Midlife Irish

by Frank Gannon

  They Love Their Mothers

  John Belushi did a great little bit where he pretended to be a straight-arrow newsperson. He began, “Well the calendar says March 17, and we all know what that means. It’s the time everybody is a little bit Irish. It’s the time for ‘the wearin’ of the green.’ ” He then continued in that same, standard television announcer’s voice, saying the same boring clichés you hear every Saint Patrick’s Day. “Top o’ the morning,” “Sure and begorrah,” “The luck of the Irish,” ad nauseum.

  Then he said, “I know this guy, he’s Irish. He’s a friend of mine. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, but he gives me a call, wants me to pick him up at the airport.” Belushi then told us about the Irish guy, who was a crazy drug dealer. Belushi’s voice became more and more manic as he told about his “friend” and his efforts to smuggle serious narcotics into the country. As he told the lurid story, Belushi got more and more out of control. Finally he was standing screaming about his crazy Irish friend. The bit ended with Belushi completely spinning out and falling to the ground.

  I found this bit so funny I found it in a rental place (it’s on The Best of John Belushi). I play it as part of my traditional Saint Patrick’s Day celebration right before the eatin’ of the corned beef. But the interesting thing is the last words Belushi spits out before collapsing: “Oh, they love their mothers!”

  I never met an Irish guy who didn’t love his mother. I love my mother. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. If that sounds a little Oedipal, well, too bad. I can honestly say that I never saw my mom do or say anything that was in any way “wrong.” I mean that in a moral sense. In the other senses of the word, she was always doing something “wrong.”

  She went to mass every day of her life. In the evenings she prayed for a couple of hours. I vividly remember a scene from her life. It was pure Anne Forde.

  I was about twelve years old. I was with my mom and dad and my brother and sister. We were at the racetrack. Delaware Park, about an hour from our house, was the only racetrack that admitted children. My dad would let me pick horses. If I won he would give me the money. It was a fun day. It probably wasn’t the most psychologically healthy thing to let a little kid bet on horses, but I loved it. I never said we were the Waltons. (I never became a compulsive gambler, but I love horse racing.) The racetrack was, for us, “family entertainment.” The family that gambles together, stays together.

  Anyway, my dad was having a bad day. My mom was having a good day. My mom never bet more than two dollars, while my dad frequented the hundred-dollar window. On a bad day, my mom would lose maybe twenty dollars. My dad would lose serious Benjamins. My mom always smiled and laughed and made jokes no matter how she was doing. My dad’s disposition depended on his economic state; on a bad day he was not Mister Rogers.

  It was late afternoon. The eighth race of the day had just finished. My dad had not been at the winner’s window all afternoon. He was less than thrilled. In the race that had just finished my mom’s horse acted up in the starting gate and was scratched. This meant that everyone who had bet on that horse would get his money back. But that’s all. If you bet ten bucks you would get ten bucks back. My mom had just returned from the window. She looked puzzled. She sat down next to my dad, who was wearing an intense fixed stare. He was looking at nothing, something he did when things weren’t going well.

  My mom told my dad her problem. She had gone to the window to get her two dollars back, but the guy at the window had given her a lot more than two dollars. He had made a mistake and given her the payoff for the winning horse, a long shot that paid sixty-two dollars. The racetrack had just given my mom sixty dollars.

  This news lightened my dad’s mood. I could see a little twinkle in his eyes. I could almost read his thoughts. Sixty dollars. Not bad. The racetrack just gave us sixty dollars. Life is not that bad.

  Then my mom said something that completely shattered his mood.

  “I’m going back to give the money back.” And with that, she was gone. I looked over at my dad. I could just make out some steam coming from his ears.

  My mom hadn’t even thought about keeping the money. That was the way she was with everything. Once she went way out of her way to return a twenty-five-cent pencil she had inadvertently stuck in her purse. She probably spent fifteen dollars giving back the pencil. The Ten Commandments were, for her, not the “Ten Suggestions.”

