Midlife Irish (3 page)

I know a lot about “Ireland.”

It’s extremely green there. It’s green everywhere. In the winter, it’s still green. Just green and more green. There are about
seventy-five shades of green. Whenever anybody wants to remind themselves that they’re Irish, they say, “It’s time for the
wearin’ of the green.” It’s green city.

That’s pretty much it as far as the landscape goes. There are also the Irish people.

There are young men there and old men there. The young men are often called “brawny.” They wear little hats and will, if provoked,
punch you in the mouth. The old men are smaller than the young men. The old men smoke pipes and make mysterious, gnomic pronouncements
and statements about things. The statements sound like questions. Instead of saying, “Nice night,” they say, “Are you after
havin’ dinner, is it?”

Everybody says, “Top of the mornin’.” No one knows what this means.

There is a lot of punching in “Ireland.” The old men are not as quick to punch you in the mouth, but they will, if sufficiently
provoked, give it to you. You’ll be standing there with your hand on your bleeding mouth. Then they’ll say, “Are you after
bein’ punched in the mouth, is it?”

Both the old men and the young men drink too much. Way too much. They call this “after havin’ a drop taken.”
Everyone in Ireland is continually looking for some excuse to drink. When somebody dies, they really drink a lot. They drink
something called “poteen.” The entire nation needs to be after checking in the Betty Ford Clinic, is it? But nobody ever does.
Alcohol is funny. Everybody laughs about it. A drunken Irishman is very funny.

No one ever suffers from drinking. They just “sleep it off” and everything is fine again.

All the drinking causes a lot of that fiddle music, which is played, continuously, like Musak, all across the land. If there
were a volcano in Ireland, they would be playing that music while it erupted and killed thousands. Many would die dancing.

Even though everyone in Ireland can dance, they cannot dance and move their upper body at the same time. Irish people like
to get in giant Rockettes-style lines and dance like crazy while their upper bodies remain stationary.

The Irish women come in two varieties: young and old. The young ones look very good, and most of them have red hair. You call
them either “Colleens” or “Lassies.” I, personally, would not call them “Lassies” because of the connection to the TV show.
I would call them “Colleens.” After I got to know them, I would call then “Darlin Colleens.”

The Colleens are often described as “headstrong.” The platonic ideal of an Irish girl looks like Maureen O’Hara. They look
great but if you look at them right in the eye, they smile for a second and turn their face.

That is darlin’.

When the Irish women get older, they go to church a lot, and many people refer to them as “saintly.” They are never far from
rosary beads. When some Irish guy dies, no matter how bad that guy is, they can, and do, say of him, “At least he loved his
mother.”

Everybody in Ireland is Catholic. If you are born and grow up, and, for some reason, do not completely and utterly accept
the Catholic dogma in its entirety, then you have to
leave. The other Irish people will watch your plane or boat leave and say, “We won’t be missin’ him.” Or they may say, “We
won’t be missin’ the likes of him.”

But they will. They will write songs about him leaving. The songs will have pipes in them. Someone, somewhere in the song
will be referred to as “darlin’.”

The priests and the nuns of Ireland form a large part of the population. Almost everyone has a priest or a nun in their family.
The priests, when they are young, tend to resemble the young Bing Crosby. When they get older, they turn into Barry Fitzgerald.
All priests are extremely good at all sports. They are particularly adept in boxing. If you “put on the gloves” with an Irish
priest, watch out because he will beat the crap out of you. An old Irish priest always has a photograph of himself taken when
he was young. He will be in trunks and gloves and will be the one-time welterweight champion of Sligo or something, a title
he abandoned when he became a priest.

You don’t mess with Irish priests. They would call them bad mother_____, but they don’t use that kind of language over there.

If an Irish man isn’t a priest he can be a cop or a bartender or a farmer. There are no other professions available.

Irish policemen are “tough but fair.” When they are described, those exact words are used. There are no Irish policewomen.
If an Irish woman is interested in keeping the general order, she becomes a nun.

