I think I like old Irish people best of all

By old I really just mean those who lived most of their lives before the Celtic Tiger, the Motorway system and shopping centers.  I have been spending about half of my social time with the over 55 set in Maynooth and I like it.  I know some from daily Mass, some from my library book club, and some more from the class I've been co-teaching with my friend Niemh.  These folks are interesting and completely different from their grandchildren.

For that reason and just because I want to learn more, I've been reading both Irish history books - the easiest ones to digest, and memoirs and the odd novel written by an Irish writer.  For one thing, after living here for a bit, they all make more sense than they might have had I read them in Portland.  Also I think they are giving me a sad look at what may be gone from Irish society.

This country used to be much bigger for one thing.  It took 4 hours to get from Maynooth (where we live now) to Sligo before the Motorway system.  Now it takes just 2 hours or so. When people here gape at us for the crazy/brave move we've made from the west side of the U.S. to Ireland their shock is in no small part fueled by the sense that moving just to the other side of Ireland is really far away.  And in some ways it still is.  The accents are different, the landscape is different, and if you go all the way up to the North, everything is different.  The wounds are still very fresh and although it doesn't feel dangerous to be in Belfast, you can still feel the sense that it would be easy to offend someone.  By being Catholic, by being from the Republic of Ireland, by not understanding well enough how much pain surrounds the Troubles.  I guess that understanding how little you know is the first step to not offending.  So, I'm at least on my way.  Living here essentially makes me wish that I could just be Irish so that I would get everything.

Last thought, that actually was the reason I sat down to do this posting in the first place, is a passage from the memoir I'm reading at the moment called "Me and Mine" by Anna May Managan.  It refers to the way that cancer - both ovarian and breast - felled the author's aunts and her mother one by one over the course of a frighteningly short span of years.  It just was so true and so sad I had to share it.  Mostly for my siblings.

"Katsie was the next to take ill.  'It's the change', was Mum's confident diagnosis of her sister's symptoms: forgetfulness, weight loss, and the disappearance of her smile.  She spent her days hair awry, make-up and nail-varnish free, out on the balcony of her council flat, brooding and smoking.  Hauled to the doctor by my mum, when he asked what the problem was, Katsie replied that her body just wasn't working properly any more.  'Show him', my mum ordered, and Katsie demonstrated by trying to walk across his consulting-room floor in a straight line but travelling sideways.  She was swiftly diagnosed with a secondary cancer in her brain; the primary was in her breast and she died a couple of months later. "