Tag Archives: rituals

Out of practice

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The closer we got to the church, the further away from the right one we were going. A solitary car drew up behind us. A lone driver looked over quizzically before emerging to unlock the gate. At ten past one, I knew this wasn’t a place where being late is fashionable for anyone; be it one of the spectators, or either one of those taking up vows in full view of them. A rolled-down windowed query and ten-point turn later, we were headed in the right direction.

I should’ve read the invitation properly but took the location of her birthplace for granted. The rest of it, I studied with a smile after it took a moment to register her name. Ah. Of course it would arrive late. She was still living life by the seat of her pants. There they were pictured, he with his hands in his pockets, she beaming out of over-sized glasses, hand on hip, the other looped through his arm. Above their heads, individual letters erected across the cinema board with the aid of a ladder spelled out the date of their wedding. No wonder he couldn’t contain his grin.

It went up on the fridge with the other reminders as I immediately composed a regret in my head. Her face now covered by a green and black magnet revealing a blotchy Che Guevara to the trained eye.

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If imperfect

A heave of relief broke five miles further up the road. The vintage bus took up half the street halving the number of lanes available. This would only matter when the children were flushed from school at 3pm. By then, our hosts had traded promises and we pocketed the birdseed not thrown on them due to hostile weather that forced everyone to run in an undignified manner onto the bus for the stone’s throw journey to the pub for chicken and chips and elbow room only.

By the time the empty paper cones were collected and the bar counter strewn with half-eaten cup-cakes, I had congratulated the bride eleven times, and her cousin double that on the birth of her baby boy following a rocky road to getting her fertility on side. I caught myself almost doing it again and blushed with embarrassment. There was even less customary repartee on offer from my companion. She had gone on charm strike for the afternoon, resolute in her concern that we had deserted the sweet cart prematurely. We circulated the room; I struggling to remember the names of half-colleagues I avoided in a bygone era, she picking her nose and checking out her reflection wherever there was a chance of catching it. We made it to the car intact where I threw my eyes up at my reflection in the rear-view, my rosey cheeks burning a hole in my relief.

A week later on the station forecourt, I studied the same mirror hoping to catch sight of someone half approachable to help re-start the damn car. The battery had also expired along with my energy. My companion lay asleep in the back, her Grandmother texted to check the estimated time of arrival. My response was to recline with my nose in the problem page while thinking over the next move in mine. A woman wrote of her husband’s porn addiction. With a new-born baby, she feared for their future now he had started to repulse her with his relentless habit. Not for the first time I wondered what Patricia Redlich would say. She was one of the few voices of perceptiveness and wisdom ever to adorn the pages of the Sunday Independent. Agony Aunt too lowly a title for the woman whose finger deftly wagged folk towards the right direction. This usually commenced with an invitation to correspondents to square up to themselves.

What would she make of a 40-something cursing the need to pull-up on the hillside like she was walking naked through her hometown? The man with the jeep cheerfully latched on the jump-leads, warning of the need to park it so in preparation for jump-starting the next day when the garages re-opened. With an appreciative beep of the horn, we pulled out and parked up in front of my folks’. Conveniently, they bicker away their days at very top of a hill. The rain runs down it at enough speed to hypnotise the occupant of the rocking chair gazing out the corner window. As a main arterial route to town, the traffic rarely abates, and even then cars and lorries will try to put up a good fight against snow and ice. Few make it undefeated.

The cursing was vindicated by the beep of the phone. “Is that your car? Are you home? Let’s meet up!” I half-smiled at her thoughtfulness, then deleted the message as I composed an excuse in my head. Two more messages from other spontaneous visitors followed. We couldn’t engineer this if we tried.

The Cork reg in the car park confirmed we were late. Second-hand batteries aren’t so easy to come by. My companion hesitantly stepped away to join the other two on the slides while I overpowered their mother’s cash with my card to pay for the coffees.

Two hours later I waved them off in the rear-view before they turned the other way; imploring my backseat companion to agree with me on how good it was as I was struck by a fleeting thought. I didn’t really take in the other parents dotted and hunkered about the place, and was unable to recall seeing any sitting on their own hiding behind a Sunday supplement. So this is what it’s like.

