Midlife Irish (6 page)

My dad loved this plan.

“Beats the cursed traffic,” he would say.

At that point I know that I accepted the truth of this:

A big epic journey takes an hour. At the end, you are still in New Jersey.

I remember thinking once, on a Sunday drive with my dad, that Hershey, Pennsylvania, was “the wilderness.” I remember him
stopping the Dodge to go in and take a leak, and I remember getting out of the car to stretch my little legs. And I remember
looking around and thinking, “Wow, this is like on Davey Crockett.” Wilderness.

But now I was going to Ireland. Get on the plane. And when I got off, I wouldn’t even be in New Jersey.

I sat at my kitchen table and went over this with Paulette, my wife, a woman I have spent virtually my entire adult life with.
She has been to bizarre places, so it wasn’t the traveling that was the bother. With her, it was the realization that she
was going to have to be a character in a book.

“You have to be a character in this book because you are traveling with me and sharing my exciting and diverse Irish experiences
while I write this gripping and moving saga.” I didn’t say exactly that, but pretty close.

Paulette said, “No, I do not want to be a character.”

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “I am a very private person, and I do not want to be a ‘character.’ ”

I was, to be honest, a little put out by her prima donna stunt. When you’ve been in the same room with a person while that
person is going to the bathroom and you have had sex with that person and children with that person, I feel the term “private
person” is no longer a usable term. I told her that I would be entirely truthful and would not say anything about her that
she didn’t want me to say unless it was really necessary or I wanted to get back at her in some way.

“I don’t want you slandering me.” She actually said that. That’s a direct quotation.

I said that I would not legally slander her to the best of my knowledge of the definition of “slander,” as I, a person who
did not go to law school, understood it.

We arrived at a mutually satisfactory agreement without the aid of lawyers. I agreed that I would let her read the book before
it was published and, if there was anything in there about her that she did not like, I would feel really bad about it and
sympathize with her. At least that’s the way I understood it. Nobody signed anything.

Ken, our friend, drove us to the airport. Ken is a lawyer, but the subject was never broached on our ninety-minute drive from
Demorest to the Atlanta airport. Even though Paulette was now in the presence of a lawyer, she did not bring up the alleged
“slander” issue. I take this as an implied agreement on her part.

We were soon parking at the vast, sprawling Atlanta Harts-field Airport. If anything deserves the words “vast and sprawling,”
it’s the Atlanta Airport. Also “irritating.”

I hate airports, and Atlanta’s is the most loathsome of all airports. I walked through the vast sprawling place and had grim
thoughts. We decided to go to one of the bars in the airport, an idea I was very much in favor of.

We all had drinks and sat there without saying anything. Airports almost always make me feel bad. I trace my dread of airports
to early systematic conditioning. Airports and hospitals are the places where everything bad happens. Or at least, in my experience,
the last (and therefore permanent) memory of the really horrible bad things in life is formed there.

In truth I was a little frightened about what I might find over there in Ireland. My mom and dad’s aversion to talking about
Ireland might have, it occurred to me, some single horrifying reality. I could see my dad saying, “I’ve never told you this.
But your great-grandfather was Titus Andronicus.”

What I’m really worried about, I realize, is what I might
find out about myself. That is always the most horrifying thing to discover: that “the horror” lives right inside your own
chromosomes.

Murderers and horse thieves are romantic figures until you know that you are permanently genetically hooked up to them. But
there was another thread that had deeply bothered me in a very quiet but consistent way. It can be described in two words:
“Irish Coldness.”

The Cold Irish are not all Irish, but we recognize each other by our awkward, stuttering movement whenever some emotional
display is appropriate. We do many things, but one trait is dominant. We do not touch other human beings unless absolutely
necessary.

I have been aware of this quality in myself for many years, and I have tried (vainly) to overcome it. When I was in high school
all of my friends were Italian and I would marvel at the ease with which they hugged and kissed and nuzzled each other. The
way the men would kiss each other.

In my family the men did not even kiss women (often, even when they were married to them).

So I have, since youth, tried consciously to overcome the “Cold Irish” quality that is buried deep within my DNA.

I try to hug, but it’s clumsy, artificial, forced, awkward, and Lurchlike. Sometimes I stumble over and try to hug people
and I catch, over their shoulders, a look of utter, naked horror on their faces and I know one thing.

YOU, Frank Gannon, are a Cold Irish person. You should never touch another human being. You have tried, and have failed.

But, maybe, I think, Ireland is the key to all this. Maybe when I get over there I will, among my people, lose that surrounded-by-invisible-bodyguards
quality.

Maybe once I am over there under Celtic sky, I will stand in the Celtic heather (whatever that is) and be transformed into
an actual human being with three dimensions and at least three real authentic emotions. I will become a warmer,
more Walton’s Mountain person. I will just jump up and hug somebody. I will find out that I am deeper than I thought I was.
To touch, not Indians, but Irish people. People like me. My blood. My brothers and sisters. I need to dance about madly when
the fit is on me. Need to hug the girl down by the garden gate and shake hands with all my neighbors.

