Ray Hedin

My Father’s Bowling Trophies

MY FATHER’S BOWLING TROPHIES SIT on a shelf in my garage, undusted, splayed in all directions, next to bottles of Miracle-Gro and Weed-B-Gon. They sketch out a good deal of my father’s suburban, parish-league bowling career: Hi Series, Kuples Klub, 1953–54, G. Hedin, 648; Kuples Klub, 1968–69, High Game (unspecified); Kuples Klub, 1st Place, 1980–81, G. Hedin, League Champion, St. Petronille, 1981–82; League Champion (plaque missing). They have sat there since my wife and I moved to this house five years ago. In our previous house they were tucked away in a basement cupboard. They are slowly making their way public, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
    Fourteen years ago, after my father died of a stroke, my stepmother offered me his trophies along with his two-finger bowling ball. How could I refuse? But what to do with them has been a problem ever since. I could put them back into storage, admitting their hold on me but keeping them private, my own little family secret. I could leave them on the garage shelf, there only for my wife, Ivona, and me. Or I could display them; isn’t that what trophies are for?
    But where would I do that? In my study, for my own pleasure? That’s not really a display. High on a kitchen shelf, away from normal sight lines but not quite hidden either? Or right out there, in our family room, the most public room in the house, where they would indeed be noticed—and commented on? Why does that prospect make me nervous? And in any case, why did I put those trophies on that particular garage shelf, where they stare at me every time I get out of the car?
    I know at least why I don’t toss them out: they conjure some of my strongest memories of my father and his enthusiasms. For nearly forty years, from soon after the time we moved out of Chicago to his dream suburb of Glen Ellyn in 1950 until his death in 1987, he bowled every Friday night in the St. Petronille parish men’s bowling league and every other Sunday night in the parish Kuples Klub league. My father was too shy, too unsure of himself to join the league on his own; my mother signed him up. He must have done some bowling back in Chicago, because he won his first individual trophy, for high series, only three years after we moved out from the city he was so eager to escape. He had a wide-sweeping hook and a 160 average over the years; as his trophies attest, he would occasionally get hot, once running off nine strikes in a row before leaving the ten pin in the tenth frame.
    On my once-a-month weekends back home from the seminary I attended in high school, I would often go down to the smoke-filled, basement-level lanes and watch him. I was a minor-level jock myself, I had not yet developed any snobbishness toward bowling, and I enjoyed his skill. Even more, I enjoyed his total immersion in the whole enterprise: the beer drinking (low man in the fifth frame paid for everyone), the laughter, the comradeship, his unabashed pleasure at every strike and every hard spare. My father was quiet around people he did not know, but he was outgoing, even gleeful, around his friends and buddies.
    He took undisguised delight in a wide range of things for which my sisters, Pat and Karen, and I eventually held him accountable when we came to embrace anti-middle-class sophistication. He loved TV westerns—and to our later horror, Lawrence Welk—so the family ate in the living room four or five nights a week in front of “Maverick,” “Wagon Train,” “Yancy Derringer,” “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide.” (I still sing the themes to most of those shows, at least when my own daughter is not around to register her generation’s scorn.) What he loved most about our house, an airy, two-story, ivy-covered brick that fulfilled his long-standing urge to move up from his family’s working-class background, was that it had “forty-six openings.” He sold Catholic church goods for a living, eventually came to own the store at just the wrong moment, when the Vatican Council had wiped out the market for rosaries and holy cards and many other staples of the trade. Even as owner he was the primary salesman as well and so was on the road several days a week. Returning home, he would invariably boast that “I was in Rockford at 5:45 and made it home by 7:00.” Speed and distance meant something to him, though I never knew quite what. (That he was getting somewhere? That he could go places?) I was content to raise my eyebrows and wince at his repetitiveness and the strangeness of this boast; it became more important to hone my irony than to understand him.
