| Never Mind The Weather
By Christopher Connell
Dublin: The wind and rain lashed furiously on the tarmac at Dublin
Airport, rocking our Aer Lingus Airbus like a gondola exposed to the elements
on a mountaintop. We hadn't packed any sun block for this post-Christmas
2000 family trip to Ireland, but no one had told us we'd be landing in the
monsoon season.
It had proved impossible to land at Shannon Airport in the west, where
the storm was said to be really raging. What had possessed us to think that
taking our children at Christmastime to see Ireland for the first time made
any sense at all?
As a Muzak reel of Christmas carols piped us off the Airbus, I wondered:
Can you get seasick on an airplane at the gate? Not that folks hadn't tried
to warn us.
Everybody said the weather in Ireland at the outset of winter would be
miserable, even the innkeepers we called to book rooms. Gusts had reached
100 mph in the west the previous day. The drenched ground crew in their
yellow slickers looked like fishermen waiting to tie down the last ship
in the fleet. But what the heck!
Most of the things we wanted to see, from the Book of Kells to Bunratty
Castle, were indoors anyway. This was an adventure and a well-earned break
for the Connells.
I was a recovering journalist, about to embark on a new life as an independent
writer after a quarter century in the daily news grind. Nancy and I had
last been in Ireland together two decades earlier, the summer before our
first child, Matthew, was born.
Now Matt, 19, home from college for the holidays, and Ellen, 13, were
getting a glimpse of the land where their grandmother grew up and where
unseen uncles, aunts, and cousins still lived. Our third child, James, 18,
was back home rowing with his college crew team.
We encounter a few disappointments on our Yuletide tourist trek. The
library that houses the Book of Kells at Trinity College in the middle of
Dublin was locked tight for the week between Christmas and New Years. There
were no banquets or songs at Bunratty Castle just outside Limerick, either.
But the off-season traveler quickly learns to appreciate the myriad of other
sights that can be enjoyed without the bustling crowds of spring and summer.
As for the weather, we paid it no mind. The thermometer never sank close
to freezing during our week in Ireland, and three days were brilliant, sunnier
by far than many a July day I have passed in Ireland. There were vacancies
galore and plenty to do, notwithstanding the occasional CLOSED sign.
We weren't the only ones taken aback by Trinity College's and the keeper
of the Kells' strict observance of the holiday. Two dozen foreign students
were turned away at the same time, equally surprised and disappointed at
missing a glimpse of the monks' colorful calligraphy.
The stage was dark at the Abbey, but a few blocks up O' Connell Street
the Gate Theater mounted a stirring production of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.
We saw golden antiquities and relics at the National Museum, and had
a delightful tour of Dublin Castle, led by a witty, feminist guide who remarked
as she pointed out former President Mary Robinson's coat of arms that the
incumbent Irish president "is also a woman, thank God!"
We dispensed with the Guinness Brewery tour (but not with the Guinness,
it's good for you), and made the ritual trek to Christchurch and St. Patrick's
Cathedrals, where the 18th century dean and his wife are buried "where fierce
indignation can no more lacerate his heart".
We also skipped St. Michan's Church, on whose regal organ Handel is said
to have composed The Messiah. St. Michan's is also Dublin's answer to the
Tomb of Tutankhamen: its basement houses a collection of mummified bodies,
preserved by the limestone in these dry vaults. The largest and most famous
tenant in St. Michan's basement is affectionately called the Crusader (the
late 17th century church is built atop the ruins of an earlier place of
worship that the Vikings built 900 years ago). I shook the Crusader's leathery
hand back in December 1970 at the end of a five-month stay in Ireland as
a college student.
When I climbed out of the crypt and into the sunshine that day, a nasty
cold that had been making my final days in Ireland a misery almost miraculously
went away. We were told some vandals had made a mess of St. Michan's a few
years back; I hope they left the Crusader his dignity.
