by Frank Gannon
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 wa
s 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.
I also found it comforting to be around so many people who had some of the same religion-induced psychoses that I did. Just kidding, God.
In Ireland, everybody does the things that people thought were so weird about my family. Almost every house out in the west has holy water fonts next to the door. Almost every house has an Infant of Prague (a statue of the Christ child whose garb you change to fit the liturgical season). I didn’t keep statistics but, on average, the houses I visited in Ireland had about eight crosses in them. There were signs with prayers and pictures of Jesus and Mary all over the place. I was in ten houses that had that famous picture of the sacred heart of Jesus. In Ireland I knew what it was like to be typical. Just another kid in a regular family. Everybody was looking around for the holy water font when they came into a room. Completely normal behavior.
In Ireland, I tried to walk inside every Catholic church I came across. There were, as you would figure, a lot of Saint Patrick’s, but I also came across Saint Teresa’s, Saint Peter’s, Saint Joseph’s, and the saint I’m named after, Saint Francis Xavier’s. If you come across somebody named Francis in Ireland, you don’t need to ask what his middle name is.
It was great to be in a country where my family was normal.
ELEVEN
Alcohol and the?
Irish Person
Phase one of our journey was near completion. We had only a few days of random rambling before phase two set in. In phase two we would no longer be footloose and fancy-free. We would be bound by an “agenda.” We would have to look into very specific things, and we would probably be confined to very particular areas.
Our “plans” for phase two didn’t look like plans. They looked like the two-pronged plan that had gotten me through much of my life until now, namely: 1) Make it up as you go along; 2) When convenient, pretend that you had whatever happened planned all the time.
So we drove along just north of Dublin without a mood of desperation. We had spent a lot more money that we thought we would spend, but when your money has James Joyce’s picture on it, it’s difficult to get upset. It’s like Monopoly money.
But on that day in our lovely Punta, we decided to take stock. We would find a little town, find a pub, which is never hard to do in Ireland (like finding that name “Trump” in New York), and have a “sit-down.” We wound up in a little pub around Dundalk, a town just north of Dublin on Ireland’s east side. We found a seat, and decided to take stock.
Phase two, the finding of my parents, was still in front of us. It was time to get organized. We didn’t want to leave without doing what we set out to do. Now that we had to actually act, our attitude changed. We were in a country that was still pretty foreign to us, and we had very little information. But Paulette was optimistic and I felt “if she is optimistic I am optimistic too.” I had faith in Paulette and her orderly mind. When anybody loses anything around our house, she finds it. She always knows the ending of murder mysteries before everybody else does. She loves organizing. She loves lists of “things to do.” She will have a “list of things to do” at my funeral.
We wrote a little list and evaluated it while we ate a few sausages and sipped another Guinness. (By then I could just walk in, sit down, hold up two fingers, and point. They always knew.)
There wasn’t much on our list.
Find out about Frank’s dad
Find out about Frank’s mom.
At this point, we had a few regrets. We hadn’t seen the whole country, but we had seen a good bit of it. Ireland is not the USSR. I’m sure we hadn’t really seen and experienced Ireland, but we got semiclose. We had given it a good shot. We certainly used a lot of petrol. We had seen enough of it to get a pretty good impression.
But we knew that if we were going to accomplish our goals, we would have to draw a line someplace. We knew that, despite the vast uncharted Ireland that still lay before us, there were limits. We couldn’t stay here forever, although that seemed, late at night, a very good idea many times.
We realized that we hadn’t even set foot in Dublin, the city a lot of people think of when they think of Ireland. Dublin was the city of Ulysses, the city of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious novels like The Commitments and The Snapper, the city of the Easter rebellion and certainly the city of Ireland.
I had even thought of going to graduate school there. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I thought that I was an “Irish writer,” even though I’d never spent a day in Ireland. I would go to Ireland and come home with my Irish degree and all would be well. I’d be a young man reconnected to his “Irishness.”
It never happened, of course. When I was twenty-one, I already had a wife and a child (and twelve dollars on my nightstand, my “nest egg”) and could never really afford to go to Ireland and study there. I remember sitting o
n a couch in Watkinsville, Georgia, and realizing that no matter what I did, I could never afford to go to Ireland and study.
But Yeats infected me. I said his poems to myself all the time. I thought they were perfect ways to spend the fifteen-minute tour around the factory that was part of the job.
I remember vividly opening the big gate in the back so they could unload the train at 7:30 in the evening. It was the only “thing” I had to do on my shift. The rest of the time was spent reading: Otherwise, I just walked around for insurance purposes “paying attention.” Yeats was amazing. He would make the whole thing somehow elevated.
When I stood on the roof of the factory and turned the lights on, I thought about those swans. I made $1.75 an hour—pretty good.
A quarter after seven the sun would start to go down, and I’d open the King Kong–like gate; the train would gasp and belch its way in. They would unload the massive coils of wire. Forklift drivers would steer their amazing way over to it with startling quick turns of the little black steering wheel. The train would leave. I would close the door. All the time I would be thinking:
Like a long legged fly
Above the swift stream
His mind moves upon silence.
I had always loved that stuff. In graduate school I loved Yeats, memorized his poems, said them silently as I walked around my rounds at Anaconda Wire and Cable Company, where I was a security guard. It was my little world there. But as I finished school, and started yet more school, and had another child, and moved to an opulent trailer in Winterville, Georgia, I still found no matter what idignity the trailer park had in store for me, I still loved that stuff.
So with Dublin before us and a big stack of American-earned James Joyces in our pockets, we could go after Beckett or Joyce or Yeats or Shaw or Wilde (or the young, still-living Heaney), or (for the politically minded) the chilling details of the 1921 revolution, but we thought that those were very big fish and we weren’t, after all, Ahab and his wife. (Although Paulette, at times, reminded me of her.)