    Those who say that routine dulls the senses never met my father; his routines freed him from anxiety, loosened him up to have a good time. When Pat went away to St. Teresa’s College in Minnesota and my parents drove up to see her, they would stop, at my father’s insistence, at the same rest stops every time, eat at the same franchise restaurants, and stay at the same motel (where my mother would have to scrub the bathroom with Lysol before my father would use it). It was not surprising that bowling and horseshoes were his favorite sports: the same motion again and again, the groove that brought comfort and satisfaction. Every workday on which he did not go out to sell, he would ride the 8:10 Chicago-and-Northwestern commuter train into the Loop and the 5:35 back out. And on every one of those days, he would sit with the same men in the same seats .(a different group each way), rent cards and a lapboard from the same conductor, and play poker until they hit the station. It was nickel-ante poker, not insignificant stakes in the 1950s, but it wasn’t the money that lured my father—he more or less broke even over the years—it was the ritualized camaraderie, “the nonstop needling,” as he described it, always with a satisfied grin. He gave as well as he took, though from what I knew of some of these men, I suspect he gave more gently than he got. Yet the exchanges were immensely satisfying to him, registering as they did suburban acceptance, the belonging and validation he longed for. He was well aware that he did not make a lot of money, certainly less than almost all of his peers, and so my sisters and I became aware of it too. But in other ways—Look, they needle me, they let me needle them—he had made it and loved having made it.
    The most obvious signs of this pleasure were the afternoon horseshoe-pitching sessions in our backyard. There, on nearly every Sunday of the summer, my father and his buddies, as many as a dozen of them, would gather after Mass and pitch horseshoes on his blue clay courts (“to match the color of my clear-blue eyes,” he would remind us all, repeatedly) until dusk and, after I was commandeered to dig a 150-foot trench so he could lay electrical wires to light the courts, into the evening. He was one of the two best horseshoe pitchers in his crowd, and though he would grin from ear to ear when he won, I never heard him crow or try to dominate anyone. The benefit of winning was not the triumph itself but the right to keep playing; he loved to play, he was a playful man. And it was his backyard, after all, to which other (Catholic) men who had also emigrated to. the suburbs, who belonged there or seemed to, and who constituted my father’s modest version of the establishment, had willingly, even eagerly gravitated under the correct assumption that a good time was to be had at the Hedins’s. My father loved being their host, he loved the appreciation they expressed to my mother for cooking hamburgers for all of them every week, and he conveyed his appreciation to her—which must have been why she continued to do this for so many years, showing irritation only in the late 1960s the one sign I saw that she was registering feminist impulses. During these sessions—which I often took part in, becoming one of the better pitchers myself, though never as good as my father—he floated on a cushion of beer foam and good feeling. In his backyard, my father, one of five sons who had competed for attention from a stern Germanic mother who didn’t dole out much affection to any of them, was an insider at last.
    My father had games for all seasons; he needed to keep the lines of connection intact. In the spring and summer, horseshoes; in the fall and winter, bowling; and, as a bonus, during Christmas season, my Lionel train set. Nominally mine, that is. When I was in first grade, my parents bought me a basic oval track that came with one engine and four freight cars, then added to the set every year. By the time I reached eighth grade, the set had two engines (one diesel, one steam, the latter complete with aspirin-shaped smoke pellets), two transformers, about a dozen cars (coal car, cattle car, milk car, log car, passenger cars-the classic Lionel repertoire), an inner oval connected to the outer track, and two side spurs. Somewhere along the line my father had mounted the entire set onto a sturdy, four-legged plywood platform and appropriated it.
    He would invite his friends, men similarly eager for seasonal stimulus, for Sunday-afternoon railroad games. They would set themselves a goal: start with six cars lined up in this order behind this engine and six more lined up behind the other engine, then see how long it would take (how many switches and drop-offs on the spur lines) to get the cars in a different, specified order. My father had built a restraining barrier for the setup, thus rendering the inevitable spinouts and multi-car wrecks relatively risk-free to the equipment; the crashes were of course the purpose of the whole exercise. Money changing hands, Budweiser spilling onto the track, raucous laughter at each crash and near-crash—an exuberant scenario that replayed every week. The train would come down from the attic before Christmas, replace the living room couch, and, my mother’s protests notwithstanding, stay in action until Easter, when the weather allowed for a move to the horseshoe courts. I was allowed to watch, and to play with my set when my father’s gang was not around.
    My father loved to be called on to do favors for friends. I remember one striking occasion when he spent an entire weekend afternoon snaking out blocked plumbing for his friend Adrian Carl. He came back to the house exhausted, covered with slime, and aglow; to be singled out for such requests made him feel valued, special, worthy. Working with priests offered him similar satisfaction. Selling church goods to them, as he did for forty years, he established close and satisfying ties. I never heard him say a bad word about a priest. They were God’s representatives; they looked at him with God’s eyes. For them to find him trustworthy and likable meant that he was indeed worth something; their smiles left an indelible mark on his soul, his own version of ordination. What more could he ask for?