Irish nuns are also startlingly good at sports. An Irish nun will always strike out a kid who thinks he’s a wise guy. Irish
priests can play baseball, basketball, and football extremely well, even though they will always play with those big black
robes on. And if you act like a wise ass they will humiliate you. But they’ll still love you.

Irish people are all happy-go-lucky. They say “sure and begorrah” a lot, and like “top of the morning” no one ever knows what
it means. They are extremely lucky. If you read
about the history of Ireland, “lucky” is the last adjective that would seem to describe it. But everybody says, “The Luck
of the Irish,” so there must be something to it. No one says “The Bad Luck of the Irish,” which seems a lot more appropriate.

That is Ireland, a place I am very familiar with. The place I am familiar with, however, exists only in advertisements for
cereals and soap, and in certain movies now largely owned by Ted Turner who is owned by AOL Time Warner. The real Ireland,
I couldn’t tell you. My mom and dad were, of course, born in Ireland. Their mom and dad were born there too. And so on and
so on, back into what science-fiction movies call “the mists of time.” But I woke up one day and realized that I really didn’t
know who I was. I was an Irish guy, but that was all I really knew about Ireland.

I’m an American. I like American stuff. I like the Philadelphia Phillies. Every year I can name their lineup. I start every
morning from April to September checking the box scores. I know all the characters on
Gilligan’s Island.

I grew up in Camden, New Jersey. If you have never been there, I will describe it as “Philadelphia’s exciting sister city
to the east.” I took Latin and German in college and high school, but American English is the only language I will ever really
know, the only language I will ever dream in. I know two things in Gaelic: “Erin go bragh” and “poga ma hough.” One means
“Ireland forever” and the other means “kiss my ass.” I once got a book on Gaelic, looked at it, and put it away. As Steve
Martin said of the French, they have different words for
everything.

But there was always something “Irish” floating around in the atmosphere at my house on Forty-ninth Street. My friends, when
they met my mom and dad, would always say something like, “Wow, your parents are really Irish.” Or, “They’re like from Ireland,
huh?” Or, among some, “They talk funny, huh?”

My mom had little holy water fonts beside the doorways
in my house, and I got used to “blessing myself” (dipping a finger in the font and making the sign of the cross whenever I
entered a room) at a very early age. There were crucifixes in every room in my house except the bathroom, and I am not completely
sure there weren’t any in there. There was an Infant of Prague, a little statue of the Christ Child, which my mom would dress
in different ways according to the church calendar, sitting on the radiator cover in our living room. There were also religious
pictures all over the house, and my family would, without fail, dutifully kneel and say the rosary every night before bed.

We would also stop at the appointed hours and say the Angelus prayer. There was a print of that famous Millet painting
The Angelus
in our living room, the only “objet d’art” in the house.

My house had so much religious stuff that Paul Gartland, my friend, saw the movie
Hunchback of Notre Dame
on television and then told people that criminals often ran into my living room, fell to their knees, and screamed, “Sanctuary!”

My mom and dad both listened to the
Irish Hour
on the radio (it always seemed to be on, making me suspect it was longer than an hour), and my dad always read the Irish
newspapers, even though he never mentioned “back there.” They were members of the Hibernians, and on Saint Patrick’s Day
and
the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, we got to stay home from school. My dad’s bar was called GANNON’S IRISH AMERICAN REFRESHMENT
PARLOR.

There were two framed pictures in my dad’s bar, one on each side of the front door. One was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and
the other was Jesus Christ. Sometimes my dad would point them out to people and assume a vaguely threatening posture that
seemed to say, “Any questions?”

My dad had a little accordion-thing with buttons on one side. When he played it, with his enormous, alarmingly scarred fingers,
it always sounded like the same song. I began to think of it as “The Irish Song.” I looked in his songbook.
There were several different songs in there. I can’t remember the names, but they had titles like. “Maggie in the Bushes,”
and “Bringin’ in the Rot,” and that old favorite, “Down by the Side of the Ditch.” They all sounded like the same song played
at slightly different speeds. By the time I was thirteen, I was really sick of “The Irish Song.” Even today, if you say “Deedly
deedly dee” in my presence I get a little nauseated.

