By George Fels
[Reprinted from August 2005]
My mother was to cooking what Roseanne Barr was to the national anthem. Either my grandmother didn’t teach her properly, or she was just plan inept, but virtually every offering emanating from her sensuous kitchen tasted like bedroom slippers. She was a small woman, and didn’t need to eat much, which was certainly just as well. The proof in the pudding (one of the relatively few dishes she couldn’t ruin) was that the other two recipients of her culinary acumen, my father and I, both looked like survivors of Auschwitz. Complementing her cooking prowess, my mother understood nothing whatsoever about the cue games (except, of course, that anyone even remotely associated with them was a bum). Once I discovered pool, at age 15, there was hardly anything else I wanted to talk about, nor hardly anything about which she cared less.

My father, Laury Fels, on the other hand, had spent a respectable portion of his youth in poolrooms, and was even a decent recreational player. So, to a limited degree, he was a much better audience for my pool maunderings. But, as a well-educated man (he held a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern), he was far more eager to talk about school, and the college that lay ahead for me. Largely because of his eagerness, I was not eager in the least to discuss that. And so, my father indulged his infuriating habit of raving about the accomplishments of the sons of strangers. He knew none of the sons: much worse, he barely knew, and sometimes even disliked, their fathers. Yet on and on he babbled, about valedictorians and salutatorians and pre-laws and pre-meds. Thus, dinner at my parent’s table could be, and frequently was, about as much fun as the aforementioned Auschwitz.

I was almost certainly not the first pool freak to begin forming the loop around his silverware (or pens, brooms, baseball bats, umbrellas, etc., for that matter.) It drove both my parents to distraction, which only reinforced the quirk; later I would graduate to more sophisticated tactics such as polishing the brass joint of my Rambow cue (using nothing less than the un-aromatic Brasso, of course) and my true piece de resistance, spit-shining my cue case. But for now, it was mostly knife, fork and spoon enclosed in a most correct orthodox tripod bridge.

One night my mother served either calves’ liver or lamp chops (in her hands, those two were indistinguishable). The tasteless entrée was nicely accessorized with equally flavorless mashed potatoes and green peas. My father began to prattle on about the son of a man he hardly knew, and my bridge hand began to form.

I really don’t know where this next inspiration came from. My peers and I must have played pool 10 times for each time we played billiards; none of us was blazing away at much better than .2, not that we had any knowledge of that noble statistic back then. On the rare occasion when we did score, we should share the triumph, singing out, “Bill-yurd!” in the manner of Mr. Ed calling to his beloved pal Wilbur. And as my father relentlessly pressured me to guess where Junior down the street was going to college, I sorted out three peas — one cue pea and two object peas — for billiards.

“I don’t know him,” I groaned one last time, staring at my plate. “I can’t imagine caring less about where he goes to school.”

“I know you don’t. But guess anyway.”

I turned my attention to aiming my shot. “I don’t know. Slippery Rock State?”

My father rarely got worked up; when countered, his reaction was far more often of the deadpan, Jack Benny variety. He shot me one of those and intoned softly, as though in prayer, “Princeton.”

“Well, good for him,” I generously allowed. “But can he do this?” And, taking care not to mis-fork, I stroked my cue pea cleanly off both object peas. “Bill-yurd!”

My father turned his Jack Benny impression toward my mother. Meanwhile, my two object peas bounded off my player’s inner rim and returned very close to one another.

“Position!” I bellowed. “The dreaded pea nurse! There’s no telling how many I’ll run from here!” I also began to giggle, which didn’t help matters.

“The neighbor’s son gets Princeton,” my father pointed out to his non-cook of a wife. “I get billiards with peas!”

“Bill-yurd! That’s three! Heeheehee!”

“Who, Laury? Who’s Bill Yurd? Who’s a nurse? Is Bill Yurd a nurse?” she said.

“No,” I clarified, as the giggles grew higher in pitch. “Just the opposite. A nurse is a bill-yurd!”

“Don’t play with your food,” my mother said, not seeming to understand that it wasn’t much good for much else.

At that point, I believe my father understood that he was, to borrow again from pool, in a trap. To one side was the woman he had chosen to share his life, who served him glorified beef jerky nightly; I do not doubt that he loved her, but I would suggest that that feat alone merited Nobel Prize consideration. To the other side was his only son, summa cum laude when it came to underachievement, dawdling somewhere slightly above the middle of his high school class, forever unable to compete with the godlike scions of his peers. When it came to pure IQ — a psychological albatross if ever there was one — I just might have had them all dead to rights. I think my father knew that, and it galled him all his days. But all those accomplished sons had their priorities and I had mine.

It was not until I reach my early 30s that I finally told my father to shut his yap once and for all about the sons of strangers. While the details of that occasion are not important, I clearly remember that his reaction was not contentious in the least, but rather one that seemed much more like, “What took you so long?” And I flashed back immediately to the night when he attempted to lavish his praise on some faceless young man bound for Princeton while the mooncalf that had sprung from his very own seed sat inches away, whooping like a loon, scoring billiards with peas.