Midlife Irish (22 page)

If you cruise along Ireland’s northwestern shore, you have to fight the impulse to stop and take pictures. It is just beautiful.
You circle Donegal Bay and stop at the little towns with strange names like Ballyshannon and Killybegs and you are having
a grand time.

All is well in your Irish world as you drive along in your little wind-up car. You listen to a “real” Irish station that plays
authentic Celtic music played on authentic Celtic instruments by authentic Celts.

We started to feel authentic. I was wearing one of those funny hats that authentic Irish people wear. I had worn it for days
and it no longer even made me feel like an idiot. Or “eee-jit,” to say it the way authentic Irish people like me say it. I
had a sweater on that was quite Celtic in general appearance. Its label said L.L. Bean, but nobody had to know that. I looked
at myself in the rear-view mirror. Yes, that’s an Irishman there. You’re lookin’ at a fine broth of a man there.

I looked over at Paulette. I was now calling her Bridget. She was a fine broth of a Colleen. I think you might describe her
complexion as “ruddy.” She too was pretty tweedy. She was after looking pretty damn Irish even though her dad was born in
France and her mom is from Saint Louis and her mom’s mom was German. But Old Bridget, she was after being a fine slip of a
lass. Old Bridget had a white sweater on and that’s what her kind of Colleens wear.

On the radio they were havin’ a “session” (that’s what we call it). The bodhran was bodhraning and the fiddler was working
overtime and you could almost hear them perspiring with the way they were playin’ the reel. Everything was grand. It was brilliant.

I looked ahead and realized something that made me have a thought or two that was perhaps a bit
too
authentic. If we kept this up, if we kept driving where we were driving, we were going to be where things, I hear, are not
that grand. We were going to be after driving into Northern Ireland. That was not in our nonplan. Before we left we stuck
a note on the refrigerator: “No explosions.”

I knew less about Northern Ireland than I knew about
southern
Ireland. All I know is what I saw on the television. What I saw on the television said, “No!” I’m sure that the northern
part of Ireland is very interesting, but we knew that, for us on this trip at least, it wasn’t going to happen.

We took the first right we could and headed for Monaghan. As we drove along, we decided that we were going to continue south
by southwest. Drogheda sounded good. That was where Cromwell had done his damned work. But Cromwell was, at least, dead.

This didn’t mean we were backing off on anything. We were still just rambling around Ireland. Still in phase one. Just free,
we were. But we’re not going to visit Northern Ireland. We’re not getting
that
authentic, are we, Bridget?

No, we’re not. Not this time. We’ll go up there later.

As you cruise through northeastern Ireland, the part just south of “the troubles,” you see a lot of really amazing churches—structures
that dominate a lot of the little towns. These smaller Irish churches are quite beautiful. We tried to visit as many as we
could. When we walked inside one, it seemed very natural to go over to a pew and kneel for a few minutes. This slowed us down,
but then again, we weren’t going anywhere in particular.

We visited the little churches at odd hours, but the
churches were always open, and there was always somebody in there. On our visit, I tried to read as many local newspapers
as I could. I was always coming across editorials and features that told, in one way or another, of the decreasing influence
of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Sometimes there were editorials that said that this was good. They said that now, with
a little money and independence, the Irish person would no longer be a puppet of the Catholic Church. There were also editorials
that said the opposite: that newly affluent Ireland was losing its spiritual center, the thing that made Ireland what it was.

Whatever the truth (and it’s probably somewhere in between the two op-ed poles), the Catholic Church continues to have a greater
influence on the population of Ireland than anywhere else in the world. Almost everybody in the southern, eastern, and western
parts of Ireland is Catholic, and they seem much more aware of their status as Catholics than the average American Catholic.
It has been this way for a very long time, since Saint Patrick arrived and turned the violent, pagan people into “the Land
of Saints and Scholars who are, nevertheless, occasionally violent.”

In many parts of Ireland, particularly in the west, Catholicism is a given. Nobody asks if you’re Catholic. When we were in
Mayo, I asked a close-to-if-not-already-drunk guy in his midtwenties about the local church schedule (it was Saturday) and
he instantly rattled all of the mass times. I think if I had asked him what his name was, he would have given it quite a bit
of thought, but he hit me with the mass times as if they were multiplication tables.

