It was over – but not for long

By noeleenm on June 15th, 2007

The Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults training course is over, the General Elections are over, the appointment of a new Government is over – even the good weather is over, at least temporarily.

It’s a soft grey day today, and it feels like the beginning of a weekend in November, rather than the middle of June. 

Since my last April post right up to General Election day in Ireland (which also happened to be the final night of our CELTA course), I was so busy that stories of a changing Ireland just got squeezed out of my schedule. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the Elections/course, I went on an ‘after-school’ binge of being out of doors in the sunshine and air I’d missed so much in the previous weeks.

I’ve climbed Bray Head in the evening, absorbing air, beauty, and bird-song in a heart-gladdening mixture, and gardened at the weekends, with dollops of talk and laughter and catching-up with house-family and family of origin and friends in between. That the end of all this busy-ness coincided with the return to our house of a beloved ’son’ – Jan from the Czech Republic – added to the contentment.

Our ‘family’ seems to be going through one of those patches where it gathers other people up as well – Alba’s parents from Spain, briefly, and her Irish boyfriend, more long-term; Kasia’s friends from Poland, also briefly; now Jan’s girlfriend, Letti, who has come to stay in Ireland (not in our house, but hopefully nearby) for a few months; while Gint, our longest resident, has been increasingly busy in his new career laying timber floors.

For me these past few weeks have been a quiet ‘honeymoon’ period in a very busy life, but already things are moving again. I was lucky enough to do well in the CELTA course, and luckier again to be offered two nights a week teaching English in International House, where I did the course. It started last Monday, and it’s nervewracking, stimulating, and fun!

With the election of a new Government, and the appointment of new Ministers, it’s time again to pick up the battle to keep our floodplain free of high density building. With the Green Party going into coalition with Fianna Fail, and a Green Minister for the Environment, we need to make the most of these few weeks before the Government goes into its summer recess.

…Especially as the otherwise excellent flood defence proposals being put forward seem to suggest that, with these in place, there is no need for the floodplain to be preserved… With the news of drought and flood from Australia over this past week, and the extreme flooding much nearer to home in Donegal in the past few days, it’s hard to believe that anyone can seriously moot this argument any longer – but they do.

So, on with the warpaint again and out with the English language text books, but in between there will be some time for working in the garden, walking in the hills, and coming home to Gint, Kasia, Alba, and Jan in this changing Ireland of ours…

Posted in Czech Republic, Flooding, Friends, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, McManus Family, Poland, Spain | No Comments »

Slow Down

By noeleenm on January 16th, 2007

Over the last week or two, I have listened to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Concert in Central Park’ a couple of times, and their ‘54th Street Bridge Song’ (’Feelin’ Groovy’) keeps playing over in my mind. I love its playful, hopscotch melody, I love Simon’s ‘Slow Down, You’re Goin’ Too Fast’ advice, and I find the close harmony singing of him and Art Garfunkel, especially their countermelody, simply fabulous. Some music is mood changing for me (and Simon and Garfunkel’s music is in this category), some I need to be in a particular mood already to really enjoy it (Bach), and some simply puts me in a bad mood, whatever I’ve been feeling at the beginning (Heavy Metal!).

On my recent holiday in France, I found myself listening to Simon and Garfunkel, as well as to John Denver, and, more obviously appropriately, to ‘Songs of the Auvergne’ sung by Frederica von Stade. I brought all three CDs because they are among my favourites, but they were also appropriate… I celebrated my 60th birthday on January 6th, and the music of Simon and Garfunkel, the music of John Denver, the music of the Seekers, the music of Joan Baez, were all part of my transition into adulthood. They sing about the things I care about – love, nature, freedom, and music itself.

There’s something momentous about turning 60, and I celebrated it with family here, then in Carcassonne in Southern France with five close friends (’Old friends, sat on their parkbench like bookends…’), and, finally, in Collioure, walking in the hills and getting my mind around the fact that I am 60 and deciding what I would like to do with the next decade of my life, if God grants me that time.

