Honorable Mention winner in the Inspirational/Spiritual category of the 2024 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition
I don’t know that I felt my true soul until I got off the airplane at Shannon airport, Ireland, and stepped into green – emerald green, mint green, cats-eye green, just-budding-tree green. Like Oz. Though I was 40 years old and this was my first visit, it felt like coming home.
I sensed at once how the culture I’d grown up in no longer fit. A culture born of Yankee adages. America writ large. Build businesses. Get on with it. Get rich. Follow the rules. Don’t cry. Get a move on. Something new was awakened in me on that trip. The kindness and graciousness of the Irish people seemed somehow right to me.
This was soon after the terrible loss of my father. I was grieving and, at the same time, discovering the Celtic spirit I’d inherited from him and our forebears – a people with time enough to stop and tell a funny story or just to chat. A people who cherish time spent with friends and kin. And at the same time, nobody’s fool.
“This is the land and people I truly belong to,” I thought.
Kindness and keenness. I looked into Irish eyes in Ireland and saw that burning keenness of mind and spirit that was my dad’s. And love of story. Such love of language and story! Irish songs are filled with tales of troubles and survival, and love. Funny stories and jokes are told in the pub and around the kitchen table -- many with well-earned gallows humor. Even in the smallest towns, theater groups put on the classic Irish plays, keeping the old stories alive.
Perhaps this hunger for story relates to the time when the Irish were colonized, beaten down by cruel laws – forbidden to attend school, forbidden to wear the color green. Now, even on a dull, rainy St. Patrick’s day, I pull on my green sweater to honor those who risked jail for wearing of the green. I honor my great-something grandfather who risked his life by secretly instructing children in the hedgerows at night, despite the law. He was betrayed, a price on his head. The soldiers, not content with driving the family out, burned down the farm and the barn with the cow in it. This drove them to America.
The family, with several children, sailed over in separate bunches. One of the boats was a leaky “coffin” ship that sank. My family survived, but many did not – Irish emigrants who would never make it to America.
In America, the progeny of my great-something Irish grandfather first went to work in the textile mills of New York. Eventually, by that reverence for education, whether in hedgerows or halls of ivy, they became teachers, social workers, lawyers, business men and women, politicians, clergy, writers, poets and artists.
Perhaps this family history is what made my father such a visible champion of civil rights in mid last century. During the riots, as black men were thrown into jail for merely being on the street, without due process, dad and a handful of other lawyers went down to the county jail and bailed them out.
The home of my heart is a cottage in the west of Ireland, in a town where the family goes to the pub in the evening, where they randomly stand to recite poetry and sing the old songs, where one evening, urged by the locals, I stood and sang “Danny Boy.”
It was not a great performance, but they clapped and cheered loudly. I was one of them, a cousin from America come home.
This is why I tell stories, rail against injustice. This is why my artworks are filled with many shades of green.
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