If you go to a travel agent, or watch airline commercials, or read travel magazines, you get the feeling that the Golden Age
of Irish Tourism is here. I think Ireland is very hot now, as Australia was in the by-gone “Shrimp-on-the-Barbie” days. I
picked up
USA Today
one day and I saw, on the front of one of their sections, a picture of a guy outside Dublin. I didn’t know him, but something
in his face was very familiar to me. It was a face I had seen on many heads at many Hibernian dinners. He was, as they say,
pure mick. He looked like he should have had a cloth hat on his mick head and a pipe in his mick mouth. He looked as if he
should be leaning on his rake out there in the bog fields.

But there is no bog, no rake. He has a yellow tie and an Armani suit and a cell phone and he is leaning against his BMW and
the expression on his face says, “What I am talking about you can never understand.” He has, finally, a really well-shined
pair of black shoes. His shoes glimmer like onyx in the moonshine.

He is an Irish yuppie, two words that do not seem as if they can be next to each other.

I am not sure what I’m going to find over there. But it is too late to stop now. They call our row and I must show that woman
my boarding pass to the land of saints and scholars and yuppies and, I hope, elves.

FIVE

The Promised Land

If this film of my parents’ life were rewound, the part that I am now seeking, the pre-America part, would begin with their
boat ride to Ellis Island. The end of my parents’ Irish life would have been the day they got off the boat in America.

I was able to determine that they did come over on a boat, but when I tried to determine which boat, I ran into big trouble.
They just didn’t keep very good records of such things. Ellis Island is in the process of establishing a huge database that
will eventually be able to tell everyone in America exactly when and how their ancestors got here. However, it’s not finished
yet. (Now it is, I believe—April 30, 2001.)

I spent many hours trying to establish my parents’ boat, then, after finding nothing, I looked into the type of boat they
came over on. I was able to narrow it down a little. I’m sure they didn’t come over on a Carnival Cruise, but I was very curious
about what their voyage was like. If I did write a moving account about their epic journey to America I’d be expanding beyond
what I knew. What I know is, “It was bad.” I’ll have to omit the gripping story. It was better than
Mutiny on the Bounty
and worse than the first part of
Titanic
(the film).

I can, however, tell you about my trip
back
to Ireland. Although it wasn’t even a boat ride it was, in its way, a nightmarish,
near-death ride of survival. It was a trip of great horror that tested the souls of my fellow travelers and me.

We flew coach on Delta. I sat in a seat designed for a member of the United States Female Gymnastic Team. We were given a
little plastic tray with poorly prepared food, and if we wanted alcoholic beverages, we had to pay for them.

But the final testament of man’s cruelty to his fellow man was this: The in-flight movie was
Baby Geniuses.

Lesser men wouldn’t have made it, but somehow the human spirit finds ways to survive. We landed in Shannon Airport and every
single person on that plane of evil survived. If Neil Diamond had been on that plane (in coach) he would have written something
at least as good as “We’re Coming to America.” “We’re Leaving America and We’re Uncomfortable.”

We knew that our adventure in Ireland would be a two-parter. We knew that our real mission was to find out about my mom and
dad. The other part was just to check out Ireland.

As we walked off the plane we noticed that it was just about but not quite raining. After a week or so we realized that in
Ireland it is almost always just about but not quite raining.

Shannon Airport looks as if it belongs in an old movie. It is markedly different from the standard American airport. The signs
are of the “Eat at Joe’s” variety and the luggage machine makes a loud clicking noise as it makes its bumpy way. The bathrooms
look circa 1940. The men’s-room urinal is one big metal trough where the men walk up, do their business, and depart. It looks
like the urinal they usually have in prison movies.

When we got our luggage we were both pretty sore from siting in the Nadia seats for twelve hours, but we were excited because
we were in Ireland. I felt very close to something,
but I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t wait to get over to the car rental.

In Ireland, for all the otherworldliness, they are a lot more sensitive to the realities of the environment. In America the
mere sight of a guy in his SUV seems to scream out, “Screw all you Green peace pinko huggers of trees! I deny your existence!”
In Ireland gas costs a lot, and the cars tend to be tiny. When I met Irish people with big cars they told me, without my asking,
why they had to have a big car. If they had a big car, it was usually related to their livelihood or their family.

Gasoline is sold in liters, which seems to underline the sense that oil is not to be taken for granted. In America I never
thought about “environmentalism,” but in Ireland I was very conscious of it, and the amazing natural beauty of Ireland always
reminded me.

We rented a Punta, a car not sold in America. If they did have it for sale in America people would laugh at it. I met another
Punta driver in Ireland who told me that “Punta” is Gaelic for “cheap ass little car.” That was pretty close. I felt that
if I got a flat tire (sorry, a “puncture”) I could just flip the Punta over on its side and go to work.

When we first picked up our car, the guy at the rental place handed me the keys and gave me a quick lesson in Irish driving.
I remembered “Q” explaining the equipment to James Bond.

“That’s the ignition. That’s the wiper. The mirrors are on the side, you notice they collapse…”