The result was some belated New Year Resolutions geared to enable some New Year Dreams. (One of my birthday cards showed two puppies fast asleep together with the message: ‘If all our dreams came true, we’d have nothing left to wish for…’) The resolutions start with ‘Slow down, you’re goin’ too fast’ because I’ve felt that this past year I have been going too fast, always hurrying, always mentally rushing, even when my body was fixed in the same position for too many hours at a time. In Collioure there was time to hike in the beautiful hills above that glorious village, and there was time to listen to music.  

It’s a time of change. Maria is returning to Germany next week, leaving two empty rooms in the house, as Rasa left just before Christmas. I am deliberately not replacing them, because it is a time of change. I want space for a little while to empty myself and my home back to our bones, and start a new decade afresh. My overcrowded heart can remain overcrowded with its many inhabitants, but the rooms in which it and I live need to take a breathing space.

…But I’ll fill it with music…

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New Year in Ireland

By noeleenm on January 4th, 2007

Christmas was fun – but busy!

The first chance I got to write anything was a ‘thank you’ letter to a friend, which I wrote at what seemed to me like dawn, but was in reality near nine o’clock, on the day before New Year’s Eve. I was up early to say goodbye to Renata and Pavel who were returning to the Czech Republic. It’s always hard to say goodbye, but I consoled myself with the fact that, for Pavel, this is his second time to stay in my house. The world is getting smaller…

It still seemed strange, though, when the house had been so packed for so long, to sit in quietness.

We (Renata, Pavel, Maria, and myself) cooked for seven on the 23rd December, with Gint laying the table, opening bottles of wine, and muttering over the washing up afterwards. Wojtek was excused from duty as he had to go to work immediately after the meal and was allowed to sleep till then – until we discovered we were unaccountably short of dishes and he went scuttling up to his den (politely referred to as his bedroom), to emerge carrying a precarious load of dirty dishes! He has earned the nickname ‘Bear’ because of his ability to hibernate, a useful skill if you work nights and study during the day, but sometimes the area around his bed is only just short of gnawed bones and a pot of honey…

Renata and Pavel had hunted fish (thank God they don’t have Wojtek’s hoarding habits) in our local Saturday street market, but couldn’t locate carp, the traditional fish dish for much of Eastern Europe. Instead, they were advised to use salmon and brown trout. Apparently, it was delicious – once they had finally given up on the white wine sauce which was supposed to accompany it. The sauce had been chosen from one of my cookery books and the recipe in English, with its very different vocabulary, proved a little too much in the long run. But Gint ate it anyway…

The traditional accompaniment of potato salad, which Renata and Pavel had worked on all day, had ‘eating and drinking’ in it, as we say in Ireland, and more than made up for the disappointing sauce for our Czechs, Polish and Latvian fish eaters. Maria is allergic to potatoes, so she had plain basmati rice with her fish, while I turned my rice dish into a mushroom risotto. We all shared a big green salad, with a very nice vinaigrette sauce (prepared by Maria) - and we all shared white wine!

This decidedly unIrish main course was followed by a very Irish Christmas pudding, made in County Wexford, and custard. I find a lot of visitors to our country have never met custard before (it’s rather like caramel, but usually served hot), and it met with mixed reactions. Renata, for instance, is convinced that every sweet food is sweeter in Ireland, sometimes too much so, but everyone liked the pudding – except Maria, whom I had completely forgotten is allergic to nuts also. Luckily, she tasted them at her first tentative (she has learned to be tentative about food) mouthful, and stopped before any damage was done.