School around the corner

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What a difference a week makes; book-ended as it was by songs that evoke emotions so heavy they don’t bear hearing more than once in a year. O Holy Night cracks its whip on the heart, startling it to bolt upright and take off around the track of emotion. Past memories, some magical, others painful; disturbing the earth surrounding dormant feelings as it gallops onward through the bend of hopeful anticipation before hitting the straight. Then chasing Now along the final furlong to cross the line in a perfect photo-finish. A week later Auld Lang Syne will not be able resist pulling at the stray thread dangling from the soul; it won’t be satisfied until it unravels it completely before abandoning it in an untidy heap for its owner to disentangle and roll back up.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the Eve of Christmas and loathed that of New Year with equal measure. Nothing new or unique in that, says you. This doesn’t go unnoticed. All the New Year greetings are filed long before the credits roll on the spent one. Few, it seems, are alone in longing to keep the head down and let it wash over them. Possibly in a similar haze of miniature snack denial that sees the desperate diner through a sustained period with their considered size. Honey, you shrunk the hot dogs. It’s OK, Dear, there’s another 45 of them in the oven. The relief in the room is palpable.

Under pressure to respond, I get most of my replies texted by 10pm. It used to be that no-one could be arsed going out on New Year’s Eve anymore. In recent years, I mistook the flurry of early evening messages for a preventative measure against an echo of Millennium hysteria that caused ordinarily laid-back folk to fear telecommunication failure at midnight. Now I know it’s a cure against other people phoning them to detonate the ring tone equivalent of Auld Lang Syne, and the risk of letting the wrong person in.

Unlike Christmas Eve, with its camaraderie, the promise of impending bonhomie and threat of reciprocated love among one’s own tribe, NYE sits in judgement in the confessional box of life, waiting for you to enter alone to square up to yourself. Bless me New Year’s Eve, for I have sinned. It has been one year since my last confession and here are my sins…

Like the death-knell signalling the near-end of school holidays, you know the party is coming to an end. The determination to ring the best out of the remaining days is your two fingered salute to the army of Mondays advancing.

I phone the one friend I can speak to on a night like this. Throwing scorn on the notion of resolution, we resolve to go gentler on ourselves and to meet soon. I ask her what she’s doing. She is loath to write a list but is in the middle of compiling two: one with the things from the past year she wishes to let go; the other with wishes for the coming year. Both will go up in flames in her tiny hearth in the hope that the former will be extinguished, and the latter just put out there. To the universe. She read about it somewhere. I hope the right list attaches itself to the stars, I say. She forgives my outburst of cheese and we say our goodbyes.

An hour later, safely ensconced in our mini-snack stupor, we risk crossing the threshold of midnight with a quick flick to Jools striking up the band. Ten..nine..eight..

Like the classic seasonal ending to a dodgy soap where the credits roll over the scene, my mind’s eye involuntarily pans those chief characters of my life in tonight’s episode. I see my mate with her knees tucked under her chin watching the flames go up; my parents dragging their grandchildren to their feet; my brother waiting to pick up a fare; my State-side friend with a few hours to go; another kicking back in the sun by way of good riddance; and even the odd blogger whose faces I wouldn’t recognise but who I’ve become immensely fond of nonetheless. The powerful round-ups of their year reverberate.

Then the morning comes. Just like that the storm is over. Souls are re-wound with hopeful determination into slightly different shapes than before. And a new year of fleeting speckled pieces of happiness beckons. We’ll do alright.

Many occasionally happy returns

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Hit by the whiff of a half-cooked feast as I bound through the back door on the eve of it.

Back from childhood border crossings with my Da to pick a last minute gift for my Ma in exotic High St. shops; in a city without a high street. Stopping off for chips doused in silence in a Strand Road cafe before navigating hostile torch-lit interrogations on the way back through.

“Drivers license please, Sir”

“Any goods to declare?”

Back from the yearly sore arse cultivated from sitting on bottles of Black Tower and Blue Nun. The height of sophistication for the discerning diner’s table. A table always cleared before dessert and the occasional arm-wrestling tournament. We lived in a developing county; the concentration distracted us from the central heating my Dad was is fond of rationing.

Back after swearing blind I’d never go back. From the Dublin bus after the first semester on the brink of dropping out. Dropping down for a drink to the pub to re-unite with old classmates to commandeer our corner of it. Spotting yer man out of the corner of my eye; the later lighting-up together as good as being beckoned towards your coat.

