Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

  The older I got, the more stories like that I heard, and the more bewildering my dad seemed. How did he get this way? Did he decide to be this way, or did it just happen to him? As I grew up I began to appreciate how strange my dad was, yet it’s still something I’m still learning about, and it’s still something I feel like I’ve barely begun to figure out. His kindness is not something I could ask him about, because it’s not something he would ever acknowledge or admit. Like my mom says, he has a short memory.

  When I was a Cub Scout, I entered the annual Pinewood Derby contest, which involved carving a race car out of a little block of wood. I had no idea how to carve, sand, saw, or use any kind of tools whatsoever—I’m the kind of guy whose knowledge of how to build or fix things runs dry after “righty tighty lefty loosey.” So I just kind of scraped the edges off the side of the car and painted it this awesome shade of purple.

  The evening of the race, I got a look at the other kids’ cars, which were sleek little Stingrays and Mustangs and Corvettes with historically accurate detailing. I got a vague sense that I was punching above my weight, automotively speaking. When they put all our little wooden cars on the slide track to see them race to the bottom, mine did not reach the finish line. In fact, it didn’t budge—I didn’t realize I was supposed to sand the bottom of the car, so the plastic wheels on my model didn’t even touch the track. It just kind of sat there, quivering. The race was over in thirty seconds and my car hadn’t even left the starting gate.

  Yet the Cub Scout troop masters gave me a purple ribbon anyway. First they handed out the trophies for first, second, and third place, as well as various ribbons for exceptional woodwork. Then they announced I had won the ribbon for a previously unmentioned category: “Best Homemade Car.” It was obvious they just made up that award, and I had the vague sense they were making fun of me, but I was glad to accept the ribbon anyway.

  On the drive home, when I asked my dad what “Best Homemade Car” meant, he just laughed. “It means you were the only kid who did the car himself. Most of those kids weren’t even allowed to touch their cars.”

  My dad’s a good sport, always up for an adventure, letting his kids talk our easily-talked-into-things dad into things. When I started reading books, he’d bring me books like Tom Sawyer, and when I started singing along to the radio, he brought me records like “American Pie.” When he was forty, working in a bank, he decided to go to law school at night, but he still coached my sisters’ basketball teams. (How did he do that? It’d be pointless to ask him. Maybe he doesn’t even know.)

  He eventually quit his day job and started practicing law on his own when he was fifty. He has worked hard to make his life happen, but he doesn’t acknowledge any stress or strain about it at all. He has never worried about whether things will work out. He’s easy. He likes his habits—listening to the radio, drinking coffee, pronouncing the word California wrong (he calls it “Califonia.” Why? Nobody knows), calling blue jeans “dungies,” and speaking in his unreconstructed accent. When he was in the army, he went to Mass once and gave the responses in Latin, like everybody did back then. When the service was over, the chaplain asked, “So what part of Boston are you from?” That’s right: My dad’s Boston accent could make a man wince even when my dad was speaking Latin.

  MY DAD WAS NEVER MUCH of a disciplinarian. He never told us not to do anything, because he figured, why put ideas into our heads? It was infuriating, like being in jail. So we never did anything. We had no idea what we were missing, really.

  And we had absolutely no idea that my dad had been a bit of a hell-raiser in his youth at St. Gregory’s. We never heard any of these stories, because my aunt, who knew them all, lived in the convent as a Carmelite nun, with a vow of silence. Until I was seventeen, I’d only seen her during visiting hours at the convent, in full habit, talking through a screen like in old prison movies. After twenty-five years as a Carmelite, she changed vocations and became a Dominican, which meant she could now do counseling for hospital patients and wore groovy white pantsuits instead of a habit. She also came to visit more, and told us stories of my dad’s wild youth. We were appalled to learn how much trouble we had missed out on; maybe the secret of parenting is having your big sister take a vow of silence.

  He gave us permission to take a day off from school whenever we wanted, with the result that none of us ever took a day off from school. His way of parenting my sisters and me was to compliment us for things we weren’t even doing, but his compliments made us want to start doing them. If he was annoyed by my impatience, he would compliment me on my patience. Somehow that would instinctively make me strive to be more patient. Why? I don’t know. Things that come so torturously to me are a breeze for him.

