Our Lovely Humanity

It's never the perfect dinner parties I remember. You know, where everything is just so. Everything matching, flowers at attention, napkins crisp and clean and even, linen spotless, best silver aligned.

No. it's the wee touches of carelessness. Something the host/hostess forgot to put away or got thrown in a corner to be dealt with later just when the oven beeped.

I am included in these family get-togethers at friends of mine. All festive occasions. Between this couple they have 13 siblings plus their partners (or not), plus cousins and in-laws. I find it hard to talk about it without crying. Happy tears I should add as this huge family reminds me so much of my own when we all pile in together. And by now I'm like this stray sister as they tease me and ball-hop me to a huge degree. Acceptance.

And the food is awesome, this afternoon and into the evening it was all kinds of fish. Fresh crab, a clam chowder that would make you groan in pleasure, fresh cod, brewis, fish cakes and fresh baked rolls. And scrunchions. I don't eat desserts by choice but the selection would make you weep. Layered trifle in a huge bowl, 7 cup pudding with rum sauce, this fancy cinnamon roll that comes out like a swiss roll. And enough to feed hundreds. And masses of tulips and daffodils in jugs and vases everywhere.

The craic was 90, as my people say. But it was when I was in the bathroom that I smiled and felt so touched. We've all had these little slips, these forgetfullnesses. Like leaving the big tube of haemorrhoid cream beside the sink. I'll admit to walking around my own dining room serving guests with a trail of toilet paper floating behind me.

And them? Neatly arranged on three hooks at the back of their bathroom door were his underpants, her knickers and her bra.

Happy season of renewal and rebirth and re-invigoration to you all.

The Blues for the Greens - Part 3

An unusual shot of Silver Strand

So there we were on Sherkin Island on Friday night. We were staying at the hotel for the weekend. The pile of us. The whole big gang of us. It was like summer camp without counsellors. Breakfast had that air of an unceasing cast of characters brought forward for entertainment and stimulation. I was up early so as not to miss any of it.

Every day was cloudless. Every day we hit Silver Strand and banjed off. As only the Irish can when we get a spot of rain-free, cloudless days. There is a frantic air to the sandcastling, the swim-togging, the picnicking. We grab it while we can as we shrug off the mould and rust.

So there we were at dinner on the Friday night. And an old friend who lives on the island and his wife were invited to join us. To catch up. This old friend I've known since I was a single-digit-aged child. We go back a long way. I got to know and like his wife in later years when I rented a house on the island in the summer with Daughter and Grandgirl.

So the moment of comeuppance: they arrive and get settled. There's a big crowd of us around the table and Sinead (pseudonym), the wife looks across the table and greets me in delight and then says, looking at my sister (who is fourteen years younger than me):

"Oh, WWW, I'm so happy you brought your daughter with you!".

Karma, she be savage.

You can imagine how this took off for the rest of the weekend. Sinead was mortified in spite of my reassurance of absolutely no offence.

We couldn't stop laughing as I explained to the family I had a big, long-held secret to tell them. My sister called me "mammy" for the rest of the stay, requesting permission for various activities like swimming and eating and referred to her brothers as her new uncles, including my "twin."

Helpless laughter resonates a long time.

I think it's the most powerful healer of all.

Hell Ain't Hot

My grandmother held an Irish wake for her eldest daughter (my aunt) who eloped with the local protestant minister. This from their small Irish Catholic town. Subsequently, the whole family was denounced from the pulpit by the compassionate parish priest who accused them all of harbouring a harlot. Then my father, her brother, lost his position as the head altar boy. And another one of his sisters was refused admittance to the convent because of her shameful family. This all happened in the early thirties of the past century. My grandmother and grandfather never spoke to their daughter again. They say she broke her father's heart and sent him to an early grave as she was his favourite.

A few years ago I phoned an aunt (now deceased) to cry on her shoulder about Missing Daughter. I knew my mother, if she'd been alive, would have sorted it all out. She had that way with her. So telling her sister made sense to me. Even though she lived in London, England. She wept with me. And then told me one of her grandchildren had done the same thing. Fled to Australia with a boyfriend, severing ties with her parents and by extension, her grandparents. She could only offer me empathetic tears, no solution.

We're a very fragmented family, our family. Very rarely is Missing Daughter mentioned. Except by one or two, who always ask for news. Whether this absence of support is a genetic legacy or cold-hearted 'I'm alright, Jacks'. I don't know. I don't care. I'd sure like to fix it though. Inject some compassion into the dispassion. Heal it up a little.

This whole post was triggered by a long, sobbing message left on my voicemail by Daughter while I was out yesterday. She was in Montreal and missing her sister so much she had to call me in floods of tears.