We exchanged our Chriskindel gifts, ranging from scratch cards (which, if you scratch off three matching numbers, wins you the amount named) through calendars and DVD racks to a beer glass that twinkles with different coloured lights everytime it is raised! Now, far be it from me to name a Chriskindel, but the person who was responsible for choosing these twinkling coloured lights on the beer glass is the same person who was shocked to discover we use coloured lights - as opposed to simply white – on our Christmas tree! And she was relieved to find that, at least, our Christmas tree lights don’t twinkle…

Poor Wojtek had to go to work then, but the rest of us finished the night lounging about the fireplace, talking, drinking wine, and building dreams in the embers. We were joined at some point by Gail, who had been Christmas shopping in Dublin till all hours!

Maria set off early the next morning for Germany and her family and friends there, but the simple meal planned for that night for the rest of us meant we could rest a little before I set off for an afternoon tea party in my nephew, Stephen’s house, with 22 of my sister’s children and their families! Mary’s husband, Noel, celebrated his 73rd birthday on Christmas Eve, while his grandson, also Noel, celebrated his 14th birthday. Stephen and Marie, his wife, have established a tradition each year of celebrating both events early enough to leave time for all the little ones to be back home safely in bed in time for Santa’s visit later that night. It’s always a warm, talkative occasion for all of us, apart from the delicious meal.

From Stephen’s, I went to the 8pm vigil Mass for Christmas Day, which was very beautiful. Tall Christmas trees (with white lights!) form a background to the altar, the choir sang sweetly, and our old traditional Crib, that I have known since I was a child, gathers crowds around after Mass. I missed Elke and Michele, though, who accompanied me last year.

At 10pm we finally sat down at home and eat a very untraditional meal – for either Ireland or Eastern Europe – of pasta in a blue cheese and brocolli and walnut sauce. But it was delicious, and we could all eat it. We followed it happily with mince pies and ice-cream, and Renata placed the Baby Jesus in the crib, before we all crept over to the fire to dream some more…

Wojtek had a wonderful Christmas Eve also, he reported later, with four Polish couples sharing a traditional meal – and gifts – far from home. He was better off far from home the next morning, as many (between 20 and 30) of my extended family call then for our traditional Christmas drinks and exchange of gifts, causing quite a din when we’re all together.

A quick escape down then to my sister’s house in Wicklow town for an Irish Christmas dinner, with vegetarian fillets substituting for meat on my plate, Brussels sprouts and carrots and potatoes and delicious sauces, followed by homemade Christmas pudding with cream and brandy sauce. We opened our gifts, poking happily into each others presents as well as our own, before setting off for my niece, Sally-Ann’s, house in Ashford, and yet another Christmas tea, with Christmas cake and every other sweet thing featuring on the table.

Around the table, and in the living room, young Martin and his little foster sister, Saoirse, featured. Martin is ten now, while Saoirse celebrated her first birthday earlier in December, and they are crazy about each other – with good reason. Saoirse played to the gallery all night, and we were happy to be her audience, while Martin offered learned discourses on the space ship he was building, in between giving and returning hugs and kisses to his little sister.

I stayed overnight in Mary and Noel’s house, returning to our own house to spend time with the resurrected Gint (Renata and Pavel had gone to Belfast and were staying over there) before going to Bernadette’s (another of my sister, Mary’s, daughters) for yet another ginormous family reunion. On Stephen’s night, all 22 of that family have a very festive Christmas tea in Bernadette’s and the Chriskindels brings big gifts for the little ones. Mary does Mother Clause and it’s a great night for the small children – and for the adults.

The rest of Christmas passed in a blur of eating and drinking and talking and lounging about – with friends, with family, and with my diminishing house family.

Gint set off for Italy, to visit Michele, on the 28th, Wojtek made occasional guest appearances in the house in between parties, and Renata and Pavel and myself kept up our tradition of eating anything but traditional Irish food by visiting an Italian restaurant – Il Palazzo – in Bray for their last night here, on the 29th.