    He once broke his nose bowling. I wasn’t there to see it, and I still have a hard time visualizing it. One of his friends apparently thought it would be amusing to trip him after he picked his ball off the rack. Somehow, with other men close by and his arms pinned to his sides, he fell forward, unable to protect his face, and smashed his nose on the hardwood lanes. Amazingly, he did not tell this story angrily but with great satisfaction; it was one of his buddies who did this to him, and so, in the manner of frat brothers who smile warmly at those who induce them to vomit, he was happy to have been designated worthy of this attention. You only disfigure the one you love.
    My father relished playing but did not like to watch. He never developed the passionate stance of the true fan, as I would. Games to him were forms of exercise and bonding mechanisms, a way to connect with other players in the flesh; he was not much interested in identifying with teams whose members he could never meet, could never invite into his backyard. He took me to my first Cubs game in 1950 when I was six. I remember the game vividly. The Dodgers scored three runs in the top of the first, and I was despondent until the Cubs scored four in the bottom of the inning and went on to win 7-6. I could give you the Cubs starting lineup right now (Ransom Jackson, Eddie Miksis, Roy Smalley ... ), but I don’t think my father could have done it the day after the game. The event, for him, was to be with me—it took me many years to appreciate that—and we could have been watching the pavement dry for all he cared.
    Every summer after that first game, he and my mother took Pat, Karen, and me to one Cubs doubleheader. It was an ordeal for my mother—even less of a spectator than my father and hypersensitive to the sun as well—the beginning of lifetime fandom for the three siblings, and six hours of family time for my father. In July of 1955 he caught, barehanded, a towering pop foul off the bat of Pee Wee Reese. While the rest of us ducked for cover, he stood tall, reminding himself, he told all of us later (many times), “your left hand, George, not your bowling hand.” I can still hear the ball smack into his palm, a clean and painful catch, though I was too far under my box seat to see it happen. He gave me the ball; I inscribed it—Pee-Wee Reese, eighth inning, July 23, 1955—and displayed it for years. That was a trophy that inspired no ambivalence; its disappearance after one of my many later U-Haul moves haunts me still.
    Maybe because we went to games together infrequently, I remember virtually every time we did. Given free tickets, my father once took me to the North American Curling Championships at the Chicago Stadium. With similarly free tickets, he and I saw the then-annual, late-December football game between the Chicago City League champion and the Catholic League champion. That is, we saw it intermittently; it snowed so hard that for much of the game we could not see the stands on the other side of the field. Neither of us cared much about high school football, but Catholic loyalties at least gave us a team to choose, and my father actually rooted, fortifying himself and his friend Adrian Carl along the way with “snake medicine” from his flask. Our picture was in the Chicago Sun-Times the next day. Four hardy fans up from the Deep South were sitting in front of us, sufficiently stunned by the snow to be worthy of an article, and the three of us served as background for their picture. I’ve mislaid that memento too.
     Later, when I became the starting forward on the seminary varsity basketball team, my parents and sisters would drive to Milwaukee for some of our Sunday games and then take me out to dinner. A decent but not outstanding player, I had a couple of my better games with my family watching, scoring fifteen points in one of them. I remember Karen cheering wildly and looking at me with young-sister admiration afterwards. But for my father, the important thing was being there to support his son. He was proud of me, he said, but had no post-game analysis or advice. He was never, I’m happy to say, a Little League father; he had nothing but scorn for the fathers who ranted at the umpires and demanded perfection from their sons. Why would anyone go to a game and alienate himself: wasn’t connection the whole point? “Just do your best” was the most insistent counsel he gave me, in regard to academics as well as sports, and so I did, most of the time, and felt grateful for the prod that was not a stick.

WHE I LEFT THE SEMINARY after college, I went into flight mode. I did everything I could to pull back, not only from the church—I was so far inside that I had to get away in order to breathe—but from Glen Ellyn and its suburban, middle-class ethos. I wanted the life of the mind, and so Glen Ellyn came to represent everything that was inert. I veered to the political left, and so Glen Ellyn became the Neanderthal right. After years of seminary confinement and routine, I wanted travel, stimulus, the thrill of the new, and so Glen Ellyn became insularity and stagnation. After a world of easy dichotomies—Catholic/non-Catholic, good/evil—I wanted complexity. And when I began graduate school in English at Wisconsin, traveled to Europe for a year on the cheap with my first wife, and later got a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Virginia, I became enamored of what I saw as the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan tastes of the academic world; suburban tastes, and in particular my father’s, became the embodiment of everything I disdained. Not for me American cars, wall-to-wall carpeting, bland food, nightly TV, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. And especially not for me the superficial, adolescent, beer-drinking, back-slapping male bonding that the horseshoe courts, train crashes, and bowling alley came to represent. I wanted something more, something deeper, more adult, more nuanced. When I moved from Charlottesville to Bloomington, my own bowling ball disappeared in the move, and I had no trouble even then identifying unconscious motives.
