I've waited a long time to post this because I really wanted the pictures to be in their places, but I am just not technologically savvy enough to figure it out, so oh well!
“I liked Mom. Still do.” –Tom McKenna
Pam Hickey and Tom McKenna’s Facebook profiles
(Had they been in college in the modern world):
Pam Hickey
Activities: eating ice cream, reading, shopping
Music: Dave Matthews Band
Books: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens
Movies: Elf, Pride and Prejudice
TV: House, Mad Men, Arrested Development
Education:
Northeastern University
M.Ed. School Counseling
Westfield State College
Psychology/Education
North Andover High School
Work:
Northeastern University
Grad Assistant, Psych department
Oarweed Restaurant: Waitress
Barnacle Billy’s: Waitress
McDonald’s: Cashier
Tom “Tomma” McKenna
Activities: sports, hockey
Music: Allman Brothers Band, The Band, Bob Dylan, John Prine, BB King, The Who, Commander Cody, Derek Trucks, John Hiatt, and 54 more
Books: Nonfiction
Movies: Good Burger, Dumb and Dumber
TV: Modern Family, Arrested Development, Jeopardy, sports
Education:
University of Vermont
Communications
Concord-Carlisle High School
Work:
Barnes & Noble Bookstore:
Sales Associate
Boston Cab Co.: Taxi Driver
Strawberry’s CDs
Thoreau Country Club: Caddy
Pamela Jean Hickey was perfect.
Pam (second from left in the photo) was the first daughter of Bill and Margaret and the older sister of Caroline Hickey. This particular photo was taken right after Pam graduated college, but before she left to backpack around Europe for a month with her best friend. As the photo suggests, this four-person Irish Catholic family was picture perfect. Every family member was classy, orderly, rule-oriented, religious, respectable, boringly normal, but happy.
They lived on 24 Norman Road in the suburban town of North Andover, Massachusetts. Walking up the sidewalk that guides the children to school every morning, there is a white picket fence. Along the fence a beautiful garden full of lilacs, carnations, roses, daisies, lady slippers, flowers of all colors grown with love and devotion. Walking through the front porch into the Hickey home painted tan one is immediately hit by the smell of potpourri and home cooking. On the shelves are decorative flowers and cute candy boxes, and formal family photos, just like the one on Pam’s fictional Facebook, line the walls.
Bill and Margaret were raised to believe in traditional values such as faith, education, modesty, manners, hard work, and gender roles. Bill Hickey worked a standard nine to five job making calls to customers while sitting in a cubicle from the time he got out of the army until he was eighty three years old. Margaret taught math to high school students, and moved on to working in a hospital gift shop until the shop closed, when, at eighty years old, she tried to find a job in another shop to no avail.
While their kids were growing up Margaret took Pam window shopping in town to look at clothes and dresses while Bill played catch in the yard with Caroline. Both girls were always given the option on whether they wanted to shop or play catch, but neither girl ever changed her routine. Pam was interested in clothes and dolls and pretty things while Caroline was a tomboy. Pam was a Brownie scout with a sash covered in badges for different projects. Caroline’s idea of a project consisted of giving all of her sister’s Barbie dolls “haircuts,” leaving every single one of their heads bald. Pam worked three jobs during the summer, one of which was at McDonald’s, and one during the school year. Caroline worked one day at McDonald’s and then quit. Pam got straight A’s. Caroline was a C student.
Despite their vast differences the two girls did have much in common: their dark blue eyes, fair skin, and dark brown hair for instance. They were both dragged to church all day every Sunday. They both got picked on by bullies on their walk to school, although this occurred significantly more frequently to Pam, who, being a quiet, small, girl, had a target on her back to begin with. One afternoon when they were coming home the boys next door sat in their lawn pelting rocks at Pam and Caroline’s heads. Caroline ran away, and the rocks weren’t really aimed at her anyway since she was tough enough that boys didn’t bother her much. Pam, who was girly and quiet and thus an easy target for bullies, got home bleeding that night.
