Midlife Irish (20 page)

The Viking influence on the little island wasn’t completely negative. A lot of the larger cities (Waterford, Dublin) were
established by Vikings. They established a coin-based economy, which was a big advance from Ireland’s bizarre, cattle-based
economy.

Still, there is an ancient Irish prayer that says it all compactly: “From the fury of the Norsemen deliver us.”

But by 1002, Ireland, always a country of hundreds of autonomous tribes, had what some historians call its first real king,
Brian Boru. He achieved this, largely, by being the first to even seriously consider the idea that one man could rule the
whole of the island. There are many legends about Boru. They all emphasize two sides of his personality. He was a truly vicious
warrior who could cut a man in half with one swipe of his sword, but he was, at home, a sensitive, poetic type who loved to
play the harp and compose love songs. The two sides of Brian Boru are still pretty much the two sides of the idealized Irishman.
He is always something like a “warrior/poet.” The greatest Irish writing, I think, is similarly hard to pigeonhole. It is
always profoundly “tragicomic.”

After Boru’s death, there were others who tried to be sole ruler, but Boru was certainly the first. In
Darby O’Gill and the Little People
, Boru is the Man.

Brian Boru was very aware of the power of Christianity among the people of Ireland. He made his brother abbot of Killaloe,
Holy Island, and Terryglass. He threw a lot of money at the Church and it bought him a lot of goodwill among the people and
the clergy. This practice is still a good idea in 2002.

Today, there are actually some doggedly Irish people who attempt to trace their genealogy back to Boru. Every Irish kid knows
who Brain Boru was, and he’s achieved Santa Claus-like status. Mythic details have attached themselves to his life. His death
is also rather myth-influenced.

The story goes that Boru died as an old man, but not in bed. He was watching a battle outside Dublin, and a guy from the other
side crept up on him and killed him. The guy who killed him got his later, purportedly dying a painful horrible death. (I’ll
spare you the details, but his death made Mel Gibson’s disemboweling death in
Braveheart
look like euthanasia.) Ancient Irish people weren’t big on torture. They were big on
describing
torture. So the guy who killed Brian
Boru (traditionally named Brodar) probably just got beheaded or something semihumane. For the Irish, unlike a lot of ancient
people, executions were not long, drawn out, “Let’s bring lunch!” affairs. For the most part, they executed quickly, by ancient
standards.

Ireland has had a very violent past. It deserves a peaceful future and, as I write this, that may finally be the reality.
An Irish peace has to be the best peace in the world. It’s been a long time.

NINE

What Are You
Doing for Potatoes?

During the potato famine, I was told, when someone asked you where in Ireland you were from, and you answered, “County Mayo,”
the person would respond, automatically, “God Bless You.” (“It was like sneezing,” a dark-humored Mayo man in his seventies
told me one night.)

Mayo is the poorest county in Ireland, which, until recently, was pretty damn poor. The unluckiest people in Irish history
wound up owning land in Mayo, which supposedly was too rocky and irregular for any major farming. The place seems like one
vast contradiction: Its amazing beauty has been the stage for a history of appalling suffering.

“This is the only place that ever suffered because of one miserable tuber,” my landlady told me right before we walked out
to our car near the beginning of our trip. That thought stayed with me for the rest of our stay in Ireland. I spent a lot
of time in Ireland contemplating potatoes. They’re hard to ignore. They were at the table in some form for every meal we ate.

Since we were in County Mayo, not that far from the “Mom” area of part two of our journey, we decided to travel north back
to the ocean, and then sort of loop around to the “part two” portion of our trip. We were still meandering:
The purposeful section of our journey—the search for my mom and dad—could wait a few days. We didn’t know exactly what we
were after, but we were certainly up for it. The Punta looked ready. Nothing had fallen off yet, as far as I could tell.

In an hour or two, we could see the ocean. The clouds momentarily parted. The radio sounded exactly like the radio we had
left back home in America: the top forty. But no Kasey Kasem. Nevertheless, it sounded pretty good. We were driving along
in Ireland with the windows down listening to that New Radicals song (the one where they keep saying, “You got the music in
you”), and we were enjoying it. Ireland! A long-distance dedication for you, Eriu.

We cruised along the northern shore of Clew Bay. The beaches looked pretty good, so we stopped and decided to sample the waters.

Paulette is from Miami. She considers eighty degrees a good water temperature. I consider her a sissy with respect to water
temperature. I grew up with the icy waters of the Jersey shore. I have been known to brave water that dipped into the frigid
sixties. I’m a workin’-class cool-rockin’ daddy.

We parked the car and headed out for our Celtic Surfin’ Safari.

We had bathing suits with us, but we both considered it premature to change into them. First we would “test the waters.”

The Irish beach wasn’t much like the Jersey shore. There was no boardwalk, no cheese fries, and there were no “I’m With Stupid”
T-shirts. There was no smell of frying dough. There were no cheese steaks. Still, it was a beach. When you walked on it, there
was the satisfying feeling of the sand between your toes. It was July. Far off in the distance I thought I could hear Sinatra’s
“Summer Wind” wafting gently through the air.

July and we’re at the other end of the ocean. This is what my parents were looking at many years ago.

I looked off to the distant horizon. Somewhere out there people were eating cheese steaks and riding the tilt-a-whirl. Somewhere
out there was Bruce Springsteen.

I reached the water and took a tentative step.

My God.

I looked at Paulette.

It looked as if she was thinking, “My God.”

We took a step back, but a tiny wave came in and covered our calves with water as cold as the gin in Sinatra’s martini. Another
wave came in and we were knee-deep in absolutely numbingly cold water. For a second, I wanted to show Paulette that I was
an extremely tough-minded man who is not easily affected by outside stimuli. Then I went “Ahh!” in a high-pitched voice and
threw my hands up and ran away from the water.

I was happy to see that Paulette did something similar. Wusses love company.

We ran back with quick short steps and lapsed into self-comforting arms-around-our-own-backs poses and stood there hopping
quickly up and down. Paulette was jumping up and down, I believe, more than I was. Good, I thought.

“Shit! This is cold!” I said, unnecessarily.

“No shit,” she said.

We decided to walk along the beach. It was quite beautiful and, after a mile or two, feeling returned to our calves, ankles,
and feet.

We drove along, with the “Authentic Irish” station on. We stopped for a light lunch and my mind returned, as it must in Ireland
at mealtime, to the potato.

The joke is, of course, “What’s the thinnest book in the world?” The answer is, “Irish Cooking.” “Italian War Heroes.” “Great
British Heavyweight Boxers” (until recently, anyway).

This is not really fair. We ate a wide variety of things in Ireland,
and most were very good. Ireland isn’t the South of France, but it’s not the home of boiled meat either.

In Dublin there are a dozen world-class restaurants, but there are a surprising number of excellent places all over the Irish
countryside. We ate great prawns outside Limerick and some fine lamb in Milltown Malbay. We had turbot in Mayo and memorable
poached turkey near Newcastle. And, of course, multiple Irish breakfasts almost everywhere.

There is one item, however, that is on every Irish menu. Potatoes are served regularly with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We saw boxty (grilled, pancakelike potatoes), champ (mashed with scallions), potato broth (peelings in sauce), potato and
celery root puree (I can live without this one), Wicklow Pancakes (onions, potatoes, eggs, seared in olive oil), and Michaelmas
salad (beets, scallions, dill, chopped eggs, boiled potatoes).

Paulette ate a lot of these (she passed on celery root puree). I watched her.

I have always hated potatoes. I have not eaten a potato in at least twenty years. The mere sight of a plate of mashed potatoes
is often enough to ruin my day. Watching someone else eat mashed potatoes produces, in me, a deep feeling of revulsion. If
I watch a television show on which people are eating potatoes, it makes me a little ill, even though I am not in the presence
of actual potatoes.

I am a walking illustration of the efficacy of B. F. Skinner’s ideas. Bernard Gannon and Anne Forde conditioned me to hate
potatoes. My parents, being from Ireland, were pretty much addicted to potatoes. We would have mashed potatoes at every dinner.
We would also have them for lunch. We would also have hash brown potatoes for breakfast. For a snack, there were always potatoes.
My mom and dad would munch on a slice of potato while watching television or reading. Sometimes, when we went over someone
else’s house for a meal, my parents would look at the table with profound disappointment if the table happened to be lacking
the magic
ingredient. They would eat, but they would not be happy. In the car on the way home they would mention the lack of potatoes.

My mom: That was nice.

My dad: But why didn’t they have potatoes?

When I had my own place I had dinner with my mom and dad. My dad looked around the table.

“What are you doing for potatoes?” he asked.

I thought,
Nothing! Potatoes aren’t doing anything for me!
But I chickened out.

So, when I got the chance, I cut off the potato flow. No more potatoes. Never. Ever.

Once in a while people would ask me about it. I didn’t know what to say, so I developed a stock response, a standard reply:
In the late sixties, I remember seeing Johnny Cash say that he was going to wear black clothing until we got out of Vietnam.
That sounded good to me. So, for a while, I said, “I am not going to eat potatoes until we get out of this senseless ‘police
action’ in Vietnam.”

We left, but Cash kept wearing black. I kept not eating potatoes. Then, when I read a little about Irish history, I thought
I knew what to say.

“I will eat no potatoes because of the major tragedy that England caused involving Ireland in the nineteenth century,” or
something like that.

Then, when I got a little older, and read a little more about the horror of the famine, I felt really stupid that I ever said
that. How could I trivialize something like that? So I stopped saying that.

But I still don’t eat potatoes. I just don’t like them and, at least in this lifetime, I never will. Potatoes in general are
a pretty trivial subject. You’ve never seen “Potatoes” as a category on
Jeopardy
. You don’t see many divorce cases where potatoes were involved. But in Ireland “potato” is a loaded word. “Potato” is to
Irish people something like what “watermelon” is to black people. The mere mention of the word
“potato” evokes in the Irish mind a complex hierarchy of emotions. At their simplest, “potatoes” are a meal. But the word
“potato” also evokes something truly horrible and frightening, and it’s something that will never go completely away from
the Irish consciousness.

If you spend any time in Ireland you will inevitably hear about England’s cruelty during the potato famine: That is a given.
It doesn’t matter if you stay in Dublin or roam around the countryside: Stay in Ireland for a few days and someone will mention
it in your presence. Since the potato famine was 155 years ago, you would think it would become a seldom-mentioned subject,
something for history class, something like (except for the PBS Ken Burns week) the American Civil War. If my stay there is
typical, this is emphatically not the case in Ireland. In Ireland, the potato famine might have happened last year. Outside
the universities, it’s not usually discussed in any depth, but it’s mentioned a lot.