On the plane to Ireland I try hard to imagine that I’m leaving London for the very last time. I often do this. It’s a litmus test, to see what my first reaction is. In this case, I felt happy. The overriding thought being that London was a dream, and I was waking up. Some London faces flashed before me. They and made me smile. I was ok saying goodbye.
London isn’t so much a dream as a variation of a dream, hooked always upon a kind of nightmare. The first thing one notices about Ireland is how quiet it is, and how expansive. Silence and fields that extend beyond the periphery and seem to join hands somewhere away from the eyes gaze. Below, chasing under the sky, the homes, towns, and cities crawl. There is always more silence and space than there is noise, and concrete.
I feel like Frank McCourt revisiting, as a stranger the town of his youth. Growing up in Tipperary in the 80’s and 90’s isn’t Limerick in the 30’s and 40’s, but a journey home is always the longest and the shortest. The longest because you’re not just visiting home in 2010, you’re there when you were six years old and cycling a bike, fifteen, when you drank whiskey in the field, or twenty one when you dreamed of going away. The shortest because your mind, memory, or heart never really got as far away as you thought it had.
I’m not too sure where Angela’s ashes lie, but every time I come home a kind of Phoenix propels itself from the past, and disintegrates again at the terminal at Shannon. I wonder where that Phoenix goes, where it waits while I return to the dream-hooked-on-nightmare of London.
Of course, I’m expected to say that ‘this is not the Ireland of my youth’. And it’s not. Besides, I’m only turning 27 – tomorrow, in fact. Even as we drive from the airport towards home we by-pass so many of the recognisable tokens of the all important and loaded trip to Shannon airport – a pathway of emigration for many Irish. This new road means there is no reason to enter the towns that bored me, excited me, or unnerved me as a child. We frequently drove to Shannon Airport to collect our Neighbour whose family lived in New York. The most memorable car trips were during Christmas time. It was magical: passing through the small towns with their eager decorations, passing through Limerick (that epitome of cosmopolitan for small child eyes) and onto Shannon, decked in glee and flashing lights, a giant snowman waving from the side of the control tower, and inside the winter wonderland pen. Back in those days the airport seemed so big, with its long marble foyers and, even, an escalator. There was the luggage trolly to push around, and discarded magazines to flick through. And then there was the challenge to spot the plane that held our neighbour, and further still, the promise that someday we might see New York.
A by-pass functions as an alternative route for a blocked passage. My dad’s had two triple by-passes. I learned the word when I was a boy. What about Irish towns can we infer from this phenomena? Promising to do away with the noisy dirty EU trucks stuck at every corner of the small Irish market town, the town planning philosophy seems to have been: if it’s not broke – don’t fix it – bypass it. By-pass to me just means there’s a whole generation of tourists and drivers who will never experience the charm of small Irish villages, surrounded as they will be with the cross over, bountiful road kill, and the loneliness of driving in Ireland at night. They might catch a church steeple, a hurling flag, or the sign that reads ‘Newtownabbey is proudly partnered with Rybnik’. However, the most one can gleam on this by-pass is a glimpse of ‘something’; never an understanding of it, not of Newtownabbey, and my guess is, not of Rybnik.
Coming home – everything is different, and everything is the same. Our house is different; brighter, bigger. Renovation is good. It makes the homestead more manageable, but does it make it more homely? Home is the people. The paint on the wall changes, and suddenly there is Internet, and Flat screen TV. The photo frames change, but the photo’s are the same, and the people in them, without choice, feel the same, and this warms you.
Walking around town with my Dad, one sees how small the homes are. The baby boomer generation wanted homes, and security, and raised children that do not return. The houses grow moss at their sides like hair from ears, and dark rivers run down the front, like a wrinkle, caused by a broken drainpipe. ‘Who lives here, Dad?’ ‘Someone very old’. Most of the houses are empty. A lot of the curtains have not been changed since I walked past them as a child.
Walking in the plant store with my Mother, I’m reminded of how I always wanted to buy flower bulbs as a child. I would stare at the huge display of small packets, with fantastic colours on the front. Staring was nearly better than ever growing the dry little things, which nearly always ended up shrivelling in the boiler shed. The boiler shed – a boy’s best friend; the closest thing to the wardrobe leading into Narnia. All it contained was nails, old pennies, tins of paint, golfballs, glass jars, debris from Dad’s DIY adventures, and my Mother’s father, who had built the house. The walls were black, and, I imagined, stained with oil. The smell of the boiler, and the rattle never scared me. I never saw an evil face on it, or thought it would swallow me up, like some children might think. It was my accomplice when I snuck in to steal a hammer, or a knife, or chose to hide some stolen good there. My mother called me the magpie, and the boiler was my rattling nest. It was like a heartbeat that could not stop shaking.
The house changes. The house does not change. The people change the house. The house changes the people. The people do not change. In totally different circumstances, and with different props, about 22 years ago we played shop on our porch. My four year old cousin’s don’t know this, but use the porch for the exact same fantasy. Perhaps there is a window of missed opportunity for passing trade? Of course, the house cannot make the people happy. That’s not the house’s function. At best it can comfort.
Age is relative. A 1 billion year old rock is old. A 72 year old is not old. I am not old. Twenty seven is older than I thought I was. I thought that I’d be editor of the New Yorker by now, but then New York is also further away than I thought it was.
It is a joy, humbling even, to share time with those who raised you. I’ve been told that one element of a parent’s pride is to see their child mature, and become an equal (or at least, an adult). I think the reverse is true. If the person is truly mature they will see their parent, uncle, friend, or teacher no longer defined by a role, but composed of all the complexities and shades they know themselves to be made up of. For some this moment is defined as the moment where children realise that their parent has a weakness or frailty. Maybe it’s not so much the recognition of this trait, but our awareness that we are thinking of someone in another way – that our thought processes is changing. Babies, for all one can write about them, are greedy, insistent, manipulative things, hell bent on self-gratification. The most important moment in a person’s life is not their birth or death, but the moment they come out of their self, and selflessness is born.
We would not want to by-pass these moments in life, any more than we should by-pass Carrowkeel, Lisnagry, Drominboy, or Gooig. We give places names because they mean something to us. Carrowkeel, An Cheathrú Chaol , the narrow quarter. People have fought and died to name, or preserve a name. Who is to say what is worth keeping on the map, the colonists, the local councillors? If the place looses the reason for its name, it’s name will fade. Childhood is a name and it means something to us. Is it worth passing?
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