Luckily Pam and Caroline had a welcoming home. Every night when the family returned home Margaret had dinner ready for them: pasta three times a week, pancakes on Fridays, and some variation of flavorless steamed vegetables, meat, and potatoes every other night.
Despite their run-ins with bullies, both Pam and Caroline spent a lot of time around boys, not dating of course because that wouldn’t be allowed, but Pam had her first “boyfriend” (a family friend she saw on supervised occasions) at age eleven. She had a number of boyfriends after that, and even got asked to the prom while she was student teaching, but she was too busy with her education and her jobs to get into anything too serious.
Caroline was lucky to get into the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was also lucky that this school happened to be inexpensive. She got a job at Wang enterprises instantly upon graduating, paid her parents back in full for her college expenses, and retired at age forty two to live in her home in Sudbury, Mass. She is surrounded by her husband, to whom she has been married twice, her one child, whose college tuition money has been in the bank since he was five, and her BMW with leather interior, the only model of car she’s ever bought.
Pam could have gone to any school she wanted if she could have afforded it. She couldn’t afford it, and went to state school because it was cheaper. After college when she was working at and attending Northeastern, she met Dave McKenna, who was also getting his masters. We’ll pick up there later.
Thomas Aquinas McKenna Junior was not perfect.
Tom (the hippie in the flannel listening to music in the photograph) was the son of Tom Senior and Florence and the older brother of Paul, Dave, John, and Bill McKenna. Their seven-person Irish Catholic family made up of tall, dark-haired, thin, fair-skinned, hazel-eyed boys rarely took family photographs. To organize five boys and to fight with each of them to take off their hats and flannel shirts and put on dress clothes was not worth it. Each boy looked equally as goofy as Tom did in the photograph on page one, and Tom himself looked even goofier standing up at six foot three and one hundred sixty pounds. In that photo, taken shortly after Tom graduated college, he was on his way to Ireland. He and a friend intended to visit for one week and ended up staying a month because families would continuously be taking them in, and twenty-something year old boys are not good at planning anyway.
When they weren’t world travelers, Tom and all of his brothers were expected to uphold their faithful background. They went to church every Sunday and were expected to attend CCD (like Sunday school) classes on a weekly basis. Tom, however, was never one to follow rules. He skipped his classes every week to listen to The Who, The Doors, The Cars, The Rolling Stones, The Band, and any other “the” group you could think of in his friend’s basement. Of course his mother did eventually find out when she got a letter home reading:
“Your son, ___Tom McKenna___, has missed the last _17_ Sunday school classes.”
You might think if Tom had strong religious role models he would have been more likely to attend Catholicism classes. As it turns out Tom’s aunt was a nun, but she wasn’t your stereotypical religious figure. When Tom’s grandfather passed away, the wake was treated like “a party with one less member” according to the family, who, in the Irish way, treat every gathering like a party. Tom’s nun aunt had to get special permission to leave the nunnery in order to attend the wake. So, with no drivers’ license and no money, she drove herself to Concord from thirty minutes away. She hit a bit of a problem when she came upon a toll and could not pay it, but they let her go. Upon arriving at the wake, Tom Senior bribed Auntie Nun with fifty dollars if she slid down the banister in the middle of the funeral home in front of everyone. Though money has no value to someone living in a nunnery, Auntie Nun took the bet, and the whole crowd got to witness her screaming “WEEEEEE!” as she glided down the railing.
Though the McKennas were slightly crazy, they lived in a very normal neighborhood at 29 Laurel Street in the suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts. Tom’s family had been rooted in Concord for a long time. His grandfather build the house Tom lived in, situated directly on the sidewalk leading to the nearby Alcott Elementary School. Tom’s grandfather also built the house directly behind Tom’s house, and the two houses shared a backyard. Tom’s grandparents lived behind Tom until Tom’s brother Dave bought the house, and it is Dave who occupies it now. To live right behind the five McKenna boys probably would not have been a popular option for anyone outside of the family since there would always be boys noisily running through their backyard and they would have to deal with shattered windows and broken deck planks from baseballs, footballs, tennis balls, basketballs, lacrosse balls, hockey pucks, sticks, bats, or even the boys themselves wrestling their way off of their own property.
