Midlife Irish (18 page)

I used the moon as a direction finder, but it still seemed like a long two (or was it three?) hundred yards. It seemed like
a mile and a half, maybe. I tried not to feel that I was getting lost, but it was getting difficult to avoid that thought.

I began to sense that I was not alone. There was someone near. I could sense it. It was like when you know there’s someone
at the door before he knocks. So you open the door and there he is with his fist raised to rap on the door. That happens all
the time. Now it was happening in Ireland, but there was no door. Just stupid Irish trees.

I almost called out, “Hello, is anyone there?” but I stopped myself. How big a moron could I be? People might be walking by
and hear me. Then they would come see if I was hurt. I’d be standing here in all my stupid big American glory. I did not need
that scene.

But what was it? Whose presence was I feeling? I said to myself that if there was an animal, it could not be a dangerous animal.
Maybe a rabbit. Or a deer. Was I afraid of Bambi, now?

I made my way along. As I walked along carefully, a thought came into my mind and stayed there. It stayed there until I finally
saw my bed and breakfast.

I believe in fairies. Leave me alone.

As I nodded off to sleep, I held that thought.

I took several moonlit walks after that. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Paulette. There was always something out there. Waiting.

If you go into the woods at night in Ireland, don’t go
alone. Because you won’t be. In Ireland no one knows what “Augh!” means.

There are fairy stories that explain and comment on everything that there is in life in Ireland. The symbols of Ireland—the
harp and the shamrock—are spiritual symbols, and it is impossible to think of a nonspiritual Ireland, a place entirely bound
by the laws of physics. The Irish are “the ancient dreaming race.” When I think about Ireland, I think of it as a place where
there are fairies all over and they aren’t going anywhere. They’re in the woods.

I’ve never had anything like a religious experience. Whenever anyone says that he had one, I think of Ray Robinson and George
Foreman.

Sugar Ray Robinson had one after he collapsed in the 102-degree heat at Yankee Stadium against Joey Maxim. He said he saw
God in his locker room after the fight. George Foreman after losing to Jimmy Young saw something similar. Indians who want
to see God don’t drink any liquid for four days. A dehydrated brain is close to God. For me, it’s also close to Dumbo.

God has never come up to me and pinched me. He’s never come to me in a dream like the Old Testament guys. When I was in college
I read William James and I put the God experience in the box labeled “discharging lesions of the occipital cortex.” I don’t
know what that means, but when I say it people look at me as if I know what I’m talking about. Boy, are they deluded.

Everything that happened in my life happened because somebody caused it to happen and I could, in many instances, name the
person who did it. My unfaith has been around a long time. It started when I was twelve or so.

I used to do magic tricks when I was a kid. I did one that was great. Not David Blaine great, but better than you would
expect from a kid doing tricks for his parents and friends in his dining room. This was the great trick. When I was twelve.

I first got a dollar bill from a subject in the audience. I had my assistant write the serial number on a handy blackboard.
Then I took the dollar, rolled it in my hands, and made it vanish. (I’m not finished. I told you it was great.)

My assistant brought in a tray (a “TV dinner table,” as it was called). I selected someone from the vast audience (ten if
I was lucky). There were five oranges on the tray. I asked the chosen party to select one. She did. I asked her to slice it
open (supplying the knife). There was a dollar bill tightly rolled in the orange. I asked her to unroll it. I asked her to
read the serial number. Yes, indeed, a match! The same number that was on the dollar the guy gave me! Thank you very much.
No, I can’t tell you how I did it. A magician never tells.

One day, I did tell. There are two dollars. The number is subtly changed. I “force” the girl to pick the right orange. The
dollar goes up my sleeve. It’s all a trick.

After I revealed the secret, nobody liked it. It got around.

In Ireland nobody tells. Because nobody knows. There is no place like Ireland. It is a place where the Stone Age is literally
still there, but they have cable TV and cell phones. You drive past little towns with churches too big for the towns. You
pass weird stone structures erected long ago to weird old Druid gods. Everywhere there is the other world rubbing right up
against this world.