On the 30th, I went to lunch in another of my nieces’ homes – this time the daughter of my other sister, Sally, who died fifteen years ago, and whom I still miss. Luckily, many of her qualities, and mannerisms, are still to be found in her two daughters – Edel, in whose home we were eating, and Trish, who came to lunch also with her two children, Shauna and Darragh. Edel’s little girl, Hannah, was six on New Year’s Day, so we were starting her celebrations as well as catching up on each other’s news.

I thought on New Year’s Eve I was going to spend the evening alone as one of the very bad storms we’d experienced over the Christmas built up throughout the day. Normally, my generation of our family come to our house on that night to share a meal and talk of family news and memories right through midnight. This year my brother, Pat, and his wife, Judy, weren’t coming because Pat still doesn’t feel up to going out late since he had a mild stroke last Christmas. My sister, Mary, and Noel, came from Wicklow though, picking up our sister-in-law, Angela, on the way. Our other sister-in-law, Marie, came on foot as she lives nearby, and Mary and Noel left her home afterwards. As both Mary and Marie had the remains of bad colds, the laughter that seemed to go on all night caused bouts of coughing that made the house sound like a hospital ward! 

Pat phoned his good wishes through though during the evening, as did many of the family, with members of my ‘house family’ texting in their good wishes, like Grant from South Africa and Daniel from Spain, who is now living in London. Earlier in the Christmas I’d had e-mails and texts from other young people who have lived here. Nayra, who transformed a photo of me on the back of her Dad’s motorbike last year in their home in Fuerteventura by adding a Santa hat to each of us (I’ll post the photo next time I get to write a post, but more of that anon…), Lucia whose poetry has won prizes and who is now about to publish her first book of poetry, Roberto who became a Dad to Itxasa last September, and Jan, who has just discovered he is about to become a father also…

The coming of babies is appropriate, and joyful, news for Christmas – but the quietness of Bethleham was something I just didn’t get time to experience this year. That’s why tomorrow morning I’m setting off for France for an initially companionable and probably hilarious weekend with five friends as we celebrate my 60th birthday in Carcassonne, but followed by a further week in the little Mediterannean village of Collioure by myself, where I’ll explore, rest, listen to music, be quiet, and build up my energy again for another year.

When I get back I intend to post photos of our Christmas in Ireland, and of France. Meanwhile, I wish for all of us – all of the people who have lived in this house and all of their families, including new babies, as well as all of the people who read about this house – a blessed and peaceful New Year.

Posted in Canary Islands, Czech Republic, Germany, House Family, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, McManus Family, Poland, South Africa, Spain | No Comments »

The Real Maria

By noeleenm on September 20th, 2006

Last Sunday night my sister-in-law, Marie, was entertaining her fellow patients in Cappagh Orthopaedic Hospital in Dublin by singing (and dancing to) ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’

The following night she was lying in bed, with pain killing drugs being fed into her spinal system through a catheter, and with vibrators attached to two little bootees to help her circulation. She’d had a knee replacement.

Needless to say, the two events were not consequential, unlike the pain that failed contestants must feel when they are voted off the television programme designed to choose a Maria for ‘The Sound of Music’.

Seemingly, musical entrepreneur, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, decided to turn auditions for the female lead in his forthcoming show into a television series, with the co-operation of the BBC. A nice marketing move…

According to Alan Riding in The New York Times, over 2,000 young women applied for the role of Maria, and this was pruned down to 10 who took part in what is really a weekly talent show, testing their singing, dancing and acting ability.

The audience votes for each performer, and the two performers with the least votes then have to compete against each other, with Andrew Lloyd-Webber deciding which one will remain.

I have never seen it, but to me this kind of talent show – where the worst is rejected, rather than the best elected – sounds like a modern day version of the kind of public entertainment provided at the Colosseum in ancient Rome. People go there to see pain, as much as talent.

Yet I’ve heard a lot of people talking about it, and it seems the audience ratings are extremely high.