  My dad assumes the best in people. It can be maddening. He voted for Gerald Ford for president in 1976, even though he was a Democrat. Why? Because 1) he felt bad for Ford, 2) he knew Massachusetts was going Democrat anyway, and 3) he didn’t want Ford to be completely humiliated in the popular vote. He still thinks Ford did the right thing by pardoning Nixon. We argue about this every couple of years. My dad says it was important for Ford to pardon everybody and put all that trouble behind us. When I point out that this is not what happened—Nixon was the only Watergate conspirator who got pardoned, and the others went to jail for him, while he got a mansion out in Southern California with a fat pension and a valet—my dad counters, “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  That’s how my dad sees the world. He is kind to people because to him it just makes sense. That doesn’t make sense at all.

  He always had confidence in me, so when he taught me things, like driving in the rain or tying a tie, he assumed I would get them right. He’s always amused when I don’t. The night he taught me to shave, I wish I’d asked more questions. I didn’t know this traditional father-son interaction was happening until he came home from work one night with a bunch of shaving supplies. He’d rehearsed for our lesson, but I hadn’t, and I’m still not sure I learned the right technique. Shaving is a daily task that I manage to get wrong every single day. There’s a spot on my right jaw that I never reach on the first pass, forcing me to reshave my jaw three or four times. I wish I’d asked my dad when I was sixteen whether this was a family trait, or a standard shaving glitch, or just me. But the main thing my dad wanted to emphasize is that shaving isn’t a “do it all at once” task—it’s a “do it every day” task. His shaving credo, which he repeated at least three times, was “Whatever you don’t get today, you’ll get tomorrow.”

  I am a “do it all at once” kind of guy. I am not a “do it today, then start over from scratch and do it again tomorrow” kind of guy. I get flustered at tasks I am unable to complete, which is almost all of them. Things like grief and love and mourning. Things like being a husband, or being a son. The hard work of life that doesn’t get done, because there’s always more of it to do—I have trouble wrapping my head around these things. Whenever I was overwhelmed by the job of mourning, I recalled the words of the comedian Stephen Wright, who boasted, “I walked my dog all at once. I took him to Argentina and back, then I told him, ‘You’re done.’” I wish.

  Dogs do not accept this logic, which is one of the reasons humans seem to need dogs around, just to remind us that nothing works this way, unfortunately. You have to walk that dog every day, with no mileage credit for what you did yesterday. Work doesn’t get finished, and neither does play. You start over every day, and what you don’t shave off today will be waiting tomorrow, until you run out of tomorrows and leave behind more work for others to do. You fight the sensation of getting overwhelmed by the repetition of things. You build up some momentum but you don’t get a climax. You don’t even know if you’ve done your day’s work right, because nothing’s ever really done. That’s very disconcerting to me.

  That’s what being an adult is like, at least in the version of it that my dad passed on to me. The work of fatherhood must be like that, too—when he was the age I am now, I was a
lready a sullen college student, and I can barely imagine the aggravation of having to live with a nineteen-year-old version of me, who was just like me now, except more so. That nineteen-year-old boy and I have our differences, but we both like to focus on one task, do it all day, do it to death, do it clean, and see it through to completion before moving on to the next task. It’s constantly a challenge to leave today’s work undone for tomorrow. We think adulthood would be simpler and more efficient if the world had the sense to conform to our rules.

  My dad has done all sorts of tasks for me that I will never live long enough to find out about, thing I’ll never notice, much less thank him for. These are the tasks that do not have heroic completions or satisfactory results or purple ribbons. These are adult tasks that call for patience and diligence. These things seem to come so naturally to my dad; he always seems amused at the way others of us—like his son—have to keep learning them.

  TWELVE

  11:19 p.m.:

  Bold Thady Quill

  “Bold Thady Quill” is an old Irish drinking song about the adventures of a hell-raising boyo who carouses and blackguards and chases women and fights and barely staggers into the next verse. “For rambling, for roving! For football and courting! For drinking black porter as fast as you fill! In all your days roving, you’ll find none so jovial, as our Muskerry sportsman, the Bold Thady Quill!”

