The Sixty Minute Father

Matt Bissonette

This month's idea is a great excerpt from our recent interview with Matt Bissonette. If you want to read the full interview, check out our feature in this issue!

"I had always said that if I ever became a parent, I wouldn't want to just spend quality time with my children - I didn't want to only do the bare minimum. When my son was born, I decided I was going to spend as much physical time with him as possible. I have been on the road with bands a lot over the last six years, which has been kind of frustrating. Whenever I am home, once a year, he and I will get in the car and drive from state to state to see games at all the ball parks. We started in California, drove to Colorado, then up to Michigan, and started seeing all the fields. Every year, we'll see five or six more stadiums.

A couple of weeks ago, we finished our last run, to Minnesota and Washington, and we'll just drive and talk about…what color the sky is. It's that time for me, that's the stuff we'll always remember. I asked him the other day, "do you remember this certain thing about this stadium?" He said, "no, but I remember when you turned left in Cincinatti at the Louisville sign and you were so mad!" He remembers that stuff, and I know that it's making an impact on him growing up. We've found something in common, baseball, that we're both interested in. It's not even the games that are important - it's just getting there and hanging out. I bought him some cotton candy at the end of the last game to celebrate our road trip, and he completely wigged out on it. That stuff's evil. It took three days to calm him down."