Ireland: A Snap Shot View

In 2001, before 9-11, I had the opportunity to visit Ireland with 4 people I hadn't met up until that point and 1 person I had known only for a few months. Since one of my fellow travelers had plans to open a pub when he returned to America, we did a lot of research on his behalf and visited the famous Guinness Storehouse, in addition to quite a few drinking establishments.

We started in Dublin, drove down to Kilkenny, stopped at their 13th century castle, and ended up in Kinsale, the gourmet capital of the south.

It was here, in Old Head, we gave our respects to the ship Lusitania that went down off the coast in May 1915 and wondered about the history of these two items.

We climbed the 127 narrow stairs to the top of the obligatory Blarney Castle, foregoing the kiss and actually preferring the gardens to the hype.

And all throughout, we paid homage to Ireland's long fight for self determination and independence. I brought back three things with me: a reinforced respect for the country, a nubby open-weave scarf I still wear and this poem: I was here, here I was, was I here, yes, I was.

Irish Dancing

My niece Maya in the back row middle.

Moulin Rouge

Jen's dogs, Rose and Violet, ready for some holiday trick or treating ... Halloween is said to originate in Ireland and is known as Oíche Shamhna. Pagans held an autumn festival Samhain (End of Summer) and lit large communal bonfires to protect against evil spirits.

The Ballad of Ballymote

by Tess Gallagher

We stopped at her hut
on the road to Ballymote
but she did not look up
and her head was on her knee.

What is it, we asked.
As from the dreams of the dead
her voice came up.

My father, they shot him
as he looked up from his plate
and again as he stood and again
as he fell against the stove
and like a thrush his breath
bruised the room
and was gone.

A traveler would have asked directions
but saw she would not lift her face.
What is it, he asked.

My husband sits all day in a pub
and all night and I may as well
be a widow for the way he beats me
to prove he's alive.

What is it, asked the traveler's wife,
just come up to look.

My son's lost both eyes in a fight
to keep himself a man
and there he sits behind the door
where there is no door
and he sees by the stumps
of his hands.

And have you no daughters for comfort?

Two there are and gone to nuns
and a third to the North
with a fisherman.

What are you cooking?

Cabbage and bones, she said. Cabbage
and bones.

Cabbage and Bones (1997)

I've been waiting for Halloween week to post Caledonia Kearn's anthology of Irish American fiction. The themes are familiar ... funerals, loss, change, resentment, and a longing for a past more fanciful than real. It's the use of language I love, the extra pronouns, and the sense of other that exists in the daily life of those from the old country. An except follows from "Hour of Spring" by Mary Deasy:

"She remembered her great-granduncle Matt as a tall old man who wore a loose-fitting dark suit and derby hat, and who came to visit them twice a year on holiday afternoons, when he talked to them about the old days when he had lived on Burke Street .... Sometimes he went further back and talked about Ireland, and of his experiences with the little people there. He told them once that his grandmother had the glamour, and could see the fairies and traffic with them. She was a beautiful gray woman, he said; and told them how she would put an empty chair by the peats on a stormy night for some poor ghost to come in and rest.

He believed all that ... he believed it as implicitly as he believed in the Lord God sitting in His golden chair, and the angels and the blessed saints round. People who never knew the old Irish might think it incredible that a man could live for more than half a century in a modern American city and still believe in the existence of fairies, particularly a man as hardheadedly matter-of-fact as her great-granduncle Matt."

What about you? Do you have the glamour? Nearly everyone has a ghost story to tell. What's yours?

Click here to find out more about the book: Cabbage and Bones.