    These changes were not lost on my parents, nor were they meant to be. When my post-seminary hair length reached two inches, then three, with no sign of stopping there, they saw this for what it was, what my generation insisted it was: a change of taste that implied a value shift. Yet my father never blanched at the five-hour, dinner-table-and-beyond political arguments that inevitably ensued, my sisters and I leagued against our parents. He relished those debates, bragged about them to his friends. The family that argues together stays together, he insisted; we were still connected.
    When my first wife and I married in 1969, the wedding—she in a miniskirt, I in a turtleneck and Nehru jacket, a Nina Simone ballad as our hymn, e. e. cummings as our sacred text—was a taste test in the extreme for my father, and though I remember the look on his face when his turn came for the wedding toast out of a communal frisbee, he drank nonetheless; whatever disapproval he felt, he kept to himself.
    Whatever he may have felt about my movement away from his world, he was thrilled about the world I moved into. Never having finished high school, he was immensely proud of his son the Ph.D., the professor. Businessman though he was, and always strapped for money, he admired my willingness to do what mattered to me without expecting to get rich. When I first started publishing academic articles, I would show them to him, and he would read through them, shaking his head in admiration: “Boy, the words, the words.” He once, and only once, asked me—shyly, out of a genuine curiosity—what an English professor did. I blew the question off—“Oh, we just take quotes out of one book and put them in another”—a statement far more cynical than I actually felt. A small moment, not so small in retrospect; I’d give a good deal to have the chance to redo it.
    But if my father displayed no reservations about my new world, I gradually developed a few of my own, or at least about my place in it. There is no question that much of what I wanted I have found in academia. At Indiana University, where I teach American literature, I have interesting colleagues who tead full-length books and who don’t slap backs. Bloomington is a small cosmopolitan city with a good deal to offer per square inch, and teaching, after twenty-seven years, still kicks me into gear, though the tank empties out faster now. In most ways I am happy to think like the academic I am: balanced, analytic, ready to—unable not to—make distinctions in everything I say. What I offer with the one hand, I counter with the other before anyone else has a chance to. I speak and write with parenthetical interruptions that qualify my assertions before they are out of my mouth. Everything I believe, everything I assert, all the choices I make are shadowed by my awareness that it could be different, that there are no absolutes and very few certainties. In the intellectual realm, I swim in ambiguity, and the water feels fine.
    But what functions well in the intellectual realm translates, in the realm of taste, into near paralysis, at least for someone whose past and present pull him in different directions. For although in many matters of taste I can revel in my cherished ambivalence—I liked this about the movie, but I didn’t like that—in others I finally have to choose: to dress one way rather than another at a given moment (I rely on my daughter to buy my ties), to put this picture on my wall and not that one, to order hamburger or sushi. Half the time I don’t know what I’m going to order until I open my mouth to do it. It has become hard for me to know what I like and to like it unequivocally; I have become two-handed about nearly everything, double-voiced whenever I speak to myself. So, on the one hand, I have come to enjoy a range of food that goes far beyond the meat and mashed potatoes of my youth (though by this time Glen Ellyn has too). But on the other, I have fantasized for years about inviting my most refined colleagues for a dinner of macaroni and cheese, Pringles, Jell-O and Cool Whip for dessert, and wine cooler to wash it all down.
    Several years ago I came to the startlingly obvious realization that it had proven easier to turn my back on my upbringing than actually to escape it, that I am living in most ways a very middle-class, suburban life and enjoying it: a wife, two children, two cars, a house, and three color TVs. All to the good, I now insist to myself (repeatedly). But then my other voice joins in, and the two are not harmonious. Yes, my wife and I have children. (A clear caving-in to middle-class values! According to one of my colleagues, every child you have means one less book you will write.) We also have a home in what can only be called a subdivision. (But it’s a high-quality subdivision! A well-made house, with nice individual touches! And only some of the rooms have wall-to-wall carpeting!) Okay, someone comes in to clean every two weeks but only every two weeks, and she’s a cleaning person, not our cleaning lady; we pay her well, she’s very nice, and she likes us! We have Sunday dinners (but we don’t watch TV during them)! Okay, we do watch some TV, not all CNN or PBS, and we want our Friday night movies to be adrenalin highs. But on Saturday—if we don’t stay in to read or invite friends for dinner and real conversation—we go to “films!” In any case, I need to know what’s current in the culture! I teach this stuff! I don’t just indulge in it, I think about it, and doesn’t that keep me clean?