There is a world with weird old gods who steal children and leave their doubles. (The Irish had the mystical equivalent of
cloning a long time before Crick and Watson.) This is a world where screaming spirit women take you to the land of the dead.
This is a land where the most important building in town is the Catholic church, but it’s built within sight of a pile of
giant stones erected in honor of some huge ancient deity.

In this land, the spiritual realm is very real, and you can’t even ignore it if you want to.

In the magazine of America “Religion” is a very small section.
You flip through it quickly. There’s not much to it. It reduces itself down to a box you check when you apply for some things.
Catholic. Jewish. Protestant. Other.

“Hey, they’re getting pretty personal here.” But you go ahead and check the box next to “Catholic” or “Jew” or “Lutheran”
or “Episcopal” or “Presbyterian” or “Evangelical” or “None.” You don’t like to check “None.” What are you, a troubled loner?
Get with the program. Which place did your parents take you? Put that. Don’t cause trouble.

It’s the magic conversation ender. If you say, “Barb and I are Lutherans,” the guy who asked you will say, “Do you go to First
Lutheran?” and you say, “No. We hit the Second Lutheran.” Then the guy says, “Ah,” and it’s time to change subjects.

Religion is like “I have a bad case of halitosis” as a conversation ender. There is nothing you can say about your religion
or your halitosis that anyone really wants to hear about. They’d rather listen to Conelrad on the radio. They’d rather read
cereal boxes.

But go to Ireland; spend some time and, voila! everything is different. “Religion” there
really
isn’t a subject. They
never
talk about it. But it’s not a subject for discussion because it’s not separate from life. While I was in Ireland I tried
to think of what that state of mind was like and I came up with this: It’s the same state of mind you had when you were ten
years old. When you are ten you don’t know anything. When you are forty, you know a whole bunch of things but you don’t know
why you’re here or where you’re going. If you’re going anywhere.

There are worse things. I found that I was an Irish Catholic the way I had two arms. That was the way it was. Period.

There are worse things.

Because Ireland is the land where the next world seems so close, the place where the ghosts in the machine take a coffee break,
it seems a huge contrast to America, where the
Disney Corporation produces all spirituality. The one thing that underlines this more than anything else is an Irish saint’s
feast day, Saint Patrick’s. The American Saint Patrick’s Day and the Irish Saint Patrick’s Day are, well, oceans apart.

Every year on March 17, America becomes conscious of the Irishness in its midst. That is the one day every year that allows
people to wear garish green clothing and say things like “Sure and begorrah.” People wear pins that say things like “Kiss
me, I’m Irish.” Restaurants serve corned beef and cabbage. A lot of bagpipes are heard. Some people dress as leprechauns.
They are usually drunk when they do this. There are big parades in New York, Boston, Chicago, and, surprisingly, Savannah,
Georgia. Food coloring is added to malt beverages. It is, for those who are Irish in America, all pretty repulsive. Someone
writes an op-ed piece about how repulsive it is. The op-ed piece is repulsive.

Saint Patrick’s Day in America has an odd history. The earliest Irish immigrants were from Northern Ireland, Protestants from
Ulster. Their early marches and celebrations in America were a celebration of the Battle of the Boyne, the 1690 battle in
Ireland where William III, a Protestant, defeated King James II, a Catholic. Saint Patrick’s Day, first celebrated in the
middle 1800s in America, was a counter-demonstration by later Irish Catholic immigrants, a sort of in-your-face to the Protestants.
Saint Patrick’s Day today has virtually nothing to do with any of this, but that’s how the celebration started in America.

On Saint Patrick’s Day in northern Georgia, where I now live, hardly anything unusual happens at all. Some of the bars have
green beer specials, a particularly nauseating practice. On TV, they show the episode from
Bonanza
where Hoss sees little men dressed in green and assumes they are “what they call them there, leper-cons, Paw! I seen ’em,
Paw! You gotta believe me!” Nobody believes old Hoss and his face gets mighty red. The rest of the show consists of the increasingly
excited Hoss seeing the “leper-cons” and rushing to get
Paw or Little Joe (Adam had, I believe, already said “
adios
” by the time this epic episode was made). Of course the leper-cons always disappear right before Hoss gets back with a witness.
As a result, Paw and Little Joe begin to assume that Hoss has been involved in substance abuse.

