In reality, trips to the park in the spring were discouraged, and working there after school was out of the question because of the hour-long commute each way. Instead, my parents expected me to be a studious tenth grader. My brother Pete was at Dartmouth. Splinter was studying engineering at Lehigh. My father took education seriously, as though one generation of wayward Mulvihills would turn the whole family tree into the shanty Irish.
