Midlife Irish (5 page)

The longing for the Old Country has, in America, taken on a New Age aspect that is disturbing. It is responsible for the marketing
of an appalling array of Celtic spiritualism that takes the form of “Celtic” CDs, meditation guides, and God knows what. This
is a regrettable phenomenon, but at least it is (sort of) Irish in nature. In a group as large as Irish America, there has
to be a huge number of Windham Hill fanciers.

Those guys are the Irish-Americans who have been to college. IQ-challenged members of the Diaspora (God knows there is no
shortage) have their marshmallow-flecked cereal, their oddly blue soap, and, most important, their many, many varieties of
alcohol. (It’s all alcohol, but hey, I’ve seen people in Wildwood, New Jersey, argue about the merits of Bushmills
versus Jamesons as if they actually
tasted
it before they swallowed.)

All these people also, of course, have to get back to Ireland and comb through it for whatever threads are to be found. Ireland
right now is covered with every variety of American root-seeker. I know a
fifth
-generation dentist who has just returned from such a journey. He must have truly awesome genealogical abilities.

Irish America
magazine is a thriving (and very well done) bimonthly periodical aimed at just this massive audience. You would think that
a magazine that comes out six times a year and has, as its sole focus, Irish people in America would run out of things to
say, but that is emphatically not the case. Irish America is larger than most countries, and
Irish America
is, in 2001, an extremely healthy publication.

Irish America, in all its numbers, is an enormously powerful cultural and economic force, but this has not always been the
case, and that fact has a permanent position in the Celto-American (a new one!) cranial cavity. We used to be those monkeys,
remember that? How can you forget? Here’s a “No Irish Need Apply” sign. Put it in your den.

As has been often noted, this whole phenomenon has more to do with power of
numbers
than anything else. Twenty-first-century Irish America likes to say, like Stephen Crane’s MAN, “Sir, I exist!” I have a lot
of money and it’s time that everybody notices me. Okay, you’re noticed. Here’s a magazine. You want anything else? Plane tickets?

Although there have been a lot of Irish in America for centuries, much of Irish America’s past has been spent as a minor bit
player in the movie of America. “Laborers and servants,” however numerous, don’t get to be the stars of the movie. There is
no
Irish Stable Boy
magazine.

Today, however, Irish America contains leaders of industry and the arts. Has the monkey-man vanished? He is rare, but he can
still be seen. Mister 2002 Irish-American need only walk through any greeting card display in March and see the
same little green guy sitting on a rack, who says to him as he passes, “You are
still
a mick. Get used to it.”

At this point this Irish-American man’s green-man-group message doesn’t bother him much. He doesn’t write any letters or call
any congressmen. He’s above the fray now. His reaction is A, Doesn’t notice, or B, Mild bemusement.

He walks out of the drugstore to get into his fine Japanese automobile and drives to an Italian restaurant with his Swedish
girlfriend. His arrogance is well-grounded, this one. He knows certain facts that cannot be taken from him: In 1960 a monkey
was elected president of these United States. When he turns on his high-definition television he sees the simian Peter Lynch
walking in the rarefied air of big money, of cubic American Benjamins. What is he? Third generation?

The Irish-American has a sip of his Jamesons and thinks of where he is in the American structure, and he concludes that he’s
not anywhere near the basement. He thinks,
Am I to weep over a pig? The dog barks but the caravan goes on. I am a complex, well-paid human being. Need I concern myself
with some little green monkey grinning at me on a rack at Walgreen’s?

But we like it here. Most Irish people who have come to America stayed here. I think, if everything were the same except that
my parents had gotten rich in America, they still would have stayed in America. Irish people get along well with America.
There are a variety of reasons for this. Many Irish people never even had the option of returning home, of course, but I don’t
think that there was, even for a second, a “get some dough and return to the Old Country” thing working in my parents’ brains.

We speak the language, after all. A lot of first-generation Irish people made a huge social leap in one generation. Peasant
to vice president in one generation. But now is a very good time to be an Irish guy in America because 2002 America
is “being buried in Irish shit,” as an acute (at that moment) Irish-American friend put it.

This is, I guess the American Celtic revival. The first one, the one over there with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, was a whole
lot lower on the bullshit scale, but this is, after all, America.

It’s all bullshit, but we gotta have it. The Chieftains have gone the way of Shirley MacLaine/Riverdance. Where they once
made beautiful versions of ancient Irish songs on ancient Irish instruments, they now have achieved great spiritual authenticity
and their recent records are largely only played to force suspects to confess.

But who is this audience? Who buys this shit?

Yes, the woeful people in America with Irish-sounding last names. For some of us Ireland is a mythic land of Tir Nan Og with
Michael Flately dancing on the shore while some chick named Moira sings like Joni Mitchell on nitrous oxide.

The real reason that the Irish in America (no matter how remote) have a bottomless appetite for this crap may be this: The
most basic thing about being Irish isn’t any of the things we often associate with it. It isn’t a great sense of humor or
a great talent for tragedy. It’s the fact that Ireland is the most spiritual place on earth, and the major legacy that Irish
people have always, in one form or another, left to their children is a deep abiding faith in God.

