on his end of the line. Living apart since college, I really wanted to spend a week with him while I still could, which meant before I got too old and whiled away my days watching
The Price Is Right
while drooling into a bucket.

Come on, I thought, make up your mind…. Who are you, Anne Heche?

Eventually he replied, “I can't think of a place.”

“Dad, I'll pay,” I blurted out before my cheapskate gene had a second to kick in.

“Spend the money on your wife and kids. There's really no place I'd like to see.”

I'd made my offer and he had declined. I would move on to other conversation, and I completely forgot my proposition until two days later, when he urgently phoned me at work. “I want to go to Ireland
and see where we came from.” Growing up Irish, we knew our people came from county Cork or Killarney or something that started with a
c
or a
k
sound. The problem was that when our forebears arrived in this country, my grandma told me, they were too loaded to remember their previous street address.

“That's a great idea. I'll get on it today.” That was husband code for “My wife will get on it today,” and Kathy had us completely booked in two days.

“I know how much you hate to drive,” she said, “so I got you guys a driver, in a stretch for a week.”

A chauffeur and limo? I was positive I'd dialed my home number; why had Mrs. Donald Trump answered the phone? “Honey, we can't afford that.”

“It's not a limousine,” she said to her lone client. “It's a bus tour. This way the driver will tell you what famous rock you're looking at.” Instantly I relaxed and removed my gold fillings from eBay.

A bus tour was perfect. That way we didn't have to worry about airport transfers or where to eat or stay while my father and I spent the week together talking about things fathers and sons need to talk about.

“Hey, Dad, pack your bags. I've got the tickets!”

“Swell, I just told my brother Phil about the trip.”

Okay, that was good to hear, because that meant he really wanted to go. My dad and his brother shared the same values, history, and face. Phil was a little taller, a little broader, a bit pinker, but had the same Roman nose and twinkling eyes. A United States marine who proudly served in the Korean War, Phil returned home to Bancroft, Iowa, and started working at the town clothing store. It was the only job he ever had, and he loved it until the day he retired.

“I think your uncle Phil seemed a little jealous we were going to Ireland.” This was exactly what children dream of: being able to treat their parents to something so spectacular that other family members will be envious and gossip about them at the next family reunion. Real life never lets you down!

“Uncle Phil's right. It'll be the trip of a lifetime,” I said, beaming.

“Stephen, I didn't know what else to tell him….”

“You are still going, aren't you?” There was urgency in my voice, prompted by a large cash purchase of nonrefundable tickets within the past hour.

“Absolutely, I'm going.” He paused dramatically. “And so's your uncle Phil.”

“Great…,” I said, in a voice that FBI analysts would say indicated I was not being completely truthful. But thanks to the Patriot Act, if speaking on an interstate telephone call, you're never obligated to tell the truth when talking to your parents.

“And, Stephen, one more thing…”

“Yes, Dad…?”

“You're paying for your uncle's trip too.”

The luck of the Irish had just run out. My once-in-a-lifetime father-son adventure to Ireland was in ruins; now I'd never have father-son heart-to-heart conversations in quaint neighborhood pubs while watching grown red-haired drunk guys dance in clogs. Wait a minute, I didn't like smoky pubs, and beer made me bloated, and I certainly never got the charm of the
Riverdance
phenomenon where shirtless men danced hard on wooden floors like they were from Terminex and their only weapon against termites was a pair of black patent leather dancing pumps.

I didn't want to pay for my uncle, and now the trip unexpectedly seemed like a monumental mistake. I could call my dad in a few days and say my boss wouldn't give me the time off. He'd never know. But then the little voice in my head reminded me that my father never asked me for anything, and it would mean a lot to him. Besides, my uncle Phil, a deacon in his parish, was one of the greatest sermonizers in Iowa history, and if I paid, with Phil's connections I'd surely wind up in the E-ZPass lane to eternal salvation.

Phil had always been there in my life. His wife, Jane, was my mom's best childhood friend and now they were my godparents, making sure I got a handsome seven-button dress shirt every year on my
birthday until I turned twenty-one, which was apparently when the godparent statute of limitations ran out, forcing me to buy my own ready-to-wear.

“I'd be happy to pay for both of you,” I said, and meant it, flat-out sounding like a dot-com billionaire who had bought Google at a dime a share.

Within a month my father and uncle and I were on a red-eye over the black Atlantic, flying from Newark to Shannon via Ireland's national airline, Aer Lingus, which loosely translated means “arrive intoxicated.”

“Stephen, Phil,” my dad pronounced as we wandered off the overnight flight into the blinding blaze of an Irish sunrise, “by this time next week, boys, we'll know where we came from.”

“So let's get this party started!” my suddenly energized uncle Phil declared, which was jarring, as that quote was from a song by the Black Eyed Peas. I presumed Phil hadn't listened to Top 40 radio since Wolfman Jack went the way of the passenger pigeon, so maybe he was cutting loose because he was out of town with his brother and his nephew, Mr. Moneybags. Whatever got into Phil, I made a mental note to keep the deacon away from the tattoo and body-piercing castles.

“Top of the morning to you, gents,” our driver and tour guide announced at the door of our gleaming fifty-passenger motor coach. With red but thinning hair, our driver would be considered height challenged; he was almost leprechaun sized, which made me feel bad when he struggled with our luggage, but to be fair, it was included in the price, and the physical lugging and loading surely saved him from paying for a gym membership.

“Ireland has forty shades of green,” our Lucky Charms driver announced on the bus public address system as we pulled out of Shannon and headed for our week of fun. I think our guide, a terrific driver and wonderful storyteller, got hired because of his voice, an authentic combination of Pierce Brosnan and Bono. Whatever he said sounded like the official voice of Ireland, when in reality he was
probably making up half of the stuff so we'd snap a photo, buy a T-shirt, or eat more boiled cabbage.

