Maureen Stanton

A Long Way to Tipperary

Growing up with six siblings, I never had much time alone with my father, especially after my parents divorced when I was twelve and he moved out of our house. I didn’t really get to know my father until after I graduated college, when we spent a week together in Ireland, mostly in a car. After backpacking in Europe, I met my father at Shannon Airport and we cruised the backroads of Ireland’s Gaelic-speaking Connemara region, where my father’s parents grew up, where his uncles and aunts and cousins lived. His Uncle Pat, at 80, still resided in the tin-roofed stone house in which he and my grandmother and three other siblings had grown up, with a dirt floor and no indoor plumbing or electricity in 1984. As we drove along in our rental car, my father sang songs about the towns we passed through–The Rose of Tralee, Galway Bay, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary–songs he learned from his parents, who in the 1920s had settled in Dorchester, a predominantly Irish neighborhood of Boston. I met my great aunts and uncles and second-cousins, who served me Irish soda bread pulled warm from the oven, slathered with home-churned butter. I walked the land that my grandmother and my grandfather had left behind and never set foot on again.

That week in Ireland I saw my father more closely than ever before, his gregarious personality, his cutting wit, his sharp intellect, and his various minor ailments: allergies, knee-problems from a college football injury, and hypoglycemia. He had to eat every two hours or he’d grow faint, so we stopped at many roadside pubs for toasted cheese sandwiches. Once in a fit of hunger, we bought a rotisserie chicken in a grocery store but couldn’t find a picnic spot. As my father grew weak, I pulled the into the nearest parking lot, and there we ate our greasy chicken, noticing after a few minutes that we’d parked at a hospital.

The trip to Ireland was the only time in my life that I’d spent an entire week alone with my father. Two months later, I relocated to the Midwest and spent the next twenty years there. I’d see my father just once or twice year at holidays. As had happened when I was twelve and my father moved out of my childhood home, the gap between us widened. While I was teaching at the University of Missouri, my father was diagnosed with melanoma. There was no promising treatment, so my father was on borrowed time. I knew I had to get home.

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Wherever I’ve lived in my adult life — New York, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri–I’ve told acquaintances that I was from Boston. They’d never heard of my hometown south of the city, and sometimes they heard Boston in my voice. In Missouri, where I was teaching, a visiting poet from Boston pegged me when I greeted him, hearing some vestige of the dropped “r” in my pronunciation, though it had been a couple decades since I’d lived in Massachusetts.

When I moved back to Massachusetts at age 52, my family was surprised that I needed driving directions. I never knew the city of Boston, had never lived or worked there. As a teenager, my friends and I drove into the city occasionally, but we typically got lost. Once, after a trip to see Jethro Tull at the (then) Boston Gardens in 1978, we accidentally crossed some bridge and ended up in a town called Danvers, which we’d never heard of; Massachusetts seemed big back then.

Boston has always been a puzzle to me, especially its dense tangle of one-way streets; you could follow directions into the city but never leave the same way. I once got so lost in Boston that I drove around a construction barrier blocking access to a highway ramp; I could see the road that would take me home, but I couldn’t find a way onto it. When I moved back to Massachusetts as an adult, I no longer recognized the city. The Big-Dig, a congestion mitigation project, shunted traffic from Interstate 93 into a tunnel, and spit you out the other end. Gone from view were familiar landmarks: the harbor and docks, Faneuil Hall, the north-end marketplace. There is no view at all now–just the hazy cityscape in front of you, then an abrupt descent into the dark, fast, four-lane tunnel. Driving into Boston was now driving under it.

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When my father’s cancer spread, I drove him into Boston for various tests and treatments. Thirty years after our trip to Ireland, once again I was getting to know my father in the enclosed space of a car. Like the songs he sang in Ireland, everywhere in Boston my father had a story. Passing Dorchester Bay south of Boston, he talked about swimming at Malibu Beach before Interstate 93–the very road we were on–was built. Malibu Beach is a spit of sand you pass on your way into Boston from the south. At Malibu Beach, my father, who was “black Irish,” with curly jet hair, hazel eyes and skin the color of waxed paper, once suffered a sunburn so severe he was sick in bed for days. I wondered if that sunburn, or more likely the many others he got at Malibu Beach, was the origin of his skin cancer six decades later.