    With some of my choices, I know where I stand even as I see a shadow self watching skeptically. I’ll take my children over any book I would ever write and any book my peers have written. And when I see a younger female colleague getting considerable heat from her peers for having three children (and hence lacking professional seriousness), I admire her and find them sad, even as I see their careers march on. Such issues activate my ambivalence toward academic culture, not toward my modest deviations from it. In other areas, though—living in a subdivision, wall-to-wall carpeting, TV watching—my academic perspective takes over: I am too close to the suburbs of my youth for complete comfort. Each of my voices has its ascendant moments; neither is able to silence the other.
    Lifestyle and taste, in short, are not peaceful plots of land where I feel at home; they are riven by a deep fault line that constantly registers the tensions between where I come from and where I am now, between the comforts of the middle class and the refinements of the academy. I am constantly torn between what I think I like (that is as far as I can go in many areas) and what I am not sure I should like, between the possibility of unmediated pleasure and social acceptability. Ambivalence as a way of life, and taste as a confident expression of self, are uneasy bedfellows.
    Such anxieties are no doubt more intense in those of us for whom choosing a profession involved, deliberately or not, a move across class lines. In any case, expressions of taste—statements about ourselves, after all—are inherently fraught. The suspicion that “you are what you like,” as the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity suggests, is simultaneously appealing (we are knowable, others are knowable, through what we and they like) and appalling (we are easily dismissible for the same reason, and so are they). Displays of taste are acts of public self-exposure with the real risk that others will not like what they see: So that’s what he is? Is that all he’s got? Even worse, we may not like what we see once it is out in front of us—once we are out in front of ourselves, objectified and unprotected by irony or force of personality. Like photographs of ourselves, or writing as distinct from speaking, expressions of taste can evoke our deepest insecurities: we fear that the picture doesn’t do us justice—or that it does.
    My growing discomfort with the undersides of ambivalence has heightened my appreciation of my unambivalent father. In an era where male playfulness is consistently denigrated as adolescent immaturity (men and their little games), my father’s unembarrassed playfulness looks better and better to me; I have been part of groups of highly educated men who worked hard to regain the playfulness he never lost. And though I may not like everything he liked, I have come to admire and envy his straightforward, unabashed ability to like what he liked without worrying about it. He had the courage of his tastes.
    For most of his life, to be sure, he was not much of an experimenter; he stayed with what he knew. But in his last decade—first with my mother and then, after she died, with his second wife—when he had a bit more money, he began traveling, a significant act of daring for someone who was once terrified of motel bathrooms. In the process, he took some of my advice and was not too proud to take it: when you get to a new area of the country, find out what it does best and try it. Raised on meat and potatoes, with peas and corn as exotic variants, he started eating foods he had never experienced and found that he liked many of them. In his sixties and early seventies, this man who had loved his routines and had clung to them was opening up instead of shutting down.
    Both early and late in his life, as far as I could tell, he never categorized his tastes, never worried about their class associations. I can—and did, for a long time—label his taste for bowling “working class,” his enjoyment of horseshoes “suburban by way of rural,” but he never thought that way. If he liked something, he embraced it; it did not occur to him to ask himself if what he liked was acceptable. For someone as shy and insecure as he was in other ways, this was a remarkable display of confidence and un-self-consciousness; it was a central part of his charm.
    Thinking about him has prodded me to realize how easy it is in my present world to be caught up in taste as exclusive and exclusionary, taste as a highly nuanced internal mechanism, assiduously nurtured over time through contact with the right sorts of people, that unerringly ferrets out the un acceptable—the tasteless—and sweeps it off the teak table and under the antique rug—or better, never allows it to darken the French doors in the first place. Taste, by this definition, invites us to say yes to a certain range of experiences and artifacts that are often worth saying yes to. But its underlying direction—for some, its central function—is class differentiation: to say no to as much as possible, especially if what is repulsed is something the untutored masses—or worse, the middle classes, who present more of a threat through proximity (and memory)—say yes to. Rejecting what the middle classes like keeps us from being like them; the more we can reject, the more distance we establish—and the more uneasiness we feel, if what we are distancing from is where we came from.