At a kilt-raising fifty-five kilometers an hour we spent our days circling Ireland's southern half. Aside from the Waterford crystal factory, where their slogan is “We make breakable stuff people can't afford,” the only other place I'd ever heard of was the Blarney Castle, home of the Blarney Stone.

Legend has it that if you kiss the stone, you'll be blessed with the gift of gab, or “blarney.” In reality, “blarney” was probably what tourists said when they discovered that to kiss the stone, you first had to pay seven euros (almost twelve dollars) for a Blarney Castle day pass, then climb slippery stairs to the highest part of the prehistoric ruin, where you'd lie on your back and inch out over the facade with the help of two strapping castle employees whose job was not to drop the customers, because five stories directly below the stone was a granite floor. This was not a tourist trap, it was a death trap. I was surprised an Irish personal injury attorney hadn't closed down this dump, where they'd been humiliating tourists since 1446.

“You gonna do it, Dad?”

“My back is killing me, Stephen….”

“Uncle Phil?” Suddenly quiet and no longer our family's own hip-hop Reverend Run, he benched himself from the stunt. “Steve, the last time I was backward and upside down was in a Korean foxhole in '52.”

Already out twenty-one euros (thirty-five bucks), I volunteered to be the first American-based member of my clan to canoodle the castle. As soon as the guy ahead of me kissed the stone, he was unceremoniously yanked back from the brink, and as he stood, he seemed momentarily dazed and dizzy. That was a new hazard I had not imagined—the possibility I would simply fall off the side. The Blarney boys waved me over, and as I approached, I instantly noticed they both had a whiff of lunch liquor on their breath.

“Okay, Jack and Daniel, let's go.”

Surely puzzled by what the damned Yankee was talking about,
the handlers nonetheless pushed me out over the castle crevasse, allowing me to grab hold of two iron bars that framed the stone. At that moment I was upside down and flat on my back suffering from a bout of extra-dizzy vertigo. Trying to get it over as fast as possible, I gave it just a peck on her wall, scraping the end of my nose on the way back up.

“How did it taste?” the burly handler asked as he steadied me for the trip down.

“I've had better castle,” I joked, dabbing the blood off the tip of my nose.

“Let me let you in on a little secret.” He lowered his voice to explain that at night after the pubs closed, the local lads jumped the gate and came up there to pee on the stone that tourists would kiss nonstop the next day. Why he had selected me for this true confession was a mystery, but if he was trying to gross me out, he had picked the wrong guy. I'm a father of three who has no problem changing a poopy diaper with one hand while holding a Manwich in the other.

On the descent I started an hour-long hypochondriacal review of the possible diseases I could develop after positive lip contact with a Guinness-borne kidney infection. Once the bus pulled up at our hotel for the night we adjourned to the pub, where I had a double gin and tonic that was heavy on the gin, light on the tonic. Alcohol was a proven antiseptic. They always used booze in the westerns to cleanse a gunshot wound. It was the Irish equivalent of gargling with Purell.

In reality, I would have had the same drink anyway because going to a different pub each night was all we did. It was all anybody did—have you ever heard of anybody going to Ireland for the bowling? While Phil and I would sample the many chewy beers, my father would methodically research our family origins.

“You got a phone book?” he'd ask the bartender.

Dad wasn't looking for a specific phone number. He was looking for actual family members, people who spelled their names just like we did. He found a few families that were close, but they always messed it up with an extra letter or two. After five days, he'd checked
the phone books in numerous restaurants, retail stores, and rail stations all over the Emerald Isle, and not once did he find our family name.

“Stephen, come here!” he called at the conclusion of a factory tour. At the pay phone over by the snack bar, he had found four families that spelled their names exactly like ours. Eureka! We had hard evidence of actual Irish relatives for the first time in our lives. A college researcher would certainly document such a momentous discovery by making a photocopy from the phone book, or at the very least making a detailed notation of the name, address, and phone number. My father had his own system: when he found a matching name, he'd rip that page out of the phone book and wad it up in his pocket.

Before we'd left America, I'd made an appointment at Ireland's National Library's Genealogical Service; that's where the world went to officially trace Irish heritage. “Gentlemen, please have a seat as I check the computer,” the clerk said in a Brenda Fricker voice.

“Mr. Doocy, it looks as if your family first settled…oh.” Mid-sentence she paused in a jarring way, as if a dire warning had just popped up on her screen from Interpol that we were armed and dangerous cat burglars from America, and she should quietly alert the proper authorities.

“What's the matter?”

“I can't say for sure, but it appears…” She dangled the secrets of our family history away from us a few seconds longer, until she revealed, “Your family's records…were destroyed in the fire. Sorry.”

Fire?

Stunning was the only way to describe finding out that the national government of your motherland says you do not officially exist in its database and neither do any members of what you thought was your family. We sat there sobered, as if we'd discovered that whenever our kids needed batteries, they took the ones from the smoke detector over our bed.

“They called it the Four Courts fire. It was in 1922.” She recounted
how that blaze wiped out many Irish families' histories. I looked over at my father, who had a blank but pained expression, the same sad look as when everybody excuses himself from the table and stiffs you with an astronomical dinner bill.

“There's another possibility.” The clerk threw us a lifeline. “Your name is misspelled.”

“It's D-o-o-c-y,” my dad said.

“I know that's how
you
spell it, but over the last one hundred fifty years, when many family names were entered into the county record books for births, baptisms, deaths, and land purchases, sometimes incorrect information was recorded.”