The story upon which this musical is (loosely) based is the story of a real woman, Maria Augusta Kutschera. Maria did join a Benedictine convent, and was released to act as tutor to one of widower Georg von Trapp’s seven children, partly because of the family’s need and partly because the Reverend Mother of the Abbey was worried about Maria’s health.

Georg von Trapp was not the cold patriarch portrayed in the musical, but a caring father, who had the sense, when he proposed, to push his children’s need for a mother, as much as his love for Maria. They went on to have three children together.

I read ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers’ many years ago, and spirituality, patriotism, honour, and music all played equal roles in this family’s history. It’s recorded that the Trapp family were upset at some aspects of ‘The Sound of Music’ – such as the portrayal of their father. I wonder how they would have felt at the Lloyd-Webber method of choosing someone to play their beloved mother’s role…?

Somehow I feel that ‘our Marie’ dancing about the hospital ward to cheer up the patients who had already had their operations, and their recital of the Rosary the following day when she was down in surgery, was a far more authentic reminder of that strong woman.

Posted in Ireland, McManus Family | 1 Comment »

Hugs

By noeleenm on July 31st, 2006

If you are feeling tired and run-down, take vitamins. If you’re feeling anchorless and a bit lonely, hold a baby or a very small child close, or cuddle up to a dog. It’s a prescription that works for me always, and it did again this weekend.

<Fran arrived back in Ireland on Friday night, and I spoke with her by phone on Saturday to make sure she had enough energy for a visit. When I called in the late afternoon, the tiredness of the trip on top of her surgery was affecting her mobility quite badly so that she was sitting in the wheelchair that she will only use indoors and as a last resort. “I keep having to remind myself that I can’t afford to fall just now”, she admitted, shamefacedly. But her voice was strong and clear, and she was eager to show off how the gadget that triggers the electric stimulator in her body works.We were interrupted frequently by her little grandson, Aidan, who at five years old naturally wanted to play with the chair and naturally wanted the visitor (he knows me well) and his grandmother to play with him. Fran wasn’t able for play, or even for interruptions, and I was worried he would topple the chair – and Fran. So he ended up being tempted off to another part of the house by his mother.>

Ages later, when Kevin (also exhausted until he took a nap) had somehow taken a now mobile Fran’s place in the wheelchair to chat with us, as his wife stood waving her arms victoriously in the air, and Aidan’s mum sat beside me on the settee, a sleepy little figure reappeared in the room. He had fallen asleep in his Grandad’s ‘den’. He headed, naturally, to his mother, crawling in between the two of us on the settee, but, to my delight, chose to rest his head on my lap. Automatically, my arm went around the warm little body to cuddle him, but then I withdrew it gently, thinking he might not like to be confined, and worried that I’d frighten him away. Immediately a little hand came up, caught my arm, and wrapped it across his body again. If someone had pinned a medal on me, I wouldn’t have been more honoured.We remained like that, four adults talking comfortably over a resting child who somehow linked us all in a safe place as we discussed our various reactions to Fran’s surgery and rehabilitation: it will take roughly six weeks for the swelling in Fran’s brain to reduce, according to the hospital, and up to a year to get the full benefit from the Deep Brain Stimulation. When I finally left, Fran walked with me to the garden gate, with a small limpet firmly attached to her hand, fearful that she would disappear again, even for a little while. I carried the picture of the two of them in my heart as I headed off to meet two other beloved ‘children’. Edel is over thirty now, but will always be a child to me at some level, as will the rest of my nieces and nephews. If someone has been an integral part of your life as they grow into teenagers and then adults, there’s a part of you that always regards them as a child, I find. Her little girl, Hannah (also five years old), and Edel and Paddy (daddy/husband) had all been living with Paddy’s parents in Dublin for the past few months as an extension was built on to their Bray home. I had missed them, badly, because the necessary changes in their routine, as much as in their location, as the work progressed, meant we kept in touch by e-mail only. You can’t hug properly by e-mail.

