A Son’s Tribute

Before I even met Mark Williams I read a story he wrote about his father. Not having grown up in Gloucester I didn’t know about the “other” Ted Williams but the story knocked my socks off and made me want to get to know the guy who wrote it. That was a year and a half ago.

If you Google “Ted Williams” you’ll get about a million results - none of them will be the football Ted Williams. Even if you Google “Ted Williams Gloucester” you’ll get a couple thousand results that will all begin “... once thru the Ted Williams Tunnel take 128N to Gloucester...” Ah, fame.

Once Mark and I met and he asked me to help him edit his book, F/V Black Sheep, I was continually charmed by his many references in his manuscripts to his father - most especially to the debt of gratitude for all the lessons his father taught him that served to save his life again and again while Mark was fishing the North Atlantic. I said to him one day, as we worked on a particularly poignant chapter, “What comes through most beautifully in this book, is how much you loved your father.”

Mark - big, tough, Gloucester fisherman Mark - turned his face from me and said, “He’s with me every minute when I write.”

I don’t pretend to understand the world of men but I do respect it. I’m not the sort of woman who is drawn to SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys) and, since I am not big in over-analyzing my own feelings, I don’t think that is a valuable commodity in men. I love men who are tough guys but who haven’t totally succeeded in outgrowing that inner boy. Reading Mark’s book for the first time I was a little shaken by the violence - violence in bars and among dock workers and at sea. But I am smart enough to know that much of maleness - at least a certain kind of maleness - needs that. It is integral to their nature and, having had a father and three brothers of that ilk, I am comfortable with it.

Mark and I talk a lot. We talk about writing more than most people talk about anything at all. We talk about ideas and history and politics. He doesn’t have a background, as I do, in psychology but he has an intuitive understanding of it. We have talked about Jungian archetypes - in writing and in life. When I told him about the archetype of the Warrior he identified immediately.

As we talk about is father, I am always moved by the depth of his appreciation of the man. I was the one who suggested it might be nice to make a tribute web page for him but Mark, appropriately, took the ball and ran with it.

This morning he gave me the text he wrote to be included on the page. As his writing often does, it moved me to tears. Over the coming weeks, we hope to add more images taken from old newspaper clippings but, for now, Mark’s tribute to his father seems enough. So if you have the time, please visit Ted Williams: This Guy Will never Play Football.

Thanks for reading.