Back in the small hours and being woken up not long after by Bart Simpson ordering me to “Get up and get outta bed”; my Mother pissing herself laughing at the effect her present of a talking alarm clock was having. Inadvertently getting her back by accidentally leaving the sacred sprouts I’d been sent out for behind in the pub.

The Bart Simpson Alarm Clock. Hilarious.

Back all grown up but reverting to our bickering ways in the year 19…20..oh take your pick. Back to slammed doors and exploited windows of opportunity our parents threatened to put us out for even if we were in our incremental decades. Maintaining a ceasefire for the duration of Top of the Pops before scrambling for the remote to prevent Mrs. Windsor from addressing the room.

Back-to-back films and phone-calls from far away relatives my parents hoped each other would answer. Reading back over wish lists of goals composed for the year ahead with cross-legged concentration alongside my best mate in my bedroom. Listing the qualities of our respective future partners through wild guesses of the other. Paring those down to a bare-boned sex preference by the age of 30.

Back to the website booking page after being struck by a gnawing feeling as I smiled my way down Waterloo en route to the airport. The airport I had mistakenly booked to fly into instead of out from. Back eventually with relief to a livelier looking tree replacing the vague question mark the old single set of lights used to aptly resemble.

Putting back cards my parents gave one another on the mantelpiece after reading. Hand-writing getting smaller, much like their frames. Closing over another card written to a Wife, unable to reconcile herself to her new title.

Back for fewer days with each passing year. Escaping the resurrection of barren shelves and that unbearably empty nest feeling pervading the house on the day the decorations come down. Avoiding total recall of all those quiet tears she struggled to hide after waving her boys back to college with a foiled turkey leg brandished from each bag. Reminding her to hang in till January 6th and the night we’ll have. On Women’s Christmas. Little Christmas. Nollaig na mban. When she and I would traditionally leave the remaining fir to fend for themselves and trot out for dinner in smug satisfaction.

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Prompted by the Christmas Memories linky posted by the lovely Naomi at Science Wows Blog. I’m sure she’d welcome your contribution! Click here..

Most of the time

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I don’t believe in an interventionist God. That’s another thing I have in common with Nick Cave along with the appearance of a receding hairline. (Nice one, nature.) Nor do I believe in an omnipotent creator to whom we owe everything and who watches over everything; to whom we owe a duty of worship and who will reward us with eternal life in paradise, with or without virgins, or a deathtime’s supply of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Consequently, I don’t believe in any of the organised religions that espouse that kind of deity. I can tell you what I don’t believe in more than what I do. I’m of no fixed faith. Except in humanity. Most of the time.

Still, that won’t ever stop me from occasionally claiming squatters rights in the back pew of an empty church seeking sanctuary from the rotation crop of head woes. Any branch of The Bank of God will do. But always the left-hand side. Force of habit from many a day-dreaming hour spent there in the company of other children in receipt of stern looks from arched browed parents threatening us with a clip round the ear if we didn’t sit up right.

I made it to fourteen before graduating to free-will. The age when being within a two mile radius of my parents became untenable due to the threat it posed to my teenage credentials. Credentials carefully crafted through back-combing, sulking and failure to cooperate with authority. I’d already lost patience with the Virgin Mary for not respecting my demands to appear to me. Or at least give me a sneaky wink from any one of the numerous ornate marble homages to her adorning the place. I gave her enough chances by taking her on in lengthy staring competitions. She always won, all the while appearing pre-occupied. Mary checking her phone for texts from Joseph. Mary looking slightly hungover. Mary taking yet another selfie etc.

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“I really shouldn’t have had that tequila”

It’s impossible to conceive of those days now. Moving statues making headlines, Corpus Christi processions snaking through the streets, the Child of Prague going on tour round the houses for a few rosary gigs. And yet, churches remain the only indoor incubator of a rare quality of stillness. One dense with generations of special intentions. Most of the time, churches don’t register on my radar, but once in a while I get swept in to one by the draw of the candlelight and the need to flee my own muddle-headedness.

So conditioned am I, my hand almost reaches out involuntarily towards the water font. The coin lands on a bed of others. I straighten the wick on a candle and light it off another. Another born of hope or gratitude. Who knows. The flame gathers steam and elbows its way into the row with confidence, chattering back and forth to its neighbours.

Lighting candles is no substitute for thinking well of those you love. But chances are, the flame outlasts the time between slipping back out onto the street and a return to other things that occupy the mind for most of the time.