I was enveloped in her usual satisfactory bear-hug by Edel, but greeted more shyly by Hannah, who is going through a slightly self-conscious stage, according to her Mum. I had missed Paddy, who’d gone out for a drink with a friend. The grand tour started with Hannah’s room, basically unchanged in architecture but decorated in the pinks (psychedelic pink curtain rail and tie-backs!) and lilacs and lavenders that she loves and that match her beloved My Little Pony toys. When these had all been satisfactorily admired, we moved onto Edel’s ‘toy’ – her newly fitted, much more spacious, kitchen. I was allowed to see, touch, admire, and even open cupboards to my heart’s content, but as soon as I attempted to help with even washing a cup, I was ordered out and told: “This is MY kitchen!” A nice big dining room has replaced their old sitting room downstairs, and their new sitting room is now upstairs. Edel and Paddy’s bungalow, as it was then, was built on a height overlooking Bray seafront. Even from their ground floor the view was great, right over the sea and strand, and with Bray Head barely visible to the right. Now, from their big upstairs window, it’s magnificent. Directly in front, waves rolled in from the horizon to a silent (from here) shore, to the left the coast was visible right up to the Pigeon House at Ringsend, where Paddy’s parents live, and to the right walkers could be seen resting at the foot of the cross on Bray Head. Later, when darkness fell,  the big Ferris Wheel remaining from the Summerfest, lit up the Head, moonlight made paths across the sea, and soft coloured spotlights set into the maple floor of Edel and Paddy’s new sitting room gave the whole room a feeling of magic.The new big spare bedroom to the back of the house, despite its view over Bray Head, barely got a glance from me after that view, despite the fact that an extra bedroom was the ‘raison d’etre’ for the extension in the first place.When Hannah had been tucked in to sleep, with a promise extracted that she would make no more than five minutes of ‘phone calls’ on the toy mobile I had brought as a gift (in colours and with sequins that even Gint would consider ‘bling bling’), her hugs and goodnight kisses wafted into the sitting room with us where we drank some wine, ate some garlic bread, and talked and talked and talked…>Oddly enough, the following morning – Sunday – I met another of my most beloved nieces, Bernadette, with her three teenagers after Mass: Roisin, not yet a teenager, had gone around the side of the church to meet her Dad who sings with the choir at the 10.30am. family Mass. Bernadette hugged me as Robert, Kate and Aoife all grinned amiably down from their teenage heights: teenagers don’t do hugs with aunts, generally, except on special occasions like Christmas, although they all seem to do that rocking bear hug thing with each other that we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing with each other as children. It’s nice…“Why don’t you come up some evening, if you’ve time”, asked Bernadette, “now that the children are all off school?” Conscious of an approving warmth from the three friendly lighthouses above my head, I happily agreed.Who needs vitamins, anyway

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‘Anchors’ in a Changing World

By noeleenm on July 28th, 2006

I’ve been thinking a lot about community, and connections, particularly in Ireland and even more particularly in Little Bray, over the past week.

We have a door-to-door collection going on all week to fundraise for our flood plain campaign, so an ever-widening circle went out from our core group through some thirty collectors to every house in the ‘flood basin’ or lowlands of Little Bray. That’s some 450 homes. Many of the people living in those homes have been through two floods – 1965 and 1986 – while the older people in the area remember the flood of 1932 as children.

People who have moved into the area in the last twenty years, though, find it harder to imagine the devastation caused by flooding happening in their neighbourhood, and that a proposal to put high density building on the flood plain downriver from our community would be even considered if it’s as dangerous as we (and every hydrologist all over the world) say…

So the door-to-door collection is also an information session, knocking on doors and telling new people stories of floods and flood plains. It has meant the usual chats with neighbours, but it has also turned up some surprises…

My collection area was our road of twenty houses, and I called at the house of Tom, who moved in about five years ago (a newcomer in our area!), expecting to have to explain all the background and stories of the floods. Tom has the kind of accent that tells you straight away that he has lived most of his life in England, like many Irish emigrants before him, but he surprised me by explaining that he is originally from Bray, knows all about the flooding in Little Bray (digging into his wallet as he talked), and – when I established his surname for a receipt – it turned out that he is a brother of my sister-in-law’s stepfather. Marie’s father died when she was a little girl, and John Whiston, Lord rest him, was a loving replacement all through his life. Tom is his brother.