Florence McKenna taught high school Math for a while, but retired when she was in her fifties. Tom Senior passed away at fifty-nine years old after serving in the army and winning a bronze medal for sprinting in the Olympics. His father, Arthur Glendon, had an Olympic history as well. He coached a Gold-medal winning crew team and invented the Glendon stroke, the moving seat on screw boats. The Wonder Crew is a book published about Tom’s grandfather. Not surprisingly, Tom’s home was very sports oriented. There was an innumerable amount of broken windows, bones, and teeth. Five boys within six years of age wreaked havoc on their small-town home life.
With four very masculine brothers and a lot of male cousins, many of whom went on to work in construction and one of whom went on to play for the Bruins, all women were aliens to Tom. He “never spoke to a girl” before college and claims never to have had a girlfriend before age thirty. He only knew women of his mother or grandmother’s generation.
Tom’s grandmother had a driver in one of the first models of cars ever made. His family owned the first colored television set in his neighborhood, as well as the first remote control. When they first bought the remote they decided to play a trick on Tom Senior. When he came home from work one of the boys hid within range of the TV while another boy told his father, “Hey look Dad, I can do magic! Every time I pound my fist on the coffee table the TV switches channels!” He then proceeded to punch the table, while his brother, waiting eagerly for his cue, hit the “channel up” button on the remote. And just like that the television channel was magically switched!
Tom had the money to attend college. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the grades. This was no reflection on his intelligence, but he wasn’t very good at doing “what you’re supposed to do.” He went to community college for a year before transferring to the University of Vermont, where he joined a hockey frat and majored in Communications. He wanted to go into sports journalism as sports and nonfiction writing were his passions. He was working at a bookstore when he was invited to go out to dinner by his brother Dave.
If Pam Hickey and Tom McKenna had Facebook during the 1980s, they would have seen that they had one mutual friend, Dave McKenna, Tom’s brother and Pam’s peer at Northeastern.
One evening Dave and a dozen of his friends were going to dinner in Marblehead at a place called Rosalee’s. The night Tom McKenna and Pam Hickey met they were on a blind double date, but not with each other. When Tom walked in Pam was wearing a beret, which was in fashion at the time. Tom, not realizing this, thought she was French or at least foreign upon first glance, which caught his interest, but Tom was not enamored by foreign girls the way most men are. Little is known about Tom’s date, but she wasn’t his type. He was picky, and if he were to date it would have to be a very sweet, normal, quiet, smart, but modest girl.
Pam’s date was Tom’s wildest friend. He was a loose cannon: loud, bombastic, inappropriate, and sarcastic. He drank, cursed, told stories he shouldn’t have, and managed to throw a dinner roll across the table by the end of the evening. Pam had probably never seen anything like this. She was brought up in a structured home where people worked hard, cared about the rules, said all the right things, etc. I think that is why she was drawn into Tom’s crowd of friends. They had a carelessness that was fun, light-hearted, and endearing. They had a childish sense of humor and created chaos wherever they went. But they never viewed themselves as comedians.
Tom was so used to his friends’ behavior, even though he mostly watched all of the idiocy, that he hardly ever laughed at them. So when the girl who got voted quietest in high school roared her hearty, genuine laugh, Tom noticed. He hadn’t ever heard someone laugh at him or his friends like that ever before, and he could not understand why she found them so funny, but he liked it. He said, “I remember thinking, ‘she’s pretty, but I don’t know what’s going on in her head.’”
When they were about to order, the waiter came over and informed the table the restaurant had received a phone tip-off of a bomb scare, so everyone had to evacuate down from the second floor and out the door. The scene became complete chaos. Pam, who had a tendency to worry, was frightened. Tom claims not to remember any of it, but according to Pam, he cut off her, his date, and a number of other people during his push to get out. The “women and children first” chivalrous approach was lost on him. Those kinds of social graces usually are.
