An Irish Lesson

Yes, we're in a pandemic, but Saint Patrick's Day shall not go unnoticed. Here there will be corned beef and cabbage, Irish music, and placemats with shamrocks on them. In my spare moments I'll look at photos of the auld sod. There will not be a gathering of the clan, but we will be together in spirit.

The Irish are no strangers to adversity, having survived mass starvation during the Potato Famine (a fact you hear often when touring Ireland, a place where the past is more present than most places I've visited). But the Irish are also no strangers to joy.

You can hear these twin themes in their music, which alternates between raucous jigs and mournful ballads. In this the Irish are instructive: they can find fun in the midst of gloom. I'll hang onto that lesson today.

St. Patty's Redux

One advantage of having a tame St. Patty's Day celebration is waking up and wanting to do the day all over again. It's something that younger people (and my younger self) would have problems with.

But because my office is having a little happy hour this afternoon, and because I never get my fill of Irish music, I'm treating today as St. Patty's #2.

I'm wearing green and humming tunes and yes, I'll try to do a little work today, too.  But the spirit will be with me. The Irish spirit, that is.

Green Weekend

The Irish music has been blaring yesterday and today, pipes and jigs and ballads, from my laptop, iPod and CD player. I listen and am back in the little pub in Inishmore in the Aran Islands, or in Dingle Town, where the great Steve Cooney showed up to play at the Courthouse Pub.

I'm remembering the stones, the cliffs, the bare hills all green with lambs grazing, the ancient, ruined forts with rainbows all around them.

I'm tasting the brown bread at breakfast, the scones and the fish and chips and the Cadbury's chocolate, which somehow tastes better over there.

I'm remembering how I felt in Ireland, which was ... like I'd come home.

Visits to Ireland

"The people here look familiar," said Mom, a few hours after we'd landed at Dun Laoghaire off the ferry from Holyhead, Wales. At first I wasn't sure what she was talking about. But after a few days in Dublin I began to understand. The people looked like a lot of the Irish Catholics we knew back home, people like the Bryants, a family with 10 children who lived on Providence Avenue across the street from Christ the King School and Church. They had freckles and round faces and a pleasant way about them.

A week later, down a long lane in County Clare, Mom and I found her cousins, a pair of bachelor uncles who lived in a cottage without electricity. They served us tea in thin china cups that they produced with great ceremony, and they reminisced about meeting my mother's aunts when they were little boys.

A few days after that, in County Galway, we came across a man named Paddy Concannon, whose connection to us was unknown except that he was the spitting image of my grandfather, Martin Joseph Concannon.

I've visited Ireland only once. But I have to remind myself of that fact; it seems like I've been there at least a half a dozen times.

The Irish Season

The travel agents call it shoulder season. The New Englanders call it mud season. I call it Irish season. The time between winter and spring. A time when anything can happen. Snowfall or sunshine. Bloom or bust.

I've only been to Ireland once, but it feels like more often. Maybe I live vicariously through the travel of others. Or I listen to so much Irish music that I fool myself. Or I feel such an affinity for the landscape that I see it wherever I go.

Or maybe I visit there every year during the Irish season.

(County Clare channeled through the hills of West Virginia.)

A Place Apart

I've been re-reading the memoirs of Niall Williams and Christine Breen, who in 1985 moved from Manhattan to Kiltumper, County Clare, Ireland to write, paint and live a simple life. Their first two summers were some of the rainiest on record and tested their resolve. But in 1987 the sun shone and the turf dried and the hay was made before the rains came again.

It was then that they wrote, "Days and nights in Kiltumper are perfect countryside settings for the quiet contemplation of a career, a love, a life. In this green isolation, whole chunks of life can suddenly seem unimportant. A walk across fields in the evening light can change philosophies forever."

Like many writers they found that a change of scene created a change of heart. "Kiltumper had come to seem a sort of relief post, quite literally a place apart, a place to come to in which to draw breath and look outwards over the fields, to find the direction of your life."

Reading this, losing myself in their fantasy, I wonder: Can I ever do the same thing by staying put in the suburbs? Can I walk my way into an epiphany? I must admit, when I'm reading about the west of Ireland, I think not.

Sláinte!

The Irish may not be great walkers, but, by God, they are great talkers. And since walking and talking are meant for each other, and since this is the day that everyone is Irish (or would like to be) let us raise a glass to the sons and daughters of Erin wherever they may be. Sláinte!