It shouldn’t have surprised me because I had told Magda when she moved in to our house over a week ago that: “You can’t throw a stone in Bray without hitting a relative.”

Magda had explained, when she came to see the room, that she had been living just up the hill from us, and wanted to stay in our neighbourhood. It turned out that she had been living on the same road as that same sister-in-law – Marie – and her now grown up children, whom Deirdre, the housemother, knows well.

Bray’ population in the 2002 census was over 28,000, and it’s growing at an enormous rate. Thousands of new people have come from other parts of Ireland – generally to work in nearby Dublin city – and have become committed members of our community. But there is still a strong core of families who have lived in Bray for generations.

I hoped that the realisation of this close-knit community might help Magda to settle into our house after what was obviously a traumatic move.

It had seemed to do so, because last Saturday, which was the first time we really got to talk, she was bubbly and laughing, teasing her compatriot, Wojtek, who was trying, not very subtly, to establish how old she is, whether she has a boyfriend here, how long she intends to stay, and what exactly is this ‘set-dancing’ she’s doing, with the unspoken addendum ‘Can anybody join in?’!

You can’t fault him for trying…

I was further amused to discover that when Elke was leaving Bray, Magda was one of the people who applied for her job on reception in one of our local hotels. With excellent English, but without hotel experience, she didn’t get the job, but it was another one of those ‘web threads’ that seem strange looking back.

Still I was conscious all week that our house seems terribly quiet just now, surprisingly so considering there are five of us living there. The dead heat we are experiencing now in Ireland (only 22 degrees Celsius, but clammy, thundery weather that feels much hotter) is causing some slow down: everybody just wants to lie down, preferably in a hammock. Different work and social schedules – and consequently evening meal schedules, which was traditionally the time everyone met up in the kitchen – mean that there are rarely more than three of us in the house at a time, and often only two.

On Wednesday evening I wanted to do some work in the attic that involved quite a bit of hammering and sawing and drilling, using electric tools. Magda was just about to go out, and nobody else seemed to be at home – I knocked doors to check, before settling down to work without any regard to the noise I was making. Yesterday I found that Wojtek had been asleep in his room throughout it all, and heard neither the knock on the door nor the noise of the electric drill and saw! (“I told you I don’t hear anything when I sleep…!”)

I asked Magda if she finds our house very quiet, having lived with a family with small children till now. She considered it.

“I miss all the coming and going. There were always children in and out. But I’ll get used to it.!

I never have…

When my parents were alive, our house was always full of children – us, then their grandchildren, and, even after they died, my nieces and nephews and then my grand-nieces and grand-nephews came here often. But, when I lost my dog, Pal, last year, the final ‘anchor’ to a regular ‘house timetable’ disappeared for me. Too often, I am out of the house until late, and, while adults make arrangements to see each other, most of the children’s visits our house experienced was when some of the family were going by with children: “And we just took a chance and dropped in…”

They still come by invitation, of course, as I go to their houses by invitation – but I rarely seem to manage to “just drop up” to their houses, either, because my timetable is that of an adult without children. You can’t visit a five year old at 11pm at night.

But I miss them – and I miss having a dog, particularly and specifically a ‘Pal’ dog. She anchored me.

There are so many things I want to do right now – continue to fight the flood plain campaign, travel when I can, pore over blogs (my own and others), relax over a meal and a glass of wine without having to go home first – that would not be nearly as easy to do if I had a dog again, and I was tied down to the sort of routine that committing to any other living thing entails. But it’s as if not having a dog, and the routine it entails, has cut me off from the company of children, too.