Own goal

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It’s that time of year again. The annual pilgrimage to the sold-out Springsteen shows. Relax. It’s just the sun giving me jip and having me mix up my religious rituals as the summers fade into one another. I mean graveyard mass, of course. Then there’s the monster raving Ulsterman cracking open the apoplexy, as is tradition. Or Joe Brolly, for short. Bruce and Joe. Imagine them trading birth places, if you will. Joey and Wee Brucie.

Not a porch door for any of Brucie’s average-looking women to slam. Maybe a broken lift to curse, or the person who was born in a hospital with swinging doors who left one wide open. Meanwhile, Joey’s giving it Red Sox knocking himself out commentating on the baseball league with Patty Spillane. Awesome.

There’s really not a whole lot that separates these two men from their traded places in terms of the people that inspire and drive them. It’s just that Jersey skylines go better with the universal theme of disenchantment and broken blue collar dreams than Tesco car-parks and doughnut tracks from twin-cams. Baseball is the unifying game that helps them forget about life for a while. Sort of like The GAA. Or the Grab All Association. Or the what’s-the-point and the anachronistic eye-rolls scornfully mocking the parochial game. Or its failure to compare with the beautiful game. Delete as you see appropriate.

It’s that time of year again. When the city/rural divisions rear their jerseys online, and the self-regarding antipathy breaks out on messageboards like a prickly heat rash. I’m no devotee, or apologist for The GAA. No sport has claimed to be the panacea for all societal ills, except maybe democracy. But it takes a certain blinkered snobbery to wilfully ignore the unifying power the GAA has in carrying communities through good and bad.

One of the more heartening developments in recent years has been the emergence of rugby as a more reachable sport for all the nation. Men and women getting stuck in on the great debate throughout the country (“O’Gara’s better looking” “No BO’D is”).

Plenty of sporting enthusiasts love both, some play both. Even so, it’s past time the minority of whingers paused the eyeroll and threw out the stale sweat smelling questions on the point of it all. Go listen to Badlands. It’s about living in Leitrim. Except it’s not, but it is. And Carlow. And Donegal. And Armagh. And Louth. And Tipperary. And even Dublin. Where the game breathes energy into connections between folk, and helps them forget about life for a while.

Rock me Daddy-O

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It’s two years to the month since I harassed your Dad for song ideas for your naming ceremony. It was far from naming ceremonies we were reared. Every generation has the responsibility of trying to make the best of what they’re about. For my folks it was original sin and prawn cocktail. More power to them. Or less, as was the case.

In truth, it was like the wedding ceremony we never had. Your Granny’s house was treated to the same epic spruce-up it received during the last bachelor days of all her boys. I volunteered your Auntie’s fine singing voice. Every tome and tune were pored over. Noses were flung skyward at the mention of a sausage roll. And I sighed heavily every time I looked at the family portrait above the TV in which I am channelling some groovy fairway fashion with my classic diamond v-neck golfer’s jumper replete with polo-neck.

Your Dad shrugged off his own suggestion at the speed his ears could hear it. “Ah, she won’t know it, and it probably wouldn’t fit. Nevermind.”

You don’t know this about your Dad yet, but that’d be typical of the man. Never one to strenuously impose his will or wishes on others, except when demanding someone pass him the hammer so he can drive the nails in when hanging himself on the Cross. Sorry, did you think I was using you to make passive aggressive comments? I actually find his martyring quite endearing. In a I’ll-see-your-persecution-complex-and-raise-it type way. Why did you think I married him? To let him win.

A few other things you don’t know yet:

When leaving the hospital to take you home, he pressed play on the car stereo and Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely ricocheted off our hearts. The fucker.

Every payday he squirrels away savings into a Credit Union account he opened for you later that week. It’s a low point for responsibility when your own toddler has more savings than you. Any chance of a lo….etc.

That funny voice that cracks you up is his impeccable Godfather impersonation, complete with downward mouth and thick bottom lip. He does a brilliant Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, too, but those had to be shelved. Sometimes he forgets until he remembers and there’s a pause before we both move on without saying anything.

Every few weeks he scurries over to the shopping centre at lunch for a quick flick through the children’s clothing rails. Sorry you were made wear those psychedelic jeans.

That microscopic white patch on the back of his head is a souvenir from his exam days when he would unwittingly soothe his anxiety by rubbing the one little patch of hair until he wore it down. Wearing him down is my job now.