    This means, all too often, that the less we like, the better; liking less moves us away from any gray area of possible common ground. If we can only stomach wines that cost over $15, that is pretty good, but if our palate starts quivering only at the $50 level, that is better. If only Bergman movies are worth your time, that is good, but if only early Bergman is sufficiently serious, before he mellowed out a bit, that is better. Proust is very good, since he is hard, but Proust in French is much better, much harder. Even fewer can appreciate him. The sophisticated life becomes a life of hard-to-acquire appreciations, small portions, measured experiences; the exquisite comes in small doses.
    I know the appeal of this kind of taste, the lure of its protective power. But at this point, when I am more drawn to reconnection than to differentiation, I have come to prefer another definition of taste: something that would allow me to enjoy as much as possible rather than as little as possible; an appetite for rather than a barrier against; an impulse to imbibe (to taste, after all) rather than to spit out. Shouldn’t taste, like the tongue itself, reach outward? Shouldn’t it be an expression of yearning, expansion, openness toward what is out there and might be drawn enjoyably in rather than a gag reflex against the unacceptable or a fortification against taint? Taste as curiosity—Sure, I’ll try that; what does it have to offer?—moves us into the world, in whatever direction necessary, rather than into a shell. This kind of taste refuses to categorize prematurely (or at all), to say that I can’t enjoy that because it is considered unsophisticated or the wrong people like it. If suburbanites like sex, should I reject it in order to keep myself free from stain? And maybe suburbanites aren’t so bad in the first place.

I MYSTIFIED MY FATHER any number of times: I left the church he cherished, I got divorced, I lived with Ivona long before we married. But he never cut me off, and he welcomed Ivona with great warmth. He made it clear that I was his son, that he valued me no matter what. Two years ago I went back to Glen Ellyn and talked with two of his contemporaries, our neighbors from across the street. I asked them, How had my father reacted to my leaving the church? No harsh words at all, they said. A few years before he died, I wrote him a letter telling him how much his acceptance had meant to me. But he died suddenly of a stroke before I could talk to him for the last time. Now it is all catch-up, and how do you catch up with the dead?
    Well, you tell their stories. My father’s wake in 1987 was a festive occasion; I remember thinking at the time that this was the last great party that George Hedin would throw. Everyone stood around and told stories about him. And stories, the narrator of Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried insists, are what keep people alive; being dead is like being in a book that no one is reading. Do I want this essay published? You bet. Publish or perish, and I don’t want my father to perish.
    I used to wonder how my colleagues would react to my father; I realize, uncomfortably, that I introduced him to very few of them over the years. Now I wonder how he would react to them. I don’t have him around anymore, but I do have his trophies, and they don’t have to stay in the garage. One of my voices still says, Are you crazy? Display is tacky, trophies are tacky, bowling (even if you happen to like it, as you do) is tacky. Do you really want to have to explain them to your guests? Because don’t fool yourself, you will have to explain; worse, you may not get the chance.
    But the voice I want to listen to says, This is your chance, you idiot. For once, just do it. So what if these are bowling trophies? And what’s wrong with that anyway? Haven’t you figured out yet that taste is finally a question of what you value? So what do you value here? What these trophies ultimately conjure up is your father, not as he posed in pictures, where he was as self-conscious as the rest of us, but in what he really liked, they are more an expression of him than anything else you have (you are what you like). Their presence on that table near the window, right next to that old Underwood typewriter of his (no problem with that) would make it clear to you—a good audience to start with—that you admired him, that you took him (finally, to be sure, and too late for him to see it) for what he was, that you value him. Your father always wanted to belong; this is your chance to show that he belongs with you.
    So, last New Year’s Eve, Ivona and I threw a party for eighteen people. No train set, no horseshoes—though there was country music (my choice) at one, end of the house to balance off the blues (Ivona’s passion) in the family room at the other end. Most of our friends moved back and forth; why not like it all? Just before the party I placed two of my father’s trophies next to the Underwood, along with two small sample bottles of altar wine, probably lethal by now, that he once peddled and that I inherited with his trophies. It wasn’t so hard to do. Looks like a shrine to your father, several people said—appreciatively, I think, not ironically.

RAY HEDIN teaches American literature and American studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Married to the Church, a study of the men with whom he attended Catholic seminary for eight years. He is currently working on a collection of personal essays.

“My Father’s Bowling Trophies” appears in our Winter 2001 issue.

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