Children and dogs go together, and they make a house a real home.

Last night Magda and myself sat and talked… She’s going home to Poland on holidays in August for about ten days. She’s here in Ireland, like Gint, because of work, not just to travel and see other countries. She misses home.

“I know already that when I come back, I will be sad”, she admitted.

That’s very understandable when you’re Polish and you’re living in Ireland.

…But why am I homesick, I wonder…?

Posted in House Family, Ireland, McManus Family, Poland | No Comments »

The Pattern of the Graves

By noeleenm on July 3rd, 2006

Yesterday I went with my family and neighbours to the Pattern of the Graves.

The Pattern of the Graves is traditionally held in Ireland on the Sunday following the feast day of the Patron Saint of the local parish, and consists of a procession around the local cemetery to bless the graves, followed by Benediction. The word ‘Pattern’ apparently comes from the word ‘Patron’: I always thought it described the way the procession moves around the little paths of the cemetery in a ‘pattern’ woven of prayer.

Unusually, in our parish we have the Pattern twice a year – once on the Sunday following the Feast of St. Peter and Paul (June 29), and again on the Sunday following the Feast of All Souls (November 2). The latter procession is an ‘add-on’, though, underlined by the fact that parishioners who visited Lourdes in France brought back the tradition of a candle-lit procession for our November pattern.

In July, we have daylight in Ireland until near 11pm, so it’s far too bright at 4pm in the afternoon for candles. The ‘Patterns’ of my childhood are associated in my mind with sunshine, and the sound of crows in the big chestnut trees in the churchyard as a background to the rhythmic chant of the Rosary recited quietly by what seemed like thousands of voices, following the silken canopy bobbing over the head of the priest carrying the Host in procession around the cemetery before returning to the churchyard for open air Benediction.

Decades of the Rosary were interspersed with the old hymns, sung lustily, and the smell of incense vied with the smell of flowers – because for this occasion the cemetery is turned into a garden.

The process starts in the week leading up to the Pattern, and comes to a head on the Saturday, when most people are off work and can tend their family graves. FAS (a scheme to provide employment for people who are out of work) workers carry out overall maintenance on the cemetery paths, and in between graves, and many people tidy graves near their own who have no one left to care for them.

It’s a community occasion, when people who have long left the parish come back to honour their dead, so old neighbours meet both in the preparation of the graves, and at the Pattern itself. And the family members and neighbours who have gone before seem as much a part of the conversations and the company, as those who walk the old paths stopping to say a prayer, admire a flower, or remember the name on a headstone.

When I was growing up several thousand parishioners would walk in the procession, queuing patiently in parallel columns of four abreast, until it was time to move into the cemetery. Twenty five years ago, though, Bray Summer Festival was launched, with its attendant Carnival (a Fairground, in Ireland), opening on the day of St. Peter’s Pattern of the Graves. It seemed a strange decision, and, combined with a diminishing of religious practice in Ireland, the huge crowds that used to attend the Pattern were suddenly reduced enormously.

For parishioners with small children, especially, it was a difficult choice. Fortunately, Bray Summerfest, as it is now known, has moved into the second week of July.

This year it is being held from 5th – 13th July, and yesterday there must have been nigh on 1,000 people walking in the Pattern, not to mention the increasing number of able-bodied people who simply stand at their own family graves. It’s another new tradition that I cannot understand. It seems to me to say: “I will honour my own dead, but don’t expect me to walk around and remember the rest.”

Those who really cannot walk, generally sit in the church itself and follow the prayers broadcast over the loudspeakers dotted around the cemetery, but many old people make a big effort to walk in the procession, and yesterday I was just behind a lady being pushed in a wheelchair along the sometimes very narrow and uneven paths. When they came to a bad patch, the nearest men simply moved in and maneouvered the chair across.

Perhaps it’s a declