OPINION: Medford comes out tops in Mother’s Day memoir
Medford native Steve Coronella calls his early life in Medford – ordinary. And how his mother was the best. Happy Mother's Day!
Here in Ireland misery-laden memoirs remain popular nearly 30 years after the ground-breaking publication of “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt’s graphic depiction of his early life in Limerick. Thanks to the late Mr. McCourt, the “Irish mammy” in particular continues to cut a pathetic figure on the national best-seller charts.
Well, with Mother’s Day just around the corner, I figure it’s my turn to have a go at this lucrative genre. Unfortunately, the deeper I delve into my Medford upbringing, the clearer the truth becomes: My formative years were unspeakably…ordinary.
No matter how hard I try to conjure up scenes that a publisher might find sufficiently harrowing, the fact is that my mother – despite her own uneven upbringing – always behaved like a well-adjusted and normal adult whose primary concern was the welfare of her family. (And the same can be said about my father.)
It’s unlikely I’ll ever recover from such an unmarketable childhood.
Of course, I should have done something about it years ago, maybe insisted that our Corey Street home include a small measure of squalor and neglect, but who knew? Coming of age in an Irish-Italian household in 1970s Medford, I figured there’d be plenty to moan about later.
I was wrong.
If only “Angela’s Ashes” had been around when I was growing up, to counsel me in the ways of the miserable memoir. The tips are all there on the opening page. In a single paragraph we’re told that “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” And: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
But it gets better.
After an impressive roll call of supporting players – including pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters, a shiftless alcoholic father, and a pious defeated mother – comes this marvelous summing up: “Above all – we were wet.”
Frank McCourt, needless to say, is a hard act to follow.
Still, despite my raw material being significantly less wretched, I’ve decided to mark Mother’s Day by tackling the memoir form. So with Mr. McCourt in mind and my poetic license ready for inspection, I present a short account of my early Medford years.
* * *
From September to June, over untold years, school was a daily torment fully endorsed by our uncaring parents so they might get on with the trivial business of running a household and earning a living.
The daily walk to our neighborhood school – covering all of four breathless blocks – taxed our little bodies almost beyond endurance. Our heartless teachers were unmoved, herding us outside each day for more physical activity and maybe even some energetic horseplay if we were sly enough about it.
As for the school building itself – the Dame Elementary on George St., handed over to Tufts a few years back for office space – how could we be expected to learn in classrooms that openly mocked us by featuring our own rudimentary work pinned to the walls and illuminated by the Dame’s large unforgiving windows?
Each afternoon after my brother and I had staggered home, my mother would ask about our day and insist we have a snack. If we told her there was nothing to our liking, she’d whip us…up anything we wanted. (Our family movies document another distressing truth: As soon as my father got home from work, he'd also beat us – at basketball on the flagstone patio court in our backyard.)
Most days in the fall and winter we’d head out with our friends before it got too dark. For a couple of hours we’d engage in an archaic suburban game called street hockey, which involved simulated fisticuffs that sometimes got out of hand. (For this traumatic chapter in my life, I blame Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins.)
Occasionally we’d challenge kids from other neighborhoods and this meant lugging our nets and equipment a few blocks, maybe to Clark Street or as far away as Burget Avenue, and then home again.
In the spring and summer, our hardship took another shape. Then, it was the endless monotony of punch ball and relievio and “outs” against someone’s front steps.
I remember one day disaster struck. I was maybe 9 or 10. Two friends were playing pitcher-catcher – with our front steps as a backstop and using a hard ball – when a wild throw rode up the hand railing and smashed our porch window.
Everyone ran for cover except me. It was my house. Where was I going to go? So I was left to do the explaining.
Frank McCourt may have had it rough in Limerick all those years ago, but growing up in 1970s Medford – long before cellphones and social media and two-car families – was no picnic either.
Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest paperback publications are “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations” and “Looking Homeward - Essays & Humor from a Misplaced American.”