Ninety-two percent Catholic is the usual figure assigned to Ireland (excluding, of course, Northern Ireland, a separate country).
Where I live now, the mountains of northern Georgia, things are quite a bit different. The Catholic population is perhaps
4 or 5 percent. Although a lot of the people have Irish-sounding names, Catholic churches are few and far between. Our priest,
a wonderful man named Father Luis
Zarama, has to drive twenty miles on Sunday to say another mass up the road. Home-grown Catholics are very scarce here (Father
Zarama is from Columbia).

Where I live, there aren’t posted mass times. There’s one service at nine and that’s it. Miss that one and you’re out of luck.
Most places that we visited in Ireland have continuous masses at staggered times. Even in small towns, the churches were crowded
every Sunday. The Irish masses I attended were much shorter than the Georgian variety. An Irish mass lasted, on the average,
about twenty-five minutes, which is less than half the time a mass takes in Georgia.

You might think that the twenty-five-minute mass loses a lot of the reverence we associate with the service, but it isn’t
so. The services we went to were very beautiful and spiritual, with no sense of hurry. Just a “no pauses” policy. A Harold
Pinter play done in the Irish Catholic manner would take about eighty-five seconds.

When I was in Ireland, and I happened to visit with someone, I would sit in the living room, look at the holy water fonts
by the door, the Christ statue on the mantel, the crucifix over the table, the various religious pictures on the wall, and
be brought back to my youth. I found it very comforting somehow, as if I were home again.

I was an altar boy, and so was my brother Bud, and we had priests and nuns who visited our house all the time. When I was
little, the three visiting nuns were as much a part of Christmas as the Lionel train set. There was no mistaking us for Buddhists
or Hindus or Protestants. During my childhood, we said the rosary every night.

When I was little, I really hated saying the rosary. Taking twenty minutes out of my life seemed awful. I never said so, of
course, but my young brain found the whole experience—the kneeling and the recitation of prayer after prayer after prayer—almost
unbearably boring. There was always the possibility, however, that my parents might forget to say the
rosary. It had happened before. It was rare, but not impossible.

So every night, I would look at the clock as the evening, which had not yet included a rosary, rolled along. Eight o’clock
would come. I would hope against hope that the unthinkable would happen, and my mother and my father would both forget about
the rosary for an evening. It’s not impossible, I would tell myself. Willie Mays dropped one fly ball. It can happen.

But my mother was an elephant about the rosary. It was
extremely
rare for her to forget. Her omissions were so rare that they burned themselves into my memory.

But my count, she made two. One time my dad got into a car accident. Another time Mom had the flu really bad (a normal virus
would never cause a cancellation). A rosaryless evening in my house was an extremely rare event, but the watching of the clock
made for great suspense.

It might get to be 9:15
P.M.
I began to have some small hope that this time, she might, indeed, forget. There were no overt visible reminders. My mother
didn’t have a note on the refrigerator, but it was impossible to walk into our living room without thinking “Catholic.”

My mom would get that look. She’d get up and say one word, “rosary,” and another hope was destroyed. But, like a poor self-deluding
slob with a lottery ticket, I always thought that I had a chance. Some nights the hands of the cuckoo clock in our living
room would creep up toward nine-thirty and I would start to get anxious. Maybe they have forgotten. Maybe, this one night
I won’t have to kneel there and say the rosary. Sometimes I would start to sneak upstairs, get halfway up, and hear my mom
say, “Hey, wait a minute. We have to say the rosary.” And I would have to walk down, get the beads, kneel, and start praying.

When I think about those days now, I think that there are much worse ways of spending twenty minutes, but not back then. It
seemed like forever. Twenty minutes is a long sentence
when
The Twilight Zone
has a good episode. I remember many evenings of finishing the rosary and running over and turning on the television to hear:

John Roberts. A very ordinary man who took a very ordinary drive on a very ordinary evening and wound up not at the grocery
store but in a place we call…the Twilight Zone.