He still does this sometimes when he’s nervous, or watching his team in a tense game of football. They’re without a manager at the moment and he fell out of bed last night exuberantly cheering a penalty they saved in his dream. The same team he held a season ticket for before surrendering it to buy you weird psychedelic jeans and other stuff.

Failing his first driving test at 18 was the last time he cried until accompanying you to get a general anaesthetic last year. When I say cry, I mean welled up, which is outright bawling to the rest of us.

He disappeared minutes before the ceremony was due to start (leaving his sisters, your Aunties, to piss themselves at the family portrait) returning with a used envelope housing his big-hearted words of love and gratitude he quietly expressed to all.

Your Granddads lit candles with ginormous granddad-sized matches. Your Grannies spoke words of wisdom handed down from minds more poetic than ours. Your Auntie rocked the (good) living room. Your Fairy Godmothers pledged love and loyalty, and we all serenaded you with a spectacularly out-of-tune Catch a Falling Star. Not a door slammed, not a grudge resurrected. The power you have.

Your Dad was right about the song. It belongs to you and him alone. On your Sunday drives together over the border for cheap diesel when he can add harmonies at top tonsil and belt out the drums on the steering wheel. Here it is.

You have no idea how lucky you are.

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Photosynthesis

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By the hue of the sky and the chime of the off-licence door-bell, it must be that time of year again: The Leaving Cert.

I would love to impart some sage words of advice to you youngsters not reading this, fleshed out with a combination of nostalgia and a few keen insights unleashed with age; perhaps a wise quote thrown in for good tradition.

Truth is, I just wanted to say the word photosynthesis; it’s one of my favourite words of all time. It might even make the top 5. Up there with zupy (Polish for soup), possibly. Like most topics contained in my Leaving Cert exams (complex numbers, Peig, lifecycle of the liver fluke, oxbow lakes, Irish), I’ve never had to apply it to life, so I’m forced to engineer opportunities to slip in a few favourites here and there to impress my peers. Or rely on it to get me out of a few hairy corners, or dig me into a deeper hole.

Take that bloke I was mad keen on a few years back. We’re strolling through a city park with an allotment scheme. Unbeknownst to him, we’re romantically involved. I’m giving him the full Thunderbirds-on-speed treatment with my head-nodding in response to his thoughtful opinion on bio-cultures. He hits a crescendo with his Mary Robinson Claw™, then it’s over to me. And out it bursts without a second’s hesitation…”photosynthesis!!!”.

Thanks to my old alma mater, and MrsG specifically, for preparing me for survival of the weakest.

“When you’re not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom”

Larry David

Month’s Mind

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Losing your faith on a pilgrimage to The Holy Land. That still cracks me up. There you are in the photograph, all 46 mother-of-four years of you, flanked by camel humps in those ridiculous square shades that devour your face, high up presiding over your travelling companions like The Queen of Pop-socks herself.

No spa breaks back then, just a girly week in Jerusalem with a pick ‘n’ mix of the habited and the devotional. And you. No furious ten-page follow-up message-board dissection. No outburst of empathy from strangers at the touch of a keypad, just an indelible question mark left next to your thoughts on the point of it all. And there it stays, mostly, until one of their kind gets a rise out of you obliging you to roar obscenities at the wireless and demand they “get a life”.

And still you occasionally slip into their place of worship on a Saturday night to bow your head and try to square all the question marks with the inevitabilities that befall your family, passed away and present, members of which you email occasionally when you can be bothered despite your virtuoso typist past. Google is an order you give your grandchildren.

I tell you I started this blog thing last month, as a hobby mainly, a way to relax since there’s not a hope of me losing the will to live entirely by going running, or cooking, or cleaning. I half expect you to ask if I’m coming out of writing retirement after twenty years but you’re already lost in your Sudoku. We thought you had it bad with the crossword. Remember when you flew to visit me and leaned over in the taxi with the paper wondering what I thought 5 across could be? Some addictions don’t require Wi-Fi.

Tomorrow, after we clear up, and your son-in-law cajoles your granddaughter up to bed, I’ll slouch on to the sofa reaching for the laptop. You’ll come in looking for your umbrella (“just in case”), and each of us will slide into our respective back pews to join the herd for a while, collect our thoughts, and zone out in the only way we know how.