Turn Around Bright Eyes (11 page)

That’s what being an adult is like, at least in the version of it that my dad passed on to me. The work of fatherhood must be like that, too—when he was the age I am now, I was already a sullen college student, and I can barely imagine the aggravation of having to live with a nineteen-year-old version of me, who was just like me now, except more so. That nineteen-year-old boy and I have our differences, but we both like to focus on one task, do it all day, do it to death, do it clean, and see it through to completion before moving on to the next task. It’s constantly a challenge to leave today’s work undone for tomorrow. We think adulthood would be simpler and more efficient if the world had the sense to conform to our rules.

My dad has done all sorts of tasks for me that I will never live long enough to find out about, thing I’ll never notice, much less thank him for. These are the tasks that do not have heroic completions or satisfactory results or purple ribbons. These are adult tasks that call for patience and diligence. These things seem to come so naturally to my dad; he always seems amused at the way others of us—like his son—have to keep learning them.

11:19 p.m.:

“Bold Thady Quill” is an old Irish drinking song about the adventures of a hell-raising boyo who carouses and blackguards and chases women and fights and barely staggers into the next verse. “For rambling, for roving! For football and courting! For drinking black porter as fast as you fill! In all your days roving, you’ll find none so jovial, as our Muskerry sportsman, the Bold Thady Quill!”

This song reminds me of my mom, because it’s the song I sing for her on special occasions. I sing it on the phone and in person, on birthdays, wedding anniversaries, any time we’re together and the hour gets festive. When it’s Thanksgiving and the fire is lit and the stingers are poured, it’s only a matter of time before my mom declares, “Let’s have a sing-song,” and we all start singing the old Irish songs. Over the course of any holiday weekend, I will sing “Bold Thady Quill” for my mom until everyone’s sick of it.

I didn’t realize how much my mom loved this song until one day years ago when we were visiting cousins in Ireland. On the road west out of County Cork, the car broke down, so we stood waiting for the tow truck by the banks of the River Lee. I casually sang a few lines from this song—“the great hurling match between Cork and Tipperary, / ’Twas played in the park on the banks of the Lee”—and my mom recognized the tune. So I sang it until the tow truck came, and if you’ve ever waited for an Irishman to show up, you know that gave us plenty of time to get though all the verses. My mom and I were each surprised to discover how much the other one liked the song. I’ve been singing it for her ever since.

We know this song from an old Clancy Brothers record that her mother had, called
Come Fill Your Glass with Us: Irish Songs of Drinking and Blackguarding
. The liner notes claimed Thady Quill was a real-life athlete from Cork, still alive at the time the record came out, a star in the Irish sport of hurling. (Ever watch a pack of grown men attack each other with clubs for thirty seconds? That’s what a hurling match looks like.) But I really know nothing about Thady Quill, or whether any of his exploits in this song ever happened. For me, he’s just the guy in this song, and I feel like I’ve come to know him, because he’s part of my duties as a son. I take my mother’s car to Jiffy Lube, I go through her fridge and throw out all the expired salad dressing, and I sing her “Bold Thady Quill.” I always will.

I’M ALWAYS SINGING FOR MY
mom, in a way. She only has the one son, so she doesn’t have the luxury of having both a loud son and a quiet son. I started out quiet, but I’ve learned to get louder for her. For my last birthday, when Ally and I were heading out to Sing Sing for karaoke, she asked me to sing an Elvis song for her. (I did “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”) My mom likes her children loud; she made us this way. So I feel close to her when I sing. I’m always trying to impress her. Singing is just one of the ways.

She’s the most passionate person I have ever encountered in my life, and when she has something important to say, she doesn’t beat around the bush. One day, right after I moved to Virginia, she called me up. I had just started my graduate studies in the English department. I was brimming with plans and ambitions. She listened to me rave for a few minutes about everything I had gone there to achieve.

“You know, you have impressed me,” she said. “You have impressed me, permanently. Your father and I are both very pleased with you. You don’t have to do anything else the rest of your life to impress me.”

Why did she say that? I don’t know. I’ve never asked her. I’m not as good as she is with a blunt question like that. But I wonder all the time. How did she know to say that? Did she realize she had just said a few words that I would remember for the rest of my life? For that matter, did
I
realize? How could I? I was only twenty-three. How could I begin to have any idea how many of my friends would live their whole lives in hopes of hearing their mother say something like that?

I mean, I already knew I impressed my mom. She’s not shy. She had loved me fiercely my whole life and she never let me (or anyone else in earshot) forget it. So I knew. But hearing it out loud is different. And I will never suffer those particular fears and doubts. I can go right on trying to impress my mom, because I’m never worried about whether it will work. I always know, because she came right out and said so.

Again, it’s one of those moments that probably can’t be fully understood by those of us who aren’t parents. What did she think after she said that? Did she understand she had just changed my life? Did she know it was a big deal? In her case, I absolutely think she did. My mom isn’t shy about saying things, when they need saying. But she knew this was something she wanted to say. Whatever happens the rest of my life, I will never
not
hear these words.

Once in my teen years, in the classic style of any ostentatious and insufferable adolescent seeker, I gave my mom a copy of the
Tao Te Ching
for her birthday. She opened to a random page and read aloud, from chapter 13: “Accept being unimportant.” Then she closed the book, handed it back to me with a smile, and said, “See, I could
never
accept being unimportant.”

She never is. She has always been involved and decisive. She raised me to distrust limp handshakes. One of the things she imprinted on me was flinching when people say “myself” as a euphemism for “me.” The way my mom sees it, if you’re talking about yourself, saying you want something, saying you don’t like something, making a demand—go ahead and say “me.” It saves time. My mom worked all her life as a teacher in the Boston public schools—she values direct communication, and she’s good at it.

Mom takes pride in telling people, “I am a shaped-up mother.” When she was training student teachers, she would tell the class to speak their minds when they had any questions or complaints. “Don’t be shy,” she says. “I have three daughters. They shape me up. So tell me what you think straight to my face. I’m used to it.”

Me, I feel more adept at writing words than saying them out loud. I guess part of the reason I love singing words is that it’s less scary than speaking them. These Irish songs will always be important to me because they’re the songs I sing for her.

OUR FAMILY, LIKE ANY IRISH
family, knows a lot of these songs. My sisters and I grew up hearing them on the Irish Hit Parade on WROL every weekend. Whether it’s rebel songs or drinking songs, there’s usually a plot, a girl, and a few killings. There are funny songs, like “The Wild Rover,” that warn about the evils of dissolute living, although you have to get a pint or two into dissolute living to sing them. There are also the long, slow songs where people get shot or hanged or deported or haunted by the ghosts of Spancil Hill.

For me, these songs are mixed up with family memories, and as my sisters and I bring new people into the family, it means we bring these people into the songs. The first time I took Ally to Glenbeigh, my grandmother’s old village in County Kerry, we sat in the pub as the guitarist sitting by the fireplace sang about wars and rebellions and ghosts. He did the latter-day classic “The Green Fields of France,” a song that goes on for about a month. The chorus repeats the question: “Did they beat the drum slowly? Did they play the pipe lowly? Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?” After seven or eight verses, Ally whispered to me: “Have they lowered him down yet?”

Not quite yet. These songs go on and on, just like we do. Some of my earliest memories are visiting Ireland as a little kid, sitting around the pub watching my parents and aunts and uncles and cousins singing. I heard these songs with my grandparents. My dad’s grandfather, the fifth John O’Brien in a row born in South Boston, used to play them on the mandolin. On fancy occasions, you’d hear them played on accordion by local legend Joe Joyce the People’s Choice. I got to meet Joe Joyce one night in 1988, during a long night of drinking with my dad, shortly before he played my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party. He was surprisingly candid about his life’s work. “You get tired of some of these old songs,” he told me. “You know, ‘Danny Boy.’ But you keep singing them.”

When my family’s together, everybody takes a turn singing—everybody has their party piece to trot out. I go for the fast ones; my brother-in-law John prefers ballads with high body counts. My toddler nieces sing “Call Me Maybe” or selections from
Annie
. (Still topping the little-girl charts after all these years, right? Amazing.) The set list might vary, but there are some songs you
have
to sing, and “Bold Thady Quill” became mine. It’s an essential part of my life as a son. You better watch what you sing, if you don’t want to sing it for the rest of your life.

When my grandparents came to America in 1924, they brought nothing with them except the songs. My grandmother, Bridie Courtney from County Kerry, hoped that she’d get a job, make some money, go back home, but there was really nothing to go back to. My grandfather, David Twomey from Cork, swore he’d never return, and never did. He hated every minute of being a farmer; when I was a little kid, I asked him if he ever missed the farm, and he said, “My boy, I was so glad to be off it, I didn’t know I was working.” They came to America and got good jobs, she as a maid, he as a brake inspector on the New Haven Railroad; then after working his fifty years there, he became a security guard at a department store. They met soon after they arrived in Boston, at a Thanksgiving dance, and in classic Celt fashion married nine years later. By the time I was born, they’d both been living in America for forty years, but they both spoke with their native brogues, and they both loved all the old songs, a connection to the old country, “the other side,” as they called it, and although they had vastly different memories of Ireland, they never thought of letting go of the songs.

My grandmother liked “Bold Thady Quill”; my grandfather preferred dance songs, rebel songs, waltzes. At that ninetieth birthday party, he took the mike to sing “Martha, the Flower of Sweet Strabane.” When I was living with my grandfather, the year he turned ninety, I tried to turn him on to some of the rock bands I liked. The only one he could stand was the Smiths. During that time he told me many stories of the passage to America, two weeks on a boat, which is usually supposed to be a historically dreadful ordeal, except he said it was the happiest two weeks of his life up to that point. He’d never danced so much in his life. He had to wait until he was twenty-four to get out, which was extremely late, working his brother’s farm and watching the Cunard ships sail out of Queenstown Harbor every day. When his brother got married, he got his sister-in-law’s dowry as his share of the inheritance. He spent it on his ticket to America and stayed on the deck for two weeks listening to the musicians play their way to the other side.

As long as I’ve been listening to rock and roll, I’ve been hearing that Celtic touch everywhere from the Beatles to the Clash to Bowie. I love Bono’s tribute to Bowie: “Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy in space—with an Irish mother.” Dylan was an honorary Celt—he loved posing as Irish the way James Joyce loved posing as Jewish—but it wasn’t until he wrote his
Chronicles
that I found out that the Clancy Brothers changed his life, as he copped their outlaw ballads and rebel songs.

All four of the Smiths were sons of the peat, which might explain why my grandfather liked “Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.” Johnny Marr once said the sadness in his guitar came from the songs he heard in his neighborhood growing up. “I was sad when I was a little kid because the area where I grew up was very heavy. A young Irish community. A lot of drinking, a lot of music and a lot of melancholy in the music, which I was really drawn to. These really melodic Irish ballads, like ‘Black Velvet Band,’ which I used to love.” Note: “Black Velvet Band” is one with a relatively upbeat ending, where the hero gets sentenced to seven years’ hard labor.

One of the things I have learned from Irish music is that these songs are where we express our tempestuous side, no matter how strictly we might try to police our emotions in our own lives. We live out the lives in these songs—killing, boozing, carousing, weeping—that we fastidiously avoid when we’re not singing them. With an Irish song, you do not wonder whether it’s a sad song or not. You can usually tell from the opening notes how sad it’s going to be. In the same way, you can tell the festive songs are going to be
extremely
festive. As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.

That’s where we get the tradition of the Irish wake. When somebody dies, my Aunt Eileen in Dublin asks, “Did they put him down well?” In other words, did they sing and tell stories? If the mourners failed in this duty, she’ll say, “Christ, they rushed him in and out of the church before he was cold.”

We do not, as a rule, choke up. We let it rip. If we’re going that way at all, we may as well go all the way. As the old song says, let’s not have a sniffle, let’s have a bloody good cry. (And always remember the longer you live, the deader you bloody well die.) Sometimes in an Irish pub I might try to sneak out after just a couple of pints (“not the full rosary—just a few Hail Marys”), and one of my cousins will clap me on the back and say, “Ah, it’s as well to hang for a sheep as for a lamb,” which is his or her way of saying, “You’re not going anywhere.” In these songs, at least, we approach our emotions with the same full-commitment approach we bring to a night down the pub. If you’re going to hang anyway, hang for a nice big sheep. One night in Glenbeigh, long after closing time, I told my cousin Kevin to come stay at the guesthouse, rather than stumble back over the hill back home to Drom. He demurred. “Sooner or later, I will have to face an irate female. And I’d rather do it while I’m still drunk.”