"He'd come out and meet us in the fields and lift each of us up and give us a hug and then we'd continue on our way home." He came out to LITERALLY just pick them up and spread a little welcome-home love and then he'd continue working in the fields. He was a farmer. Feeding his eight or ten or whatever number of kids he had. He probably didn't even remember how many kids he had. I can't even remember how many aunts and uncles I have on my mom's side of the family. I'm amazed that she can. They grew up in a world where death, disease and destruction lay in wait around almost every single corner. And they only had about five corners-down in the village. Once you got onto the road out of the tiny town-they didn't even have corners. Just long and winding dirt roads with ditches or turf bogs on either side. Trees? Hah. Trees were for pussies.
There was nothing except the dark wet sky and the cold hard ground and an assortment of atrocities in between as you headed the seven miles back to the farm. How any of them survived is a mystery to me.
My mom once brought a box of ancient black-and-white photos from Ireland in the 1930s and '40s-when she was growing up-over to our house in Connecticut and flipped through them in front of my wife Ann and me-telling us what eventually happened to each person pictured. It went something like this:
FLIP: That's Mary Aberdeen from the Aberdeens two farms away. She got kicked in the head by a horse when we were ten. Died right there on the spot.
FLIP: This is Fiona Something Or Other. She got this fever and was never the same. She became like retarded almost. Then she fell into a fireplace when we were fifteen.
FLIP: This guy here was lost in the ocean. It just swallowed him up one night. He was walking along the beach just minding his own business and-then he was gone.
FLIP: This would be my second or third cousin-she was a Burke I think-and she got what they would call multiple sclerosis now or whatever Jerry Lewis is always on about with those kids and she got married and had some kids of her own and then she was in a wheelchair but she could like stand up and walk around a little bit and then one night all the kids were in bed and she had a couple of drinks and she got up out of the wheelchair to throw some more turf onto the fire and then she fell into the fire and that was the end of it.
FLIP: This was a fourth cousin of your father's who got a pitchfork in the eye.
FLIP: This was a friend of your Uncle Jerry's who got split into two pieces by lightning.
FLIP: This lady here was someone's aunt who got some horrible growth on her leg and never told anyone and then when it burst she got run over by a car.
FLIP: This man was a great friend of your grandfather's who fell out of the hayloft in the barn and got trampled by a horse and then got cancer and then fell into a fire. Do you see how lucky Mary Aberdeen was now?
FLIP: This man dropped dead.
FLIP: This lady disappeared.
FLIP: This man got melted.
FLIP: This young boy on the bike was like a midget or something and then didn't he grow up to be a great big strapping man until he got hit by lightning out in a field and then he shrank up and was kind of bent over for a long time after until he got the cancer and then he died.
FLIP: This man had no fingers.
FLIP: This man had been out in the fields at night and was found in a bog with his head bashed in.
FLIP: That lady went to bed one evening and woke up dead.
FLIP: This lady died last year and now her whole family is dead.
And on and on it went. Ann and I sat riveted as the parade of tragedy and manifest destiny unfolded in front of us, wondering just how many Irish people had perished in day-to-day disease diagnoses and accidents and some who apparently had just been smited from above in mysterious circumstances versus those lost during The Great Potato Famine. We could barely keep count of the faces as they flashed by, one old photo after another. It gave me a rush of sense memory from when I was a kid-my mom constantly warning of the sudden possibility of lurking danger and immediate payback for the slightest of sins, not to mention how people could just be turned into instant piles of smoking ash.
I know that growing up in my day I had seventeen cousins here in America and two sisters and a brother and we all lived near each other and every time we went on vacation or just to the beach there were about eight or nine kids in the back of my dad's station wagon and there were no seat belts and at least four kids in the way way back and the window was always all the way down because the car had no air-conditioning and the entire car-the floor, the side panels, the dashboard, the roof-every single part of the car was made of steel and since you weren't strapped in whenever the car hit a pothole or any other bump in the road your head bounced off the roof or the side or the floor or if you sat in the way way back maybe even all three one right after another and we thought that was FUN because no matter what you did to someone else back there my father couldn't reach you unless he threw something at you from the front driver's seat and if he did that he usually hit one of the kids in the middle row instead and by the way if you fell out the back window onto the highway they didn't turn around to go back and get you or make a sudden stop they kept right on going 'cause it was just one less mouth to feed.
I remember a Green Hornet cane that turned into a knife and a kid named Matt and another kid named Patrick and a toy Batman motorcycle that shot missiles but my mother says I never owned either one of those toys and Matt was a pain in the ass and there was never anyone in this family named Patrick except your Uncle Patrick so if there was another Patrick shouldn't she remember? No wonder they never took pictures. It was like the Mafia with children.
And by the way the station wagon was marine green with a painted-over gas company decal on each door because my dad bought it secondhand and retooled it himself because not only was it all he could afford but they never had cars when he was growing up.
My dad grew up with a shitload of other kids on a farm adjacent to the one my mom grew up on-real storybook romance territory. His mom died giving birth to the last kid. He only went to school until he was twelve and then he had to go to work to help feed the rest of the family, along with my Uncle Patrick. One of the kids-who would've been my Uncle Matt-died from something when he was five. No one even remembers what disease he died from-they didn't have enough time or money to find out. They pretty much just buried him and kept on milking the cows. Hey-he's lucky he got a grave. In those days you had as many kids as possible because you figured some would die, some would get killed and the rest would still be able to carry stuff. You got a cold back in those days-you could pretty much kiss your ass goodbye. My dad grew up the hard way. When he decided to come to America, he was given what all the Irish who were headed across the pond got-something called A Living Wake. That's where everyone who knew or was related to you gathered themselves down at the village pub and placed whatever money they could manage into an envelope for you-which they gave to you with their solemn goodbyes because odds were very much against them ever seeing you again. So my dad got on a big boat and two weeks later landed in New York City with thirty-seven dollars in his pocket. Almost enough to buy a cup of giant fagulated coffee and a pumpkin cream-filled muffin at Starbucks in today's terms.
