Their stories, turned into a scrapbook and an autobiography — in one

You asked me how we came here. For forty years you never asked, and I never told, because I didn’t want you to carry it. But you’re a father now. So, okay. Here.

We left at night, from a beach two hours south of Saigon. Fifty-two people on a fishing boat with a blue hull, built for maybe twenty. Your father paid with my mother’s gold bracelets, every one. I was holding you so tight. You were nine months old and you never cried once. I think you knew.

On the fourth day the engine stopped. The water was almost gone. On the fifth day, a big ship came over the horizon, and everybody stood up and waved shirts and screamed. It came close enough that I could see the people on the deck looking at us. And then it kept going.

The summer I was sixteen, my uncle Sal let me help load the Mary Ellen before she went out to Georges Bank. I went down into the hold to grab a coil of rope, sat on a bunk for one minute, and woke up forty miles out to sea.

Uncle Sal was not going to turn a boat around for one dumb kid. He radioed my mother, who said things into that radio I won’t repeat in front of you, and then he handed me a pair of boots three sizes too big. “You’re crew now,” he said. “Ten days.” I had a date that Saturday with a girl named Patty.

On day six a storm came up out of nowhere. Waves higher than the wheelhouse. The radio went dead, the net winch jammed with the nets still out, and Uncle Sal looked at me — the smallest one on board — and said, “Ray. Can you fit under there?”

Tom and I grew up on the public courts at Brookside Park. Wooden rackets, tube socks, a can of balls we made last all summer. We played every day from fourth grade until college, and in all that time I never once beat him in singles. Not once. He will want you to know that.

The summer we were fourteen, a girl named Linda joined the team. She had a two-handed backhand like Chris Evert and she laughed at my jokes, which nobody did. I spent the whole summer trying to work up the nerve to talk to her. Tom said I had two choices: win the tournament and ask her, or lose the tournament and ask her anyway.

The city finals came down to match point. Me serving, Linda in the bleachers with a lemonade, Tom yelling “Just ask her!” from the fence. I tossed the ball, swung as hard as I have ever swung at anything in my life — and the racket flew right out of my hand, sailed over the fence, and went straight at Linda.