Most of my previous half-dozen trips to Ireland were in the 1970s, although
I was back briefly in 1993 on my mother Mary's last trip home. She is 90
now and living in an assisted living facility in New Jersey, with few physical
infirmities but bereft of memory. No longer can she recite the poems learned
in the one-room schoolhouse near the County Cork farm where her widowed
mother raised six youngsters.
My kids had never met her two surviving brothers: Sean McSweeney, a retired
schoolmaster and raconteur, and Jimmy McSweeney, the wry, gentle bachelor
left to work the family farm outside Dunmanway when flu carried off the
eldest brother, Con, in the 1920s.
We had rooms booked at the Golf Links Hotel in Glengariff for New Year's
Eve, but a jammed lock on the rented Opel Astra foiled our plans for an
early departure from Dublin. The lady at the desk at Talbot's Guest House
abandoned her post to try her hand, but she had no more luck than I. We
called the AA, which promised to dispatch someone within the hour. He took
90 minutes, but had the door open in a thrice.
Ireland was still soaking this morning from the gales of the two previous
days, and the main roads in the south and west were flooded. Fermoy, which
straddles the main road south, was laying claim this morning to being the
Irish Venice, so we charted a new course west through Limerick, Killarney,
and over the Caha Mountains to Glengariff.
How long would this take, Nancy and the kids asked. It was just a couple
of hundred miles. Five or six hours, I guessed. I wasn't counting on the
dual carriageway disappearing and traffic grinding to a halt in Kildare.
It was dark before we reached Limerick. We pressed on relentlessly to Killarney,
where I made a couple of wrong turns before Matthew (born with a compass
in his head) set us right again. Nancy wondered what was wrong with all
the choice lodgings we were passing up. But this was New Year's Eve, and
we had an appointment in Glengariff.
It was 8 p.m. before we reached Kenmare, and suddenly I recalled the
manager from the Golf Links telling me their restaurant was fully booked
that evening, and she could only feed us if we got there early. That was
not going to happen. Out of the car we clambered and down the street to
a hotel with a crowded bar, where the first words out of the barmaid's mouth
were, "It's a fixed-price menu only tonight, and we're fully booked".
I felt panic set in as we headed back toward the street, wondering if
we'd wind up ringing in the New Year with fish and chips from a greasy spoon.
Then the barmaid hurtled back to intercept us: "Wait! The cook says we have
a cancellation".
The meal that followed was a delight. It started with a prodigious Caesar
salad, with chopped walnuts and cheese, and the best brown bread in Ireland.
Nancy and Matt dined on chicken and I feasted on salmon in a wine sauce
worth slurping with a spoon. There were plates of potatoes, fried and browned
in the oven, as well as turnips and small, tasty Brussels sprouts. The price
fixed of 12 pounds (about $16) included pints of Murphy's Stout. Our vegetarian
13-year-old, who'd been subsisting largely on bread, butter and scones,
was charged only for the plate of chips.
Fully restored, we made it over the mountain, past the grazing sheep
with red and blue splotches of paint on their backs and into Glengariff
without incident a little past 10 p.m., 10 hours after we set out. The Golf
Links Hotel beckoned us at the top of a lane, with a Christmas tree in the
porch and peals of laughter in the bar.
Helen, the manager, found us three rooms and we ushered in the New Year
in style. In the morning we awoke to discover the beauty of Bantry Bay outside
our windows.
We made our getaway a good bit earlier than poor Helen, who had been
up until 4:30 a.m. tending the holiday revelers, had a right to expect.
She served us our tea and breakfast, then tallied the bill.
We were up early on this New Year's Day to rendezvous at the farm where
my mother was born at a bend in the road called Inchincurka, five miles
north of Dunmanway. My cousin John, an American-born rebel who emigrated
from the Bronx at the age of eight, would be there with Uncle Jimmy, the
reluctant farmer who now spends his days in a nursing home in Clonakilty.