It can’t be the beginning. There are only two times Rod Serling talks: the beginning and…the end!
I would close my eyes tightly and say bad words to myself. Another episode missed. I would think
I hate the rosary.
Then I would think about what I thought and think
I didn’t mean that, God. Sorry! The rosary is fine. I enjoy it every evening. It’s one of the highlights of my evening! Really.
Sorry. What was I thinking! I didn’t mean that “hate” comment.

A rosary, for the non-Catholic, is a group of prayers that Catholics say that consists of a few Our Fathers and quite a few
Hail Marys. You use the beads to keep track of where you are. (This was before Madonna made the rosary beads into a fashion
accessory.) It’s said out loud, so there’s no faking it; you have to say every word. It takes about twenty minutes for a sincere
person to say a rosary. For the fast talker it can take much less. (It would take about three minutes for certain people I’ve
met in Los Angeles.)

The longest rosary I ever had was almost an hour. There was a visiting priest with us that night. I forget his name, but he
had an amazingly deliberate manner. His Hail Marys were always punctuated with coughs and hems and haws. Sometimes he would
pause in the middle of Our Father, take out a handkerchief, dab the corners of his mouth, excuse himself, and continue. For
a little kid, dying to see
some
of
The Twilight Zone
, he was excruciating.

As he said his part of the rosary, a little familiar voice spoke to my brain:

Francis Xavier Gannon. A particular ordinary boy in a particularly ordinary house. A boy who knelt to say the rosary,
but a boy who found, in a quite extraordinary manner, that he had missed
…The Twilight Zone.

The rosary got to be a permanent part of my thinking—not the prayers; just the fact that I had to say it every night. I remember
the first night I spent out of the house, sleeping over at a friend’s house. I thought, around nine o’clock that night:
Damn, I don’t have to say the rosary! Thank you, God. I’ll never forget you for this!

Then, after I thought about it for a while, I would add:
Not that I find anything wrong with the rosary, God. I wouldn’t want you to get that impression.

Once a week we would have all of the other Catholics on our street over for a big group rosary. I dreaded this: Company made
the rosary last even longer. It was odd to hear those familiar words spoken by so many different voices. I thought that Mister
Mich, who lived across the street, sounded like Fred Capasella, the Florida racetrack announcer I had heard hundreds of times
owing to my dad’s fondness for the track. Capasella’s voice was a frequent background for dinner at our house.

When it was Mister Mich’s turn to pray the rosary, I remember thinking of the various phrases as horses racing around an imaginary
track in my mind. It’s our father out in front. Who art in heaven on the outside. Followed by Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom
come on the outside…

The mind does strange things to you when you are ten years old and you listen to five million Our Fathers and Hail Marys and
you know you have five million more to listen to. The racetrack rosary was only one mental game I played to pass the time.
I imagined the beads were points that Wilt Chamberlain scored. I imagined they were home runs Mickey Mantle hit.

Nothing made the twenty minutes go faster.

My friends never had anything like the rosary ritual in their houses, even though a lot of them were Catholics. I felt a little
uncomfortable talking about the nightly rosary ritual at
my house, so I rarely mentioned it. I didn’t want to seem like I belonged to a family of religious fanatics or something.

I didn’t, of course. I belonged to a family of Irish people. When I had to interrupt, say, a wiffle ball game, and run home
for the rosary, I would always say something like, “We’re going out to get a frozen custard!” I don’t think anybody really
believed me, but it was a cover, so I used it.

But in Ireland, everything was different. At several B&Bs, I heard a familiar drone from downstairs: people saying the rosary.
I didn’t run downstairs and join them.
The Twilight Zone
is long gone, but I, a stranger, would be intruding. (That’s what I told myself, anyway.)

Because I have a “Catholic Background,” I found that I had something in common with everyone I met in Ireland. I found that
I had an instant cache of conversational material. I would share rosary lore with them, chat about novenas I had made, quiz
ex-altar boys on responses in the Latin mass. Check them out on the correct Catechism answers, that sort of thing. I felt
like my dad talking to his buddies from World War II. Eccum spirie two-two-oh. God’s phone number. Heh heh.