  This song reminds me of my mom, because it’s the song I sing for her on special occasions. I sing it on the phone and in person, on birthdays, wedding anniversaries, any time we’re together and the hour gets festive. When it’s Thanksgiving and the fire is lit and the stingers are poured, it’s only a matter of time before my mom declares, “Let’s have a sing-song,” and we all start singing the old Irish songs. Over the course of any holiday weekend, I will sing “Bold Thady Quill” for my mom until everyone’s sick of it.

  I didn’t realize how much my mom loved this song until one day years ago when we were visiting cousins in Ireland. On the road west out of County Cork, the car broke down, so we stood waiting for the tow truck by the banks of the River Lee. I casually sang a few lines from this song—“the great hurling match between Cork and Tipperary, / ’Twas played in the park on the banks of the Lee”—and my mom recognized the tune. So I sang it until the tow truck came, and if you’ve ever waited for an Irishman to show up, you know that gave us plenty of time to get though all the verses. My mom and I were each surprised to discover how much the other one liked the song. I’ve been singing it for her ever since.

  We know this song from an old Clancy Brothers record that her mother had, called Come Fill Your Glass with Us: Irish Songs of Drinking and Blackguarding. The liner notes claimed Thady Quill was a real-life athlete from Cork, still alive at the time the record came out, a star in the Irish sport of hurling. (Ever watch a pack of grown men attack each other with clubs for thirty seconds? That’s what a hurling match looks like.) But I really know nothing about Thady Quill, or whether any of his exploits in this song ever happened. For me, he’s just the guy in this song, and I feel like I’ve come to know him, because he’s part of my duties as a son. I take my mother’s car to Jiffy Lube, I go through her fridge and throw out all the expired salad dressing, and I sing her “Bold Thady Quill.” I always will.

  I’M ALWAYS SINGING FOR MY mom, in a way. She only has the one son, so she doesn’t have the luxury of having both a loud son and a quiet son. I started out quiet, but I’ve learned to get louder for her. For my last birthday, when Ally and I were heading out to Sing Sing for karaoke, she asked me to sing an Elvis song for her. (I did “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”) My mom likes her children loud; she made us this way. So I feel close to her when I sing. I’m always trying to impress her. Singing is just one of the ways.

  She’s the most passionate person I have ever encountered in my life, and when she has something important to say, she doesn’t beat around the bush. One day, right after I moved to Virginia, she called me up. I had just started my graduate studies in the English department. I was brimming with plans and ambitions. She listened to me rave for a few minutes about everything I had gone there to achieve.

  “You know, you have impressed me,” she said. “You have impressed me, permanently. Your father and I are both very pleased with you. You don’t have to do anything else the rest of your life to impress me.”

  Why did she say that? I don’t know. I’ve never asked her. I’m not as good as she is with a blunt question like that. But I wonder all the time. How did she know to say that? Did she realize she had just said a few words that I would remember for the rest of my life? For that matter, did I realize? How could I? I was only twenty-three. How could I begin to have any idea how many of my friends would live their whole lives in hopes of hearing their mother say something like that?

  I mean, I already knew I impressed my mom. She’s not shy. She had loved me fiercely my whole life and she never let me (or anyone else in earshot) forget it. So I knew. But hearing it out loud is different. And I will never suffer those particular fears and doubts. I can go right on trying to impress my mom, because I’m never worried about whether it will work. I always know, because she came right out and said so.

  Again, it’s one of those moments that probably can’t be fully understood by those of us who aren’t parents. What did she think after she said that? Did she understand she had just changed my life? Did she know it was a big deal? In her case, I absolutely think she did. My mom isn’t shy about saying things, when they need saying. But she knew this was something she wanted to say. Whatever happens the rest of my life, I will never not hear these words.

  Once in my teen years, in the classic style of any ostentatious and insufferable adolescent seeker, I gave my mom a copy of the Tao Te Ching for her birthday. She opened to a random page and read aloud, from chapter 13: “Accept being unimportant.” Then she closed the book, handed it back to me with a smile, and said, “See, I could never accept being unimportant.”