In America, of course, that’s really not much of a possibility. So Irish people like to fill up the space with Ossian and
Moira’s divination keening followed by a large dose of dancers in those long lines.

When there is a hole you try to fill it. The spiritual hole in the middle of Irish America contains a whole lot of Celtic
Moods CDs.

But for those Irish-Americans who just can’t take “Yanni Plays the Druids,” there is, of course, the thing itself. The eastern
half of Ireland may be turning into America, but the western half is, in a lot of ways, the same place my parents
left. Go back there, or go
back
to there, and, my son, you don’t need any Celtic moods. You can go to the damn Catholic church and get your mood there, I
can hear Dad say.

If my mom and dad were to have a look at
me
these days, they would approve of a lot of things. Three kids, two cars, big house. If they could look beyond the surface,
however, they would see that I am a profound disappointment. My parents always told me that the most important thing in the
world is what they call “the faith.” When they discussed what an Irish person bequeaths to his children, they would say something
like, “He didn’t have much money at the end but he gave them the faith.” And other Irish people would nod in assent.

My mom and dad had a faith. But somewhere in America, I misplaced it. I still go to church on Sunday and the authorities do
not want me, but I just don’t make it in spiritual land. I read a lot of philosophers in college and I decided that I was
in Nietzsche land, but I have slowly stumbled over to what I would call “Bad Catholic Land.”

There are many bad Catholics in America. They can go along with about 80 percent of what the Catholic Church says, but they
disagree (sometimes violently) with the last 20 percent.

Bad Catholics think that homosexuals aren’t sinning when they have sex. Bad Catholics think a woman has the right to decide
what happens to her body. Bad Catholics aren’t thrilled when the pope goes into a third-world developing country, a place
where a great number of children die of starvation, and says that almost every form of birth control is morally wrong.

Finally, the most salient feature of Bad Catholics is their belief that even though they don’t agree with everything the Catholic
Church says, they still aren’t going to quit. They are
going to stick around, keep pretty quiet, and be Bad Catholics.

I grew up in America and became a Bad Catholic. I don’t have a rich spiritual life. My mom and dad, who grew up in Ireland,
did. I am now going to Ireland and I hope that I will see just where I missed the boat.

FOUR

The Epic Journey

Like certain Italian wines, I have never traveled well. This may be because of experiences I had when I was young.

Our vacation when I was a kid consisted of the following: We lived right next to Philadelphia, on the Delaware River in New
Jersey, and we would drive sixty miles to the Jersey shore and stay for two weeks in a rented house at Ocean City, the home,
I later found out, of Gay Talese, but in those days beloved for its three challenging miniature golf courses on the boardwalk
and the fact that there were no bars or even places to buy alcoholic beverages. Ocean City was “The Family Place amid the
Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Jersey shore.”

Sixty miles, tops. This was not the Oregon Trail. But my dad made a major production out of this. To “avoid traffic,” he would
wake us up at 5:00
A.M.
the day of the drive. My brother, my sister, and I would stumble out to the car clutching our pillows, and we would drive
down to the shore. My sister and brother always fell asleep. I stared out the dewladen window of my dad’s ’61 Dodge.

There were no cars on the road at that hour, just the occasional truck. Some of them would blink their lights. I never knew
what that meant, but my dad seemed to think it was ominous. He would knit his brow, stare harder at the empty Route 9. Sometimes
he would mutter the name of God.

Because I was young and because of the early hour—the
jolt of being taken from a warm bed and placed in a cold Dodge at 5:00
A.M.
—I always thought that it was like my favorite show, the one my mother rarely let me see,
The Twilight Zone.
The episode where Burgess Meredith woke up and the world was dead.

There were still people in New Jersey driving down to the shore at 5:00
A.M.
But they seemed
altered
. A single truck with a grim little Edward Hopper man peeking above the steering wheel. A solitary ominous walking black bird.
One old lady crossing the road and turning her head in slow motion as we approached. I saw all this while the sun slowly crept
up over the New Jersey shore horizon.

It was beautiful when we got there. After that grueling hour, sixty minutes on the road and now, Thank God! Thank God we had
gotten up early enough to “beat the traffic”! We would get to our destination, Ocean City, around 6:30
A.M.

My dad would roll down the window. Smell that, you sleeping ones! Smell that!

I rolled down my window. Yes, the sea. I will always love that smell.

Then we would be going over bridges and my brother and sister would wake up. Look! A seagull! I don’t think that I have ever
been happier than when we rolled into Ocean City after our epic journey.

There was the house. It was always the same house. When I was four, on my first trip, I despaired when I saw it. I asked my
mother in anguish, “Why did we sell our nice house and buy this crummy house?” By the time I was five I got the idea.

I loved the house, the weirdness of it. The sheets on the bed. The backyard with the strange gnarled tree. The little store
up at the corner.

After we got there, it was, of course, still very early. We would wander around saying things like, “What time is it?” and
taking short naps on the couch or the beds. Until finally,
after what seemed like an eternity, it was time to go to the beach.