by Frank Gannon
If my mom and dad were to have a look at me these days, they would approve of a lot of things. Three kids, two cars, big house. If they could look beyond the surface, however, they would see that I am a profound disappointment. My parents always told me that the most important thing in the world is what they call “the faith.” When they discussed what an Irish person bequeaths to his children, they would say something like, “He didn’t have much money at the end but he gave them the faith.” And other Irish people would nod in assent.
My mom and dad had a faith. But somewhere in America, I misplaced it. I still go to church on Sunday and the authorities do not want me, but I just don’t make it in spiritual land. I read a lot of philosophers in college and I decided that I was in Nietzsche land, but I have slowly stumbled over to what I would call “Bad Catholic Land.”
There are many bad Catholics in America. They can go along with about 80 percent of what the Catholic Church says, but they disagree (sometimes violently) with the last 20 percent.
Bad Catholics think that homosexuals aren’t sinning when they have sex. Bad Catholics think a woman has the right to decide what happens to her body. Bad Catholics aren’t thrilled when the pope goes into a third-world developing country, a place where a great number of children die of starvation, and says that almost every form of birth control is morally wrong.
Finally, the most salient feature of Bad Catholics is their belief that even though they don’t agree with everything the Catholic Church says, they still aren’t going to quit. They are going to stick around, keep pretty quiet, and be Bad Catholics.
I grew up in America and became a Bad Catholic. I don’t have a rich spiritual life. My mom and dad, who grew up in Ireland, did. I am now going to Ireland and I hope that I will see just where I missed the boat.
FOUR
The Epic Journey
Like certain Italian wines, I have never traveled well. This may be because of experiences I had when I was young.
Our vacation when I was a kid consisted of the following: We lived right next to Philadelphia, on the Delaware River in New Jersey, and we would drive sixty miles to the Jersey shore and stay for two weeks in a rented house at Ocean City, the home, I later found out, of Gay Talese, but in those days beloved for its three challenging miniature golf courses on the boardwalk and the fact that there were no bars or even places to buy alcoholic beverages. Ocean City was “The Family Place amid the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Jersey shore.”
Sixty miles, tops. This was not the Oregon Trail. But my dad made a major production out of this. To “avoid traffic,” he would wake us up at 5:00 A.M. the day of the drive. My brother, my sister, and I would stumble out to the car clutching our pillows, and we would drive down to the shore. My sister and brother always fell asleep. I stared out the dewladen window of my dad’s ’61 Dodge.
There were no cars on the road at that hour, just the occasional truck. Some of them would blink their lights. I never knew what that meant, but my dad seemed to think it was ominous. He would knit his brow, stare harder at the empty Route 9. Sometimes he would mutter the name of God.
Because I was young and because of the early hour—the jolt of being taken from a warm bed and placed in a cold Dodge at 5:00 A.M.—I always thought that it was like my favorite show, the one my mother rarely let me see, The Twilight Zone. The episode where Burgess Meredith woke up and the world was dead.
There were still people in New Jersey driving down to the shore at 5:00 A.M. But they seemed altered. A single truck with a grim little Edward Hopper man peeking above the steering wheel. A solitary ominous walking black bird. One old lady crossing the road and turning her head in slow motion as we approached. I saw all this while the sun slowly crept up over the New Jersey shore horizon.
It was beautiful when we got there. After that grueling hour, sixty minutes on the road and now, Thank God! Thank God we had gotten up early enough to “beat the traffic”! We would get to our destination, Ocean City, around 6:30 A.M.
My dad would roll down the window. Smell that, you sleeping ones! Smell that!
I rolled down my window. Yes, the sea. I will always love that smell.
Then we would be going over bridges and my brother and sister would wake up. Look! A seagull! I don’t think that I have ever been happier than when we rolled into Ocean City after our epic journey.
There was the house. It was always the same house. When I was four, on my first trip, I despaired when I saw it. I asked my mother in anguish, “Why did we sell our nice house and buy this crummy house?” By the time I was five I got the idea.
I loved the house, the weirdness of it. The sheets on the bed. The backyard with the strange gnarled tree. The little store up at the corner.
After we got there, it was, of course, still very early. We would wander around saying things like, “What time is it?” and taking short naps on the couch or the beds. Until finally, after what seemed like an eternity, it was time to go to the beach.
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.
PART TWO
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…”
He reached over to one of the side mirrors and clicked it back.
“If that happens, just do this.”
He popped it back.
I would later learn that the pop-back mirrors are a very good idea if you are going to drive around in Ireland. I popped a lot of mirrors driving in Ireland. Sometimes going by stone walls, sometimes going by cows and sheep.
“You drive on the left side of the road, so when you get to a roundabout remember that the cars to your right have the right of way. Good luck.”
And with that, we were off.
I have never been much of a driver. I didn’t have a license until I was twenty-three, and I am not skilled in the motor arts. Once I drove my friend Andy up to get some pizza. I had, at that time, a brand-new Toyota.
“Do you mind if I drive back?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Are you thinking about getting one of these cars?”
“No,” he said. “I just don’t want to sit in a car that you are driving.”
That has happened to me many times since then. I have had people offer me money if they could just “please, please, drive the goddamn car!”
So I do not inspire confidence when I am behind the wheel. That was why I was surprised when Paulette wanted me to drive in Ireland. We drove off smiling. What an adventure!