At Savin Hill Park, on the bay side of Interstate 93, he’d played ice hockey on a ball field frozen over in winter to make a rink. One day someone stole my father’s shoes, so he hobbled a mile home wearing his hand-me-down skates, the toes stuffed with socks since the skates were two-sizes too big. “That’s where the old wire factory was,” my father pointed out one day–Boston Insulated Wire and Cable, on the opposite side of the highway from the bay, where he’d worked the night shift while in college, greasing machines that Teflon-coated wire in the factory basement with his boss, an African-American man who talked to the machines, called them pet names and they ran smoothly.

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My father was a raconteur, remembering the odd amusing detail—how, as an altar boy, he’d accompanied Father Connolly on Sunday sick calls, the priest “plodding along on those flat feet.” He found humor in the difficult days growing up poor. At ten, he’d ride the trolley into Boston proper with cash to pay the family’s utility bills at Filene’s, an errand for his mother. He recalled his panic one day when he lost the money. Or the time, as a young boy, he’d gathered slightly-chipped tableware from the trash heap behind Dorchester Pottery Works a half-mile from his house, loaded a wagon and hauled it triumphantly home to his mother, only to be scolded and shamed, to think they needed those cracked plates and cups.

My father’s stories were gifts to me from the richness of his life. I proposed once that my father give me a tour of his old haunts, the triple-decker cold-water flat on Hecla Street, where he shared a bedroom–and a double bed–with his two younger brothers until he was eighteen; and Ronan Park, where he and the neighborhood boys became life-long friends, shooting basketballs into a peach basket with its bottom punched out, places I had yet to see.

A first-generation Irish American, my father was Boston to me. Born in Boston City Hospital and raised in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, my father attended Boston College high school on a scholarship secured by a priest, whose letter touted my father’s “excellent character and abilities.” He earned bachelor’s degree at Boston College, nearly failing math because he couldn’t afford the textbook, and later to Boston College again for his master’s degree. He worked in and around Boston his entire life.

My father is gone now, as are many landmarks of his biography. I regret that we never got around to taking the “Patrick Stanton” tour of the city. Still, when I drive through Boston now, these places come alive, even those that have been paved over, the haunts of his youth. I can see my father as a boy, hobbling home in those ankle-busting skates. I can see him standing on the deck of a ferry, the wind on his face as the ship cruises across the bay to Nantasket Beach, an excursion sponsored by Father Connolly for his altar boys. I can imagine my father’s thrill at the arcade, and the old wooden roller coaster along the shore– at 98-feet high, the tallest in the world when it was built in 1917–which always seemed too creaky to me, its lattice framework swaying as the cars rocketed down the track.

I can see my father standing at the Field’s Corner traffic lights in Dorchester, a bright earnest handsome boy in worn-out shoes, the soles “flopping” as he walked (waiting for his mother to save enough money for a new pair), hawking newspapers to homebound commuters, and then one day he was one of those commuters, the highway of time fleeting from the rear view mirror. Whenever I drive through Boston, I hear my father’s voice, can see his stories overlaid onto the cartography of the city, and this place where I have never lived begins to feel like home.

Maureen Stanton’s memoir, Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), won the 2020 Maine Literary Award in memoir, and was a People Magazine “Best New Books” pick. Her book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting (Penguin Press, 2011) won a Massachusetts Book Award, and was selected for Parade Magazine‘s “12 Great Summer Books.” Her essays have been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies, including Creative Nonfiction, Longreads, New England Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Sun, and Florida Review, among others, and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays. She’s received the Iowa Review prize, the American Literary Review Prize, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Maine Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her favorite sweet is penuche fudge, a New England favorite.