Ghosts of my Past

The map of Ireland traced on her face, she sits at my Mom’s kitchen table. With the Irish, it’s always the kitchen. The tea is poured and her grandchildren’s pictures viewed. And then her brother arrives. He has just lost his wife, and Theresa has flown halfway around the world to comfort him. As they embrace I look away, embarrassed to be sharing this intimate, tragic moment. Then it’s a flurry of stories of far away places and people long dead. More tea and more stories and some laughter as well. The lilting voices soothe me. America cannot wipe away Kevin’s brogue, even though it has had 45 years to try.

And these stories take me back to my own trips to Ireland, sitting around the table of Theresa’s kitchen so many thousands of miles away. I can’t shake these connections: the resemblance of children, the ease of reconnections, the hospitality and quiet way of this family.

I felt it most strongly in that graveyard in County Mayo, giant Celtic crosses whose inscriptions were almost smooth to the touch. I waded through knee-high grasses to find my great-grandfather’s grave. The stillness of the air stopped my own heart as I bent in prayer. And later, a peat fire warmed my chill in the tiny home where my grandfather was born. I knew a spiritual world as I stared into that fire.

I have always felt different, not quite enmeshed totally in the world around me. And I can see the reasons here at the kitchen table today. I have been straddling these cultures, torn between the ghosts of my Irish ancestors and the modern flurry in which I live. My past, it tugs me and nips me and won’t let me go. I feel comfort in the language and the soft-spoken charms. I feel old beyond my years and nostalgic for a past I never knew in a country I never called home. And the tension is ripe; I do belong there.

So I revel in the family tales of sheep interrupting traffic and the neighbor’s disputes over the family farm. There are jokes that God created beer so the Irish wouldn’t rule the world, but it’s the tea that really slows them down. Cup after cup is poured. Story after story is told. And I take it all in, because this is my story today. I think I belong in the country of green, at a slower pace, in a more hospitable land.

And tomorrow, another graveyard. Theresa will comfort her brother as he lays his wife to rest. And I will watch from the center of two cultures, the spirits of Ireland tussling my modern sensibilities. I will stay for now, but the map on my own face and the lilt in my own voice will surely call me home someday.