Eventually I drew additional conclusions about my parents’ past in Ireland: These were “additional supplementary information.”

1. It was very tough, and they had no money.

My dad would occasionally say something like, “You don’t know how easy you have it.” I didn’t know any details about the early
life of my mom and dad, but my dad did have a very peculiar attitude toward nature that, I believe, had its origin back there
in the Old Country. When I was a kid, I asked him if I could have a dog. He looked at me as if I had just asked him for something
really unspeakable. The way he said no made me think he was saying, “I have had enough of animals in my house.”

2. They lived on farms, but it wasn’t like the farm life on
Lassie.

My dad was not one with nature.

One time, when I was about ten, I saw a hand-painted sign, “Tomato Plants for sale.” I knocked on the door and an old guy
with a baseball hat answered the door. He was very friendly. He showed me his tomato plants. He had hundreds of them. I bought
four of them and took them home. I dutifully planted them in my backyard. I watered them and looked at them proudly. I didn’t
particularly like tomatoes, but I was very much looking forward to watching them grow into big round red beauties. I thought
of it as a science/nature experiment. When I was little, I loved “mad scientists.” I used to lock the bathroom door and pour
every liquid I could find into the sink. I wanted to see if something weird would happen like it did in the movies whenever
anybody
mixed stuff together. Nothing ever happened except I occasionally stained the sink.

But I enjoyed my tomato plants. They changed a little every day. “The Tomato that Attacked…” movie hadn’t yet been made, or
I would have thought of it while I watched my plants.

The next evening, my dad was mowing the lawn with his big green Sears power mower. He was just about finished when he saw
something new over by the back fence—my tomato plants. He got a peculiar look, halfway between disgust and shock. Then he
went over and mowed them down—my tomato plants. Then he went back over them a few times to make sure they were really gone.
Then, just to make
really
sure, he mowed them down one more time.

I looked at my plants. There was nothing left but…tomato plants that had been run over by a lawn mower three times. This sight
made me start crying. The brutality of the man. I ran into the house and buried my face in my pillow. My mom came in and asked
what was going on. I told her what had happened. She was not shocked. She said that was just the way Dad was.

Later, my dad explained himself. We are not farmers. We do not grow things. We do not live on a farm. We are better than that.

Any questions?

3. People who say how great Ireland is, and how beautiful it is, don’t know anything about Ireland
.

My dad told me this, in different words, approximately ten thousand times. “Ah, you don’t know what it was like, Fransie.”
He said that to me a lot when I was little. I wondered why he couldn’t get my name straight. Every time he “had a little talk”
with me, he called me “Fransie.”

But even when he called me Fransie, he really didn’t tell me much about Ireland. All I knew was that farms are really bad.
All crops should be mowed down.

I decided to find out about Ireland.

* * *

First I had to really think: What did I think “Irish” was, and how did I form my impressions?

I thought back.

I was in third grade when the teacher, Miss Burke, asked if anybody was “third generation.” I had no idea what this meant,
and I could see that most of the other kids didn’t either. Miss Burke explained.

Almost everybody in America, except the Indians, came from somewhere else. If your parents came from somewhere else, you were
“first generation.” If your grandparents came from somewhere else, you were “second generation.” And so forth.

It turned out that I was the only kid who was “first generation.”

Miss Burke said, “And we don’t have to ask what country they came from, do we?”

Why not? I thought. At recess I asked her.

“I didn’t have to ask, Frank,” she said, “because
the map of Ireland is all over your face.
”

This was, I thought, puzzling. I looked at my face. Pretty normal. I wasn’t the most perceptive kid in the world. I got most
of my knowledge from looking at movies. That summer I got the idea of what an Irish person was from watching movies.