Home and Hearth, Kith and Kin

This is where my husband's family lives.  Around this oven -- an Aga cooker.  My beloved mother-in-law bakes scones and soda bread in it.  Everyone makes tea.  The rashers, black pudding and eggs are kept warm there.  The family gathers around it and they talk and eat and eat and talk.  Alongside the Aga is a television where Husband No. 1's father watches the occasional rugby game.  His mother now boots up her laptop in this room after a breakfast or a lunch or a tea or a dinner, and offers it to us to check our e-mail or she herself updates her Facebook status or confirms the flight to Tenerife.  The children run in an out like kids do when the outdoors is as safe as the indoors.  And when they fight or fall; they come to this room dominated by the cooker to get hugs, sweets and adjudication.

This is where we are much of the time when we go home.  Everybody talks what with a table of 7 or 8 adults with decades of life, several marriages, 2 continents and a small busful of children between them.  Mostly I listen.  Because when you are dialectially outnumbered (forgive me that awful pun) you can't keep up.  I'm lucky if I can understand every fifth word.  Doesn't matter, it leaves me time to read bodies and to imagine what it is to be Irish.

Or, in particular, to be this Irish family which has owned land and a farmstead in County Longford for hundreds of years.  Being Catholic they have also been deprived of some of that land and if you drive a few minutes up the road my brother-in-law can tell you how the Protestants were deeded this acreage or that as reward for preserving English dominion.  Oh, how I got it, how easy it is to understand the legacy of reflexive animus that remains even though Ireland became wildly prosperous on its own terms, and despite the financial debacle, will never be either as poor or as oppressed as it had been before the early 1970's.

In our country, the stranglehold of inequitable land distribution and therefore the inability to prosper en masse, forced the greatest internal migration this nation's ever seen, African-Americans heading to the industrialized, urban north.  The Irish didn't have that as an out; it took the Famine to drive them here.

And what do you get when you have two disenfranchised peoples -- African-Americans and the American Irish -- competing for power and place?    The Draft Riots of the 1860's, Boston's social convulsions over busing in the 1970's, the affirmative action battles in urban fire and police departments and the building trades, and the slow and interrupted increase of dynastic African-American mayors in Northern cities.


In other words, fraternal enemies.

Dinner at the Mouth of the Ratty

Husband No. 1 on his never-ending quest for enlightenment came across a phrase "pedigree collapse" that will be our Word-O'-the-Day until Niece No. 1 wakes up and starts with the calvacade of butt jokes that she's so partial to (for now).  At first I thought it had something to do with the modern Republican Party, the meanest bunch of antediluvian, opportunistic Know Nothings I've ever seen in this country and believe me, growing up in Iowa, I've seen plenty.  (And godknows there are stupider groups in this country, but for sheer cake-taking for being as mean as you are unctuous, the modern GOP and its trademarked subsidiary, the Tea Party, takes the win.)  But, I digress.

It turns out that "pedigree collapse" doesn't mean the above, nor does it mean that there's been so much inbreeding that your line is rendered sterile (or am I being redundant?) it simply means that if one goes back far enough genealogically, you will find a relation.  Yeah, yeah we are all descendants of Eve.  Or, closer to home, there is the distinct possibility that I am related to a Beirne from County Kerry and don't know it.

Any excuse will do to find myself in Ireland one day in August at a Bunratty Castle, a 13th century fortress that's now a tourist attraction instead of a Viking or a Norman target.  (I can hear some of my American brethren:  "Doris, is it safe to go inside?  How do we know there aren't terrorists there?)  We, my in-laws, my husband and I bought tickets not only for a tour but also for that evening's meal compleat with mead ( a honey alcohol brew), the ubiquitous brown bread, soup and slabs of ribs.  It's all in fun, what I imagine they do in places like Disneyland or on a cruise.  You're packed in a banquet hall pretending that the young girl dressed in a low-cut, empire-waisted dress serving you is really a lady-in-waiting instead of the tight jeaned, bespectacled working girl smoking a filterless cigarette texting whoever as she passed you hours earlier on her way to work.  The singers sing.  The dancers dance.  The master of ceremony cajoles us and invites us in on the game.  (I am not one for sales pitches or organized groups.  The minute I sense that a live being is trying to manipulate my feelings in service to The Cause my arms cross my chest either literally or metaphorically.  A corollary:  I hate the social convention of "give yourself a hand".  Why should I clap?  I didn't do nothin' but pay for the ticket and keep my eyes open for a performance. )  Once he's deduced that we are his, and not until then because he wants you to want to play, he appoints a King and Queen.  With the typical Irish feck ya twist that night's anointed couple were English.  And not top-drawer English either.

So we're eating.  The only utensil you're given is a knife to spear the meat; everything else you eat with your hands.  You can have as much mead poured in your chalice as you want.  Puts you in the mood for the evening's business which is to catch a transgressor and have the royalty decide his fate.  That night's sacrificial schlub was a newlywed.  I don't know if being newly married mattered, but it certainly helps to have an inmate who's already poised for humiliation.  I don't even remember what the jacked up offense was; what I do remember was his growing doubt about the wisdom of having consented to role playing, not knowing what was coming.  Finally, the MC asks us, the lords and ladies of Bunratty to advise the King and Queen as to his fate -- the dungeon or death?  Torture or mercy?

And without hesitation the crowd roars for his death.  Husband No. 1 and I looked at each other with one raised eyebrow each as if to say:  Didja see that?

I Will Soon Be on Holiday in the Emerald Isle

Some time last year Husband No. 1 and I had the bright idea to take Niece No. 1 to Ireland.  She calls her female cousins (some who have visited us in the States) her "sisters" and it was time to return the gesture.  The pricing structure of airline travel and the fact that we only see Husband No. 1's family every few years led us to book a 10 day visit, which for grown-ups who love nothing better than sitting around drinking Jameson's and telling lies is just fine.  For a 5 year old separated from the mother with whom she is joined at the hip?  Not so much.  I had my misgivings when we booked the dates; and as departure approaches I have flashes of a whining, petulant, forlorn, anxious princessa who will insist that she Wants To Go Home!!!

Now I, who has for better or worse 2 kids under my belt, can be the Tom DeLay of Mothers and am quite prepared to whine, petulate (if such a verb exists), and holler back until she accepts that she might as well go outside and milk some cows because we are not driving to Dublin just yet.  Husband No. 1 will be upset.  First he will accuse me of child abuse.  (Picture me snorting.)  Then he will try to set up Skype so that Niece No. 1 can talk to her mother any time she wants, and we will be treated to the spectacle of her bleary-eyed mother (since there's a 5 hour time difference) alternately weeping and trying to crawl back to bed.  When that doesn't work, La Princessa whose other name is She Who Will Not Be Denied will convince Husband No. 1 to book a flight for himself and her and fly her home on Friday and return to Ireland on Sunday so that we can fly out of Dublin on Tuesday.


As you can tell, in my spare time, I'm always thinking up doomsday scenarios.  Despite myself, I go to the places we are specifically instructed not to go to which is one of the reasons that even after more than 25 years writing poetry and fiction making the work is its own kind of torture for me.  I actually have notes on an opera about Richard Speck, for chrissakes.  Don't think I'll be working on that piece any time soon.