  My mother told me that when she was a young girl she had a powerful desire to become a nun. She told me that she believed that God had chosen her. She set out to begin her training three separate times, and three times something happened that prevented her from going. Sometimes someone got sick and she was needed at home. Sometimes someone got in an automobile accident. My mom interpreted that as God’s way of telling her that she wasn’t meant to be a nun.

  But for my mom, the next best thing would be to be the mother of a nun or, better, a priest. I never really felt her directing me toward the priesthood. I guess there was something about me that just said, “Not priest material.” But my older brother received the full treatment. It didn’t take. It didn’t work with my sister Mary either. (She would have been a really aggressive nun.)

  There were always priests around the house when I was growing up. Some of them I liked and some of them I did not. I now know that they were there to show my brother what the life of a priest was like. If the priests at our house were typical, the priestly life didn’t look that bad. They all had cars. Some of them drank a little, some smoked, but none of them had any sexual predilection for young boys. I mention that only because of recent events, but for years before that, every time you saw an actor playing a priest he was a child molester. I was an altar boy for seven years and I never saw anything remotely sexual.

  I really enjoyed being an altar boy. You got to dress up in exotic clothing. You got to set fire to a lot of stuff (candles, incense, once in a while the exotic clothing). But the one thing I remember most about being an altar boy is a fellow altar boy I will call Tommy Ditmar.

  Ditmar was about three years older than I was, so I got to observe his altar boy career for about three years. I guess he was my role model in the religious life. He was an older and wiser altar boy. He was a tall wiry kid with large hands and crazy hair. His hair looked as if Ditmar had just stuck his hand in an electrical socket. The hair was appropriate. Ditmar was not the model altar boy.

  He would do the usual altar boy bad stuff (sword fights with the candle lighters), but he went way beyond that. He would wait until the priest was gone. He would make sure of Father Bradley’s absence and then go into his act.

  First he would go over to the refrigerator and get out a bottle of Christian Brothers wine, the wine used in the mass. I was stunned that he had the brass to do that. He would walk around taking gulps out of the bottle while engaging in a stream-of-consciousness monologue that was really, really obscene and really, really anti-Catholic (anti-everything was closer to it). For my ten-year-old mind it was the funniest thing I ever heard. While he was doing this, striding around, pretending he was the bishop or the pope, he would continually munch on a stack of communion wafers.

  I remember being really shocked the first time I saw Ditmar’s act. The wafers were, after all, sacred, and here was Tommy Ditmar buying himself a one-way, no-waiting ticket to hell.

  He always ended his rant the same way. He would say something really filthy and anti-God. Then, while everyone was laughing (usually an audience of two or three other altar boys), he would plop into the big red chair that they had in the corner of the sacristy, the one underneath the somber portrait of Pope Pius XII. Ditmar, really rolling now, would take a huge slug of Christian Brothers, clap his hands, and say in a loud, booming voice, a voice like the voice of God in the movies (or as close as Ditmar could get), “Bring me the dancing girls!”

  Ditmar’s performances burned themselves into the template of my mind. Whenever I see an altar boy, I think of him and smile. Whe
never I see an altar boy, I think of Ditmar, the chair, and the dancing girls.

  I didn’t become a priest. Sorry, Mom. I blame Ditmar.

  I did not know Tommy Ditmar. I saw him only “on duty.” Someone told me that he became a full-fledged substance abuser. I can only think of him in a big red chair with a bottle of Christian Brothers in his hand and a wild maniacal grin on his face.

  I am very happy that my mother never saw one of Ditmar’s performances. For her, the Catholic Church was the holiest of places, and all the altar boys were like little angels on earth. My mother grew up on a farm outside a little town in County Mayo named Ballyhaunis. (There are many little towns in Ireland that begin with “Bally.”) Like “Athlone,” this was, for me, merely a couple of syllables with no meaning. She never talked enough about it to give me a mental picture of Ballyhaunis. When we got an “official” Basset hound and needed an official registered “last name” for the low-IQ dog, we named it “Norman O’Ballyhaunis.”

