How many years does it take to forget where you came from? How many generations?
I remember as a small child my grandfather played records – they were already old, the sound crackled, and smaller than those my father had as a teenager. The songs were in Gaelic. I remember hearing them, and my grandfather singing along. I don’t think he knew any Gaelic – what I grew up knowing our native language as – but he sang along to those old records, faint and haunting as the sound was.
My middle name is Gaelic – and we pronounced it in the English way until a cousin of my grandfather’s visited from Ireland who had the same name. And she told me the true pronunciation. I was maybe 10.
They call our language Irish now – but it was Gaelic when we left.
My grandmother gave me her mother’s recipe for soda bread – Mary was precise – and she had converted the measurements. I remember sitting at her kitchen table as she told me how to make it. Her mother had made it with hands of flour and pinches of salt and baked in an iron skillet. It called for buttermilk but Mary said to add a spoon of lemon to the milk to curdle it – I never knew her to make the recipe with buttermilk. Buttermilk was a luxury.
I remember my uncle at the age I am now – ear pierced with a motorcycle – listening to the radio for updates about the IRA. There will be a united Ireland he said. We will be free he said.
I remember my father saying constantly – there are two types of people – the Irish and those that wish they were Irish!
Mary and Chuck are long gone. No one is close anymore.
Less and less I heard of Ireland.
Until no one really said anything at all.
Maybe we have forgotten.
Laughs and Lobotomies 