It was a cold, wet holiday, and we found Jimmy warming by the peat fire
in the pale, cream-colored farmhouse where he dwelled all but five of his
89 years. The farmhouse is mostly empty these days, and another farmer tills
the rocky West Cork fields.
John now owns the house and 58 acres of land where he came of age after
deciding back in the summer of 1948 that the Bronx was not his cup of tea.
John was one of four children of my Uncle Patrick McSweeney, a postal supervisor,
and his wife, Hannie.
Uncle Patrick, "Patsy" the oldest of my mother's five siblings, had come
to America first and endured hard times in the Depression before finding
work with the Post Office and raising his family in a three-room apartment
opposite Our Lady of Refuge Church on Briggs Avenue. The quarters were too
close for John. He saw his opportunity to escape when my mother took him
and my two older siblings back to see her mother and brother on the farm
outside Dunmanway in 1948. It was a difficult summer. Both of her own toddlers
came down with whooping cough. And at the end of their stay, young John
announced that he was staying put. When he refused to board the tender at
Cobh for the homeward journey, my mother wired Patsy and Hannie and asked
what to do. Leave him there for the winter, they wired back. We'll go over
next summer and bring him home. But John was home.
He stayed on the farm with Jimmy and Grandma, who was happy to raise
another child 40 years after her last was born in Inchincurka. John became
an Irishman and today manages a plant in Dublin, where he and wife Patricia
have raised their own four sons. He visits Inchincurka on weekends and holidays
and harbors ambitions of installing central plumbing and heating and turning
the century-old stucco farmhouse into his own retirement home.
Inchincurka looks much as I remembered from my first visit as a 13-year-old
in 1963: the spare, chilly kitchen with running water; the sitting room
where Jimmy would build roaring fires with wads of the Cork Examiner and
turf cut by his own hand from the land near the Caha River; a parlor reserved
for ceremonial occasions (and now completely bare), and three bedrooms with
mattresses en dishabille, to say the least. Jimmy, at 50, was delighted
to have company once again back on the farm.
He gave my sister Alice and me driving lessons, letting us tool around
the countryside in his vintage, black Morris Minor. He also gave me the
key to the tractor, which I managed to get stuck in the mud down by the
river in the lower fields.
Jimmy never raised his voice. He didn't let minor disasters bother him.
Of course, his ears were so full of wax you had to raise your voice so he
could hear you. A few years later, he put aside his natural aversion to
doctors long enough to have his ears cleaned at a doctor's office in Cork.
He left the doctor and nurses in stitches with his jocular complaints about
all the fierce noise he now could hear on the streets below, just the normal
sounds of traffic.
My grandmother had died in 1955, and the old farmhouse quickly degenerated
into bachelor digs under Jimmy's relaxed rule. The only serious cleaning
was when my mother or Hannie came to visit, or when there was a station,
a priest saying Mass in the living room, and a feast afterwards for the
neighbors.
The part of farming that Jimmy hated most was milking the cows, the dozen
smelly animals that provided most of his income, but also were a yoke around
his shoulders. Morning and evening they summoned him to the shed to be milked.
It was a hardscrabble life that Jimmy led with his dogs, all of whom
he called Shep. Jimmy was a non-card-carrying Pioneer who loved a good laugh
and showed us kids no quarter in card games of 110.
You can't blame him if he felt envious of the brother who became a schoolmaster
or of Patsy and Mary who escaped to make their fortunes in the new world.
And you can't blame them if they in turn envied Jimmy, living carefree in
the beauty and serenity of the Irish countryside, while they faced a legion
of children every morning or rode to work on the crowded subways in New
York.
We found to our delight that Jimmy had lost neither his memory nor his
smile. He recognized Nancy, whom he had not seen in 20 years. The kids he
had never seen, but they laughed as I did 35 years ago at the lamentations
in that rich Cork accent about the fierce, hard life of the farmer.