The background music for this episode is truly remarkable. David Rose and his orchestra (who had an actual chart record, “The
Stripper”) play the most grotesquely “Irish” music I have ever heard, music that perfectly evokes the “pseudo-Irish” experience.

The Saint Patrick’s Day
Bonanza
episode. See it!

On the last few Saint Patrick’s Days, I have established a little ritual. I have a little dinner with a few friends. I play
Chieftains records. I try, yet again, to make soda bread that doesn’t taste like papier-mâché.

It’s not a big deal at my house. Paulette isn’t Irish, so my kids are only half Irish. I tell them about my mom and dad a
little, but it is all pretty remote. I am sure that my kids will not think of themselves as “Irish.” They will say, I think
I’m half Irish on my father’s side.

Things were different when I was a kid. As soon as I say that to my son, I feel as if I am an official old coot.

But things
were
different.

My parents would mark March 17 on the calendar. They would talk about it as if it were Christmas. “Only three days!” my mom
would say. When the big day was finally here, we would get all dressed up and go out to my cousin’s restaurant for the Saint
Patrick’s Day Hibernian celebration. We would sit around a big table in a room with many big tables. We had dinner. Then the
MC would introduce a priest or, rarely, an actual monsignor, to say a prayer. Then a speaker would be introduced. I saw many
speakers, but in my mind’s eye, I always remember the speaker as a fat guy with a red face and a carnation.

I remember not “getting” any of the jokes. I’m sure they weren’t dirty but they were “over my head.” They involved mothers-in-law
and mortgages and doctors and priests and
rabbis. The Irish people around me laughed at the jokes. As the speech went on, and the amount of consumed alcohol grew, they
laughed louder and longer. By the end of the speech the speaker was doing very well, getting big laughs.

After the speaker, the band started playing. They always started with an Irish song or two. “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,”
played up-tempo, was a popular opening, but they soon went into non-Irish music. Cole Porter, other standards, and “songs
you only hear at wedding receptions.”

At first there would be only one or two couples dancing. Then, as the drinking continued, the floor would fill up. There would
be old people dancing with young people, women dancing with women. Everything was permissible, except, of course, two men
dancing together. Please, this is a saint’s day here.

There would always be one or two little girls there who were about my age. At a certain point my mother would try to induce
me to dance. I remember going into the bathroom and staying in there for about an hour to avoid this sort of thing. I would
come back from the bathroom and stop at the door to the ballroom. I would peek out and see if my mother was still seated.
If she was, I would return to the bathroom and count things. I would count tiles, cracks, anything. Then I would return to
my post outside the ballroom. I would peer in again. If my mother was dancing, and therefore unable to press me into dancing,
I would return.

I remember these evenings as incredibly long and tedious, but I was internally very happy, so I never complained. I knew that
I, unlike my non-Irish friends, didn’t have to go to school tomorrow.

It is easy to forget that Saint Patrick was a real historical figure. For the Irish, he was the man who forever changed the
entire country of Ireland. He changed it spiritually and socially. In Ireland, that’s almost everything.

He did this by absorbing the old Irish pagan ideas and
making them cohere with Christianity. No man ever succeeded at anything more fully. Ireland has remained overwhelmingly Christian
and Catholic despite enormous obstacles, and it may remain that way forever.

Saint Patrick, whatever legends are associated with him, was real, and we know more about him than we know about most people
of this era. Even if all of the myths about him are false, Saint Patrick still had an amazingly singular life. He was, in
the real sense of the words, the mysterious thing called a holy man.

Patrick first came to Ireland against his will. He was kidnapped from Britain and made a slave at the age of sixteen. He tried
to make the best of it in his assigned role, herding cattle. He learned the language, the people’s customs, and, most important,
their pagan religion. Patrick, however, remained a steadfast Christian who prayed for hours every day. He wrote that he said
over one hundred prayers a day and felt the presence of the Christian God all around him. There was in Ireland an ancient
prophecy of a man who was to come and “destroy our gods.” Patrick turned out to be that man.