Despite his lack of manners, Tom’s date was still expecting him to ask for her number at the end of the evening, more as a courtesy than anything else. This was before the days of online social networking, so a phone number was the only way to reach someone again. In fact, in May 1984, the same month of this large dinner date, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook had just been born. Had Facebook been founded at this time there probably would have been no pressure for Tom to get his date’s number since he could just add her on Facebook.
For the record, Tom was not interested and would not have friended his date on Facebook just as he skipped the formality of asking for her number. Tom was, however, interested in Pam. He approached her date and asked if he had gotten Pam’s number. He had. But, had Facebook been around he would not have because he could have just friended her instead, which was much less personal. He had already decided not to call Pam anyway because he lived an hour away from her and did not like her enough to commit to that commute. Perhaps if Facebook or AIM or webcams had been around, Pam and her date would have continued to talk that way and gotten to know each other and then decided to commit to a relationship. But it’s not likely. They were just not a good match.
Tom and Pam would probably not have been friends on Facebook, at least not right away. Tom was much too shy and unaware of social norms to have added Pam. Pam was also too shy and would have been expecting Tom, as the man, to add her. He probably never would have, not out of lack of interest but out of complete oblivion to social rules. After several dates Pam probably would have given in out of frustration and because, in the world of social networking, the rule is if you are dating someone you are at least friends with them on Facebook.
Being connected on Facebook would probably not have changed the dynamic between Tom and Pam. Having been added by Pam probably would have confused Tom who would wonder why she wanted to be connected to him. Tom had strong preset notions from his own parents about the correct way to “talk” to someone. He was old-fashioned. He wore the same clothes for decades, liked more “girly” women, and believed in at least calling a girl to ask her out.
The next time Tom and Pam ran into each other was much the same way people run into each other now, in a group of their friends. They were both at a Red Sox game with the same people they went out to dinner with. While everyone was scrambling to find seats, their friends managed to not-so-accidentally seat Tom and Pam next to one another. This was arranged by Dave’s then girlfriend, Michelle, who Tom seems to think intuited the connection between him and Pam. This may be true, or since Michelle also knew Pam from Northeastern, Pam might have let something slip about her feelings. However it happened, Michelle picked up on the attraction between Pam and Tom, and she did have a good sense for which people “go together.” Tom refers to Michelle as his “guardian angel” when explaining how she fixed him up with Pam.
When you think about it, Tom was the obvious choice for Pam’s match in that group of people since he was the quietest of his friends and brothers. Pam was also a clear choice for Tom considering she was probably the least intimidating girl possible while still being beautiful, intelligent, and sweet. It just happened that Michelle was the first to make these connections.
Pam had never learned anything about baseball, or any sport. When asked if she ever played sports as a child she said, “I used to watch the boys play tetherball after school.” Tom spent the game explaining the rules to Pam at first. She would ask, “Are we out in the field or with the bat?” and he would tell her. She’d think out loud, “Is that a new guy batting now?” and he’d explain that the last guy was already on the base. Once she learned a little more she’d wonder “why is that guy running for the ball if it’s out of bounds?” and he’d say that a foul ball is still an out if it’s caught. After an inning or so of Pam’s utter confusion and relentless questions, Tom would give up and start to ask his own questions. Has she ever seen a baseball game before? Does she have any brothers? What does she do for fun then if not sports? There were sure to be pauses in conversation between two shyer people one of whom had no idea about baseball and one of whom had no idea about dating, but for these moments they could keep track of, or in Pam’s case stare into space at, the game going on in front of them, which the Sox won.
After the Red Sox game Tom and Pam started having regular lunch dates at Northeastern. They met each other’s families, where they were both incredibly well-received. Tom’s mother loved having a girl in the house, and Tom’s father was just shocked a pretty, smart, nice girl could go for a goofy guy like his son. They were, as Tom was, refreshed by her normalcy. Tom Senior even told his son he would be an idiot to mess it up.