Later, between downpours, we searched in the Kilmichael graveyard for
the grave of my grandfather, James McSweeney, whom we know only by a photograph
of a dashing figure in Philadelphia, where he ventured briefly before returning
to Ireland and dying young.
We never did find the right one. Jimmy was waiting in the car; it was
hours past his usual dinnertime at the nursing home in Clonakilty. We couldn't
tarry, so we left the search for another year. We drove off to Macroom for
dinner, and then bade good-bye in the rain to Jimmy and John. Matthew had
purchased two Ordnance Survey maps of West Cork.
Inchincurka sits on the border of maps 85 and 86, with the farmhouse
and every other dwelling in these rugged lands east of the Shehy Mountains
marked with its own black sliver. All the villages and byways that figured
in the stories Jimmy, Sean and my mother used to tell, from Kilnadur and
Gortroe to Kealkill and Capeen, not one had been missed by the Ordnance
Survey.
Matt discovered that the fields and hillsides where Grandma played as
a girl were thick with ancient stones, burial mounds and other monuments
from several millennia before Christ. Her brother Sean, the schoolmaster,
could have led us to many of those sights without a map had we come a few
years earlier.
At 93, his memory, too, was gone, and we found him confined to bed in
Ovens with a chest cold and low fever. We kept the visit brief. His handshake
was still firm and his eye curious.
He guessed that Matthew and Ellen were in their 20s. We left a bottle
of whiskey, which he would have gladly passed around in earlier days, and
not all that much earlier. Just the week before, the family had left him
asleep in the house at midday while they attended to errands, and returned
to find him walking down the road in his nightclothes, resuming his daily
pilgrimage to the pub at Kilumney.
In 1970, I had landed in on Sean, Joan and their three teenagers for
what was supposed to be a two-week stay in August, and extended it until
December. Joan, herself now retired from teaching, was quick to regale my
two children with tales of how scandalized the neighbors were by this American
"hippie". I was a poor excuse for a hippie, but perhaps the Irish were more
easily scandalized in those days.
As it turned out, this was Uncle Sean's final bout of illness. He passed
away two weeks later, surrounded by family. The church at Ovens was filled
with generations of his pupils. We could not get back to Ireland for the
service, but I was so glad to have had the chance to say good-bye, and for
the kids to meet the schoolmaster in the family.
It was yet another reason why the timing for this trip, which at first
seemed so strange, turned out perfect. Nancy came to Ireland with bronchitis,
and our travels had done nothing to improve her condition. She sat bundled
in the car and napped while Matthew, Ellen and I clambered up the narrow,
winding steps at Blarney Castle.
At the top, a guide in yellow rain slicker waited on the narrow walkway
at the top of the castle's battlements where the Blarney Stone is ensconced.
Ellen and I observed the tradition, which involves sitting down on the guide's
mat, arching your head back, clutching some rails and pulling yourself down
a foot or two to kiss the stone while ignoring the remote possibility that
you might soon be kissing the green grass six stories below if the attendant
lets you slip through the cavity.
Matthew decided that the gift of the gab was not worth this risk, so
he left without planting his lips on the stone of legend. On Sunday morning,
as we were about to decamp from a guesthouse in Ballincollig, Nancy was
running a fever. The landlady of Westfield House, Rose Cotter, just back
from her own family's skiing vacation in Italy, rang her doctor.
In a short while, far less time than it took for the motorists' helper
to arrive in Dublin, Dr. M.F. Ryan was knocking at the door. Dr. Ryan was
a cheery soul who gave the impression there was no finer way to spend a
Sunday morning than running around Ballincollig with a medical kit, listening
to phlegmy lungs.
Nancy had come to Ireland with an antibiotic spray that had been dispensed
back in the States. He quickly diagnosed Nancy's problem as failure to ingest
enough of this spray. He dismissed as "nonsense" the advice she had gotten
back home to hold the inhaler three inches from her mouth.
To drive his message home, he darted downstairs to his car and returned
in triumph with his personal inhaler, which he proceeded to suck in with
enough force to deflate the Goodyear Blimp.
After this tutelage, he penned a couple of prescriptions and departed.
And we took our leave of Cork, driving north to Limerick through Blarney
over back roads with the help of a stranger's directions illustrated on
the back of a pharmacy slip.
The Michelin Green Guide listed just one principal attraction between
Blarney and Limerick: the 13th century Dominican Abbey in Kilmallock, just
down the road from Bruree, where another reverse immigrant from America,
Eamon de Valera, was schooled.
The weather was dismal, but the ruins of the Abbey were breathtaking,
setting me to wonder once again just how much of Ireland I had missed before
while making multiple treks around the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle peninsula.
Dingle, in fact, was on the original itinerary for this winter solstice
trip, since Matthew, an amateur linguist, wanted to immerse himself in the
Gaeltacht. He was dismayed to find no one we encountered in Cork speaking
Gaelic. The bilingual road signs were small consolation, and the evening
news in Gaelic on Radio Telefis Eireann did not suffice. Matthew already
had learned more Gaelic words from dictionaries back home than I had picked
up in all my trips to Ireland.
However, Dingle and the beehive huts near Dunquin were not to be reached
on this short visit. After enduring the 10-hour cross-country dash on New
Year's Eve, my family rebelled: no long car rides on our final day in Ireland,
they insisted.
Only Ellen came along when I set out for my final tourist destination:
the Cliffs of Moher. And the highlight on that jaunt turned out not to be
those beautiful green promontories jutting into the Atlantic, but an impromptu
stop at a farmhouse in Doonbeg where 20 cattle were huddled around feeders.
We stopped to take a picture, and Patricia McInerny emerged from the
farmhouse to greet us. Three wiggling dogs on a haystack in the barn beside
a stack of rough-cut peat made up the rest of the greeting party. There
was a skittish cat, too, but the pups chased it off. Mrs. McInerny said
they had more cows than usual this winter: prices were so low they kept
the bullocks to fatten away the winter on Doonbeg hay. "And they'll probably
be lower still this year", she said with a rueful smile.
Her husband makes his living driving a lorry, not off their 60 acres.
"Soon there won't be any farmers left", said Mrs. McInerny, in the lament
of farmers everywhere. But life in Doonbeg did not look too bleak on this
blustery morning. Notwithstanding the towering stack of peat, the McInerneys
just installed oil heat in their house.
And so it seemed everywhere our travels took us. Ireland has changed
from a country where vintage Morris Minors and Beetles roamed the roads
to one where parking jams are commonplace and everyone seems to be driving
late model Camrys, Fiestas, Astras and even Land Cruisers.
From Grafton Street in Dublin to O' Connell Street in Limerick, the Irish,
young and old, looked smartly dressed and in a hurry to get someplace. And
when the receipt for your Guinness and Seven-Ups from Flanagan's Bar in
Kilmallock comes printed in euros as well as punts, it is just another vivid
reminder that Ireland is knit now to a large and prospering continent.
Back in Limerick, the restaurant in the King George Hotel resolutely
played carols, 10 days past Christmas. We slipped away the next morning
before dawn, steering our course down a deserted highway past Bunratty Castle
to Shannon, where elaborate neon holiday decorations, the distinctive outlines
of the Houses of Parliament, the Statue of Liberty and other distant landmarks,
guided us in to the terminal.
It was the eve of Epiphany, and Frosty the Snowman was still hippety
hopping on the same Muzak Christmas tape over the loudspeaker of our Aer
Lingus jet. In America, stores would have torn down the Christmas decorations
and stocked their shelves already for the next big commercial celebration,
Valentine's Day. But the holidays last longer in Ireland.
It's a new country, but still in touch with the old verities. We had
come to Ireland at Christmastime to find family and heritage, and we had
not been disappointed.
Christopher Connell can be reached at:
cconnell@cceditorial.com.
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