So if you wanted to complain about ANYTHING in our house-you were up shit's creek without a paddle. There wasn't a single solitary complaint you could make about your clothes or your toys or your situation that my mom and dad couldn't dial right back down to the basic facts of life-hey, yer lucky yer even here.
NOT TO MENTION the house they lived in had no electricity and the toilet was a shack out in the backyard. My older brother Johnny and I lived in the attic of a three-decker and my parents and everyone else lived in the third-floor apartment. When my dad got enough money to buy a ranch house in a better neighborhood Johnny and I lived in the basement. We went from dwelling above the rest of the family like strange, pink-cheeked bats to dwelling in the bowels of the house like strawberry blond goddam rats.
The attic sucked 'cause we had to walk up three flights to get to the apartment and then another steep flight to get to the place where we slept. The basement sucked because we slept right next to the boiler room and the water heater would kick on and off and make one helluva racket. So when we did something wrong and my mom or my dad said "Go to your room!" it was a genuine hard-ass punishment.
Today? My kids each have televisions and giant computer screens and electric guitars and sofas and their own individual bathrooms and Xboxes and PlayStations and stack after stack of DVDs and CDs and video games. As a matter of fact when the kids get into trouble my wife and I say "That's it! WE'RE going to your room. You guys go sit in our bedroom and read actual books."
When I was growing up we had three TV channels and there were a handful of movie stars and only one or two kid stars plus Lassie and Mr. Ed and a dolphin who answered to the name Flipper. No one in my neighborhood ever even dreamed of being on TV. Not even me. Wasn't an option.
We knew Lassie AND Flipper were both smarter and better off than any of us could ever hope to be-not to mention the talking horse. We had clothes on our backs and homework to do and were expected to have paper routes by the time we were twelve and shovel snow off sidewalks in the winter and paint apartments in the summer if we wanted money in our pockets. I got a job in a diner twenty-five yards down the block from the local hockey rink as did my older brother my two sisters and almost all of my cousins and that was considered a choice place to work because they gave you free food at the end of your shift, which was very handy because in the house I grew up in there were no late meals. My mom served supper at six sharp and if you weren't there to eat it you just didn't eat. My dad worked two jobs so he would come home from his day job around four in the afternoon, take a quick nap and then eat dinner at six and go to his night job. What did we have for supper? Guess what. Supper. Meaning, whatever the hell she decided to cook that day. She served it hot and when they placed the bowls on the table you had to grab as much as you could and start forking it away 'cause once it was gone that was the end of it. No special meals for anyone. You didn't like what she was serving up you didn't eat. Plus-we lived in an Irish household so forget about food that tasted good. If you could taste it at ALL you were way ahead of the game. If you downed a forkful of potatoes and they tasted like dogshit your tastebuds did a goddam kitchen table jig. Irish people eat as though they were doing penance-it's punishment for your sins and just a way of laying a foundation in your stomach for all the booze that's about to follow it down your gullet. Here's an example of a few traditional Irish recipes my mom cooked up for us:
CABBAGE POTATO CHUCK ROAST
14 sticks of butter
Pinch of salt Cabbage
Seven hundred potatoes
2 pounds chuck roast beef
Place chuck roast, potatoes and cabbage into a very large pot of already boiling water. Boil for five hours. Turn heat down to a simmer. Drop in 14 sticks of butter and pinch of salt. Let boil for one more hour. Then another fifteen minutes. Then a couple more minutes. Make sure all germs and taste have been boiled out. Serve.
Here's her Thanksgiving recipe:
TURKEY DAY
47 sticks of butter
Cabbage
Six thousand potatoes
Fifteen cans of jellied cranberry sauce
65 boxes of Shake 'N Bake Stuffing Mix
Jar of Skippy Peanut Butter-Creamy Style
Two celery sticks
Five carrots
Some peas
Pie
One giant-and I do mean giant-turkey
Boil several really huge pots of water. Take all the stuff out of the inside of the turkey. Begin cursing in Gaelic. Stick the Shake 'N Bake Stuffing stuff into turkey. Slather turkey with melted butter. Place in oven with heat as high as knob will turn. Clean rest of house for one hour. Throw potatoes and cabbage and peas and carrots into boiling pots of water. Eat some pie. Dip two celery sticks into jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter and eat. Check turkey. Probably not even close to being done. Begin cursing in English. Baste turkey with tons more butter. Place back in oven. Open the fifteen cans of jellied cranberry sauce and combine into one giant heap of cranberry sauce on a large table platter. Eat more pie. Call relatives in Ireland and gossip/slander etc for half-hour. Check turkey. Begin cursing in Gaelic/English mixture that sounds like a third and almost completely separate language. Serve large amounts of whiskey and beer to guests who have already begun to arrive. Serve pie. Check turkey. Still not done. Clean up kitchen for half an hour. Threaten to begin making peanut butter and cranberry jelly sandwiches unless drunken jackasses stay out of the goddam kitchen. Check turkey again. STILL not done. Threaten to move back to Ireland-include "If I never see another turkey again it won't be soon enough for me" speech. Remove potatoes etc. from pots. Place in bowls. Smell turkey burning. Curse. Serve.
Fridays were special because as Catholics we couldn't eat meat. So that meant my mom had to break out one of her fish recipes. Like this one:
FISH
One loaf Wonder Bread
8 sticks butter
Cabbage