  He later drank antifreeze and died. It was very sad. We all really loved him. Norman wasn’t too swift in the brain department, but he was very lovable. He had an Irish name, so it is appropriate that he died because he was too fond of drinking.

  As far as my consciousness goes, that is the only real “Ballyhaunis” connection that I have ever had. This seems horrible to me now, but when I was younger I was not at all interested in my mom’s Irish life. I was extremely close to my mother, but she rarely talked about her life back in Ireland. If she wanted me to know, I figured, she would have told me about it.

  In the DNA department I’m pretty momlike. When I was born, she told me, my relatives said that I resembled my mother’s side of the family. They said, many, many times in my presence “He’s a Ford, not a Gannon.” When Gerald Ford said that he was a Ford, not a Lincoln, I was repulsed for a variety of reasons. My dad would stand no Republican associations, however remote.

  I have my dad’s weird curly hair, and I’m almost as big as he was. But from the wrist down I’m all Anne Forde’s son. My mother had tiny hands. They looked almost comical next to my dad’s Sonny Liston hands. I am six-foot-two, but my hands wouldn’t look out of place on Michael J. Fox. I used to be very self-conscious about the size of my hands. When I was in high school my friend George Bianchi said that I was the only kid in his high school who needed two hands to play Monopoly.

  I, like most American boys, once had a gripping desire to dunk a basketball. I was six-two—I should be able to dunk. I played a lot of basketball, and my nondunker status was kind of embarrassing. I could jump high enough, but I would always lose the ball on the way up. I could dunk a volleyball, but my hands were too small for a one-hand dunk with a basketball, and I couldn’t jump high enough for a two-hand dunk. This used to frustrate me. I once tried gluing the ball to my hand with LaPage’s Mucilage. This resulted in my injuring myself. The ball stuck to my hand when I tried to “dunk,” and I dislocated my shoulder. When I told the doctor how I injured myself he looked at me like, “This boy is really unusually stupid.”

  Anne Forde’s chromosomes also got to me in more subtle ways. I loved to sit around and talk to my mom. Unlike my dad she would talk back to me. I certainly inherited a lot of her personality. I, like the pants at a liquidation mart, have always been “slightly irregular.” I never quite fit in. I felt as if I was the same type of person as my mother—not criminal, just sort of confused on some level.

  My mom had a very strange sense of humor, which I find very difficult to describe. When she told jokes, she always told them very badly. She went on past the punch line, or she forgot something, or she added odd details that didn’t add anything, or she grafted another joke on to the original joke.

  Then she would laugh at the wrong moment. She would laugh at her strange version of the joke, not the joke. Sometimes, in a very strange way, her little addition to the joke was funnier. I would sometimes laugh in the middle of her joke. I’d realize that I had laughed at the wrong time. Then I would look at her and her eyes would say, “I meant to do it that way.”

  She would tell the same joke differently every time. If my mom asked, “Have you heard this one?” the answer was always, “No,” because no one had ever heard it because no one had ever told it. And no one would ever tell it again.

  I found that I usually laughed at my mother’s jokes. Often, no one else did. A bond was formed, a bond more basic than the mother-son relationship, the bond of weirdness.

  My mom and I would go to the movies all the time. We would get a cab because she didn’t drive. Someone (not my dad) once tried to teach her. She described to me her one driving lesson. She sat in the driver’s seat. She put it in reverse. She tried to get out of the driveway. She didn’t make it. She gave up.

  In the taxi, she would sit in the backseat and I would always want to sit in the little fold-down seat that yellow cabs had back then. I thought it was interesting to unfold the little fold-down seat they had in front of the rear seating area. It made me feel that I was doing something intricate and important.

  So, I’d be facing my mom as we rode into Philadelphia. My mom would talk to the cab driver, but I could tell that she was also talking to me. She was right in front of me.