Pam’s curiosity about Tom could finally be quenched through his parents. She asked his mother if Tom was mischievous like his brothers. His mother paused for a long time and said, “Tommy was sneaky about it.” Pam heard stories like when Tom spent his Boy Scout money on penny candy every week but was inevitably caught when the pack leader called his mother.
Despite Tom’s mischievous past, Pam’s parents took to him right away. Once past their stricter demeanor, Pam’s parents were sweet, light-hearted people who could appreciate a sense of humor as well as anyone else could, even if their own senses of humor were a bit hidden under formalities. Tom put Pam and her family at ease. But what truly won over Pam’s parents was when Tom visited their home and discovered that, just like his own mother, Pam’s parents watched Jeopardy every night. However he was perplexed to find they never knew the answers. Tom himself had a knack for remembering facts with his interests in history, sports, music, and the fact that he was well-read in nonfiction books. But when Tom could actually answer any, or most, of the hints, Pam’s parents were immediately impressed. Pam was impressed as well, though she had already been overwhelmed by Tom’s sports knowledge and had no doubt he was smart.
Four years after their meeting at Rosalee’s, Thomas Aquinas and Pamela Jean became Tom and Pam McKenna. Tom proposed in another Massachusetts restaurant that was located upstairs from the ground floor, the Spinnaker. The Spinnaker
was at the top floor of the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge overlooking the Charles River. The building itself looks like a set of stairs, a sequence of steps to take before you can reach that pivotal top moment. Tom and Pam had taken all of those steps. They had been dating for several years, they knew each other’s families, they built a strong relationship of love, and finally, they were seated at the top.
Their attraction to one another may have been heightened from the start but emotions never ran as high as they did while sitting down to that dinner. The Spinnaker was a revolving restaurant with a view of the beautiful skyline outside constantly changing while the diners sit still. As they eat, the world moves around them, taking them on a ride they cannot stop and do not want to get off of. The Spinnaker restaurant literally looks like it is floating on water, which is exactly how Tom and Pam felt that night.
Their journey, like the pace of the spinning floor, started off slowly, much to Pam’s dismay. Tom was not the fancy dining, suit-wearing kind of guy, so going to a dinner like this after dating for years Pam knew he was going to propose, and she eagerly waited. “It must have spun around one hundred times before he asked me,” she says. She’s probably right. Unlike her, Tom was never the type to do things the way you’re supposed to do them.
Tom was thirty four and Pam was twenty nine, and at that age, especially then, four years was a long time to date before becoming married. That’s why it is doubtful that their courtship would have been made shorter in today’s world where everything is instantaneous. It’s true they may have had more contact with email, instant messaging, video chats, Facebook, text messaging, but these material things cannot change a love that is supposed to be. They cannot change the shy personalities of two people who complement each other. Tom and Pam teach each other new things through their differences. He makes her laugh and lightens her up while she brings him down to earth and keeps him acting responsibly.
On their wedding day Tom was a full foot (and half an inch) taller than his new wife, but as she stood on her toes in her heels, he bent over to reach her in compromise. While he looked a little bit goofy with his unnatural smile and bright red full beard, she looked beautiful and happy and natural.
While they say two people become more alike when they get married, Tom and Pam never became the same person. They may be joined forever as of the day in this photograph where they are literally conjoined in a hug, but they will always be able to separate themselves as individuals.
They have embraced their differences, and even added some new ones. He is now politically conservative, though still wearing
flannel and listening to rock music, while she campaigns for Democrats like Deval Patrick. He blasts Bob Dylan in the kitchen while she blocks her ears and runs. She watches sappy love stories when he’d rather be watching ESPN. None of these differences matter, though. Tom and Pam have strong shared values of love, respect, trust, family, and most importantly they both believe in independence.
Tom and Pam McKenna are not “The McKennas” but Tom and Pam. They are their own people, and they have their own relationship, untouched by time or social norms. They have been married for twenty two years.