  She never is. She has always been involved and decisive. She raised me to distrust limp handshakes. One of the things she imprinted on me was flinching when people say “myself” as a euphemism for “me.” The way my mom sees it, if you’re talking about yourself, saying you want something, saying you don’t like something, making a demand—go ahead and say “me.” It saves time. My mom worked all her life as a teacher in the Boston public schools—she values direct communication, and she’s good at it.

  Mom takes pride in telling people, “I am a shaped-up mother.” When she was training student teachers, she would tell the class to speak their minds when they had any questions or complaints. “Don’t be shy,” she says. “I have three daughters. They shape me up. So tell me what you think straight to my face. I’m used to it.”

  Me, I feel more adept at writing words than saying them out loud. I guess part of the reason I love singing words is that it’s less scary than speaking them. These Irish songs will always be important to me because they’re the songs I sing for her.

  OUR FAMILY, LIKE ANY IRISH family, knows a lot of these songs. My sisters and I grew up hearing them on the Irish Hit Parade on WROL every weekend. Whether it’s rebel songs or drinking songs, there’s usually a plot, a girl, and a few killings. There are funny songs, like “The Wild Rover,” that warn about the evils of dissolute living, although you have to get a pint or two into dissolute living to sing them. There are also the long, slow songs where people get shot or hanged or deported or haunted by the ghosts of Spancil Hill.

  For me, these songs are mixed up with family memories, and as my sisters and I bring new people into the family, it means we bring these people into the songs. The first time I took Ally to Glenbeigh, my grandmother’s old village in County Kerry, we sat in the pub as the guitarist sitting by the fireplace sang about wars and rebellions and ghosts. He did the latter-day classic “The Green Fields of France,” a song that goes on for about a month. The chorus repeats the question: “Did they beat the drum sl
owly? Did they play the pipe lowly? Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?” After seven or eight verses, Ally whispered to me: “Have they lowered him down yet?”

  Not quite yet. These songs go on and on, just like we do. Some of my earliest memories are visiting Ireland as a little kid, sitting around the pub watching my parents and aunts and uncles and cousins singing. I heard these songs with my grandparents. My dad’s grandfather, the fifth John O’Brien in a row born in South Boston, used to play them on the mandolin. On fancy occasions, you’d hear them played on accordion by local legend Joe Joyce the People’s Choice. I got to meet Joe Joyce one night in 1988, during a long night of drinking with my dad, shortly before he played my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party. He was surprisingly candid about his life’s work. “You get tired of some of these old songs,” he told me. “You know, ‘Danny Boy.’ But you keep singing them.”

  When my family’s together, everybody takes a turn singing—everybody has their party piece to trot out. I go for the fast ones; my brother-in-law John prefers ballads with high body counts. My toddler nieces sing “Call Me Maybe” or selections from Annie. (Still topping the little-girl charts after all these years, right? Amazing.) The set list might vary, but there are some songs you have to sing, and “Bold Thady Quill” became mine. It’s an essential part of my life as a son. You better watch what you sing, if you don’t want to sing it for the rest of your life.

  When my grandparents came to America in 1924, they brought nothing with them except the songs. My grandmother, Bridie Courtney from County Kerry, hoped that she’d get a job, make some money, go back home, but there was really nothing to go back to. My grandfather, David Twomey from Cork, swore he’d never return, and never did. He hated every minute of being a farmer; when I was a little kid, I asked him if he ever missed the farm, and he said, “My boy, I was so glad to be off it, I didn’t know I was working.” They came to America and got good jobs, she as a maid, he as a brake inspector on the New Haven Railroad; then after working his fifty years there, he became a security guard at a department store. They met soon after they arrived in Boston, at a Thanksgiving dance, and in classic Celt fashion married nine years later. By the time I was born, they’d both been living in America for forty years, but they both spoke with their native brogues, and they both loved all the old songs, a connection to the old country, “the other side,” as they called it, and although they had vastly different memories of Ireland, they never thought of letting go of the songs.