  My mom loved to talk. She would start talking in a rhythmic, rambling Irish voice the moment she got into the cab, and she wouldn’t stop until we got there. The cab drivers were usually good talkers too. I could tell that they enjoyed giving a long five-dollar ride to a talker of this quality. The cab drivers had their themes. They often complained about Philadelphia and the plight of cabdrivers. My mom sympathized. Sometimes I would make an observation. She would weave my comment into the conversation so I felt I was engaging in an actual grown-up conversation. My observations were always quickly dismissed, but I was in there conversing.

  She loved baseball and she would talk about the Phillies in great, almost baroque detail. This was often startling to people who didn’t know her. She did not look like a person who would have a Red Barber-like view of the game.

  When I told friends that my mom knew about baseball, they always got the wrong idea. If my friend was over at my house, and didn’t know my mom, he might ask her something like, “How are the Phillies, Mrs. Gannon?”

  This was like asking Alan Dershowitz, “How is the law?”

  My mom wouldn’t say “good” or “bad,” as my friend would expect. She would say something like, “Gene Mauch doesn’t use his bullpen enough.” Or, “They have to get a right-handed pinch hitter, a power hitter if he’s available, because in the late innings every team in the National League has a left-handed relief guy, and the Phillies can’t do anything at that point.” Or, “When Tony Gonzalez got hurt, they let everybody pitch around Callison. They should move him up in the order. He can bat second. He is a good contact hitter.”

  My mom knew more about baseball than my friends. She also knew more than I did. That’s because she listened to the Phillies games with rapt, focused attention.

  When I got older, I wondered about this. Since she was, after all, from Ireland, where baseball was not played, and none of her friends (or her husband) were at all interested in baseball, I found her interest puzzling.

  She told me about her introduction to the game, her first impressions. At her first game she was astounded, like so many other people, upon entering the stadium and seeing the vast green in the middle of the dingy gray city of Philadelphia, in the dingy gray area of Twenty-first and Lehigh Avenue. Almost every baseball fan I know, however, has that same impression imprinted on his or her brain. What else?

  She told me that she was astounded at the fact that a long towering fly ball to center field was just an out, while a tiny, off-the-end-of-the-bat Texas Leaguer could be a big deal if it happened at the right time. Then she was amazed at how the distance from home to first was such that a fast runner who hit a ground ball to the shortstop would be just barely out if the ball was fielded cleanly and thrown well. She was also surprised
at how a fly ball had to be just so deep if the runner was to tag and make it home. My mom was into baseball.

  My mom and I went to many Phillies games, less than a hundred, more than fifty. She was a great person to watch a game with because she was totally into the game and never needed anything, although she would get me whatever crap (hot dogs, caramel corn) I wanted. She didn’t talk that much at the games, but when she noticed something, she mentioned it. It was always something interesting.

  At home she listened to the games on the radio. She didn’t like to watch them on television, but she would watch the tube if she had to. She hated it when they showed the view from behind the pitcher.

  “That ruins it,” she’d say.

  I asked her why and she pointed out that you couldn’t see the fielders’ little moves, you couldn’t see the base runners, and you couldn’t see the pitcher’s face.

  But she listened to every Phillies game on the radio. I think she liked to picture the game in her mind.

  Somewhere inside her, I knew there were pictures of Ireland. But my mom, like my dad, almost never talked to me about it. The only story she ever shared with me about her childhood in Ballyhaunis was the story of her First Holy Communion. And it was the only story she ever told me that made her visibly sad. It always made me feel that way also. It still does.

  First Holy Communion is a huge day in an Irish Catholic kid’s life. It’s like ten birthdays rolled into one. In actuality, my mom’s First Holy Communion was probably a happy day. For a kid in County Mayo, it had to be a highlight. At the beginning of the story I could see that the mere memory of the day was exciting to her. My mom’s voice didn’t go up and down. It was a steady, unending stream. But I could tell from the details that that was a big day.

  When she told me about that big day in Ireland, I had already experienced my own First Holy Communion in New Jersey. It was not a jump-up-and-down day for me. It was nothing like Christmas. The best thing about it, I remembered, was that it took place at the end of May, and school was almost finished for a year. But I could tell that it had been a big, big deal to her. She remembered all of the details.