The Tender Bar

“Grandma was no fan of my father, and she wasn’t alone. The whole family boycotted my parents’ wedding, except my mother’s rebellious brother, Uncle Charlie, four years younger, who walked my mother down the aisle.”

Before divulging his father’s backstory to his readers, Moehringer situates his relationship (or lack thereof) with his father in the context of his broader family. This quotation provides some foreshadowing to the rest of his parents’ story by hinting that there was a good reason his mother’s family were not accepting of his father.

“As the man of my family, as my mother’s protector, I should have been prepared to demand money from my father the moment he showed his face. But I didn’t want to scare him off. I longed to see him even more than I longed to see my beloved Mets in person for the first time.”

The author recalls his conflicted feelings about meeting his father for the first time as a seven-year-old boy. At this early age, he already conceived of himself as the “man of my family” and his mother’s “protector,” a part of his identity that he goes on to build and examine throughout the rest of his memoir.

“As I held my mother, clung to her, cried against her legs, it struck me that she was all I had, and if I didn’t take good care of her I’d be lost.”

The author shared his vivid childhood memory of expecting to meet his father for the first time, who never arrived. This immense disappointment prompted him to realize how much he depended on his mother, and it triggered a long-running anxiety about caring for her. This trauma played into the author’s eventual realization that it was his mother, and not his father, who embodied virtues he’d considered masculine.