And ended her message with this:

"Mum, I can't imagine what hell you're going through without any family support. At least I have you!"

Yeah, hell would be a good term for it. Forget about those fires those compassionate parish priests talked about.

Hell is just unbelievably cold, bleak and lonely.

A Fickle Mistress

I was thinking about memory.

How reliable is it anyway?

I think of members of a family with a different viewpoint on significant events.

"Do you remember?" I say to her, "Do you remember when the baby was put in a drawer out in the back field near the boards that were put out for a dance floor, and someone, I think it was the English uncle, started playing the accordion and then someone joined him on the harmonica, we used to call them mouth organs then. I hated him teaching me to play it because he smoked and there were bits of tobacco stuck in the holes and the smell was awful."

"No, I don't remember that part," you say. "I remember the apples on the trees by the fence and Billy pushed me up a few stones that he put against them and I shook the branch and the apples fell down."

"Right," I say, "Well I don't remember that part, but boy, you got in trouble because you tore your dress and our grandmother got very upset."

"Why?" you say.

"Because she wanted us to look so good for the wedding. Auntie Rita's wedding to Uncle Pete."

"No," you say, "I don't remember a wedding at all. I remember my pale green dress that flounced and the apples. Was that at a wedding then?"

"Of course."

I am getting impatient now. "Why do you think we were all dressed up?"

"So what were you wearing then if you're so smart?"

"I can't remember."

Stuff I Miss

About once a week I have a hearty breakfast: sausage, perogies, eggs, toast. I peruse the paper at leisure, soak in the weekend's activities listings, reviews, etc. Part of the ritual of this breakfast is HP Sauce - a first cousin to YR Sauce (anyone remember that?)

This morning, I was holding the bottle of HP Sauce in my hand and felt saddened that something so redolent of my childhood could be so substantially changed, and by a plastic squeeze bottle. It was sacrilegious, this squirting onto my plate rather than feeling the heft of the glass bottle in my hand and thumping its bottom, always in such a way that the amount seemed to be just the right size when it finally plopped onto the plate.

It tasted differently then too, better, sharper. Glass is obviously more hospitable than plastic. The same applies to pop/soda/minerals. Glass all the way. The cans and the plastic alter the taste. I recently had a bottle, a real glass bottle, of Coke. And I was startled when it put me in mind of the Coke bottling plant in Cork where on race days (there was nearly always a race on the Straight Road in Cork) we would get a bottle (or maybe 2?) of Coke for a shilling directly from vendors outside the plant. And here it was - the taste was exactly the same, over 50 years later.

Something has been lost (or gained) in packing foodstuffs in plastic and tin, losing flavour and gaining an overriding plastication in all our basic condiments.

And I haven't even talked about Hellmann's Mayo, have I?

Don't get me started.

And totally symptomatic of our sad old world isn't it?

This happens to everyone, right?

Do you ever think to yourself why does everything have to happen at once? So many events in the one time period that the head wants to burst with the decision making process and the BP soars with the stress of making the right one.

Next month is when my particular world is having numerous celebrations.

First of all there is a family wedding which is in Argentina. If I was going to Argentina, I would have to visit my brother in Santiago in Chile. If I was going to Chile I'd have to go to Peru, Machu Picchu has never been taken off the bucket list. The big trip to South America would happen - and that doesn't come cheap, and would have to do me for oh, say, the next 10 years of vacations.

Next up there is a major high school reunion which should be poignant and wonderful as many of our graduating class are dead: a more than average percentage to breast cancer. Our gorgeous old school is on an island in the middle of the River Lee and perhaps the effluvia from Murphy's Brewery up the road had something to do with it. No environmental watchguards in those days and the only fish in the river which made us all 'ew' were big ugly dirty mullets. With encrusted whiskers on them.

Then there is the 95th birthday party for an uncle, the uncle who was married to my absolutely favourite aunt in the whole wide world and his scattered family are all coming home for that.

Then there is the annual picnic of my mother's family which takes place on Irish Mother's Day (different from the North American) and English cousins are coming home for that along with my only living aunt who is well over ninety.

Then there is the final few weeks of rehearsals for the play I've written and am directing and which is exciting the hell out of all of those involved in it.

All of these events are happening in the same 3 week span of time and I simply can't wrap my head around any decisions at all. I had heard there was a direct St. John's to Paris flight which would make my life a whole lot easier but now I can't find a trace of it on the interwebz so will have to track down an old fashioned travel agent.

These are good choices, I remind myself. All validations of life and forward thinking in this oh so fragile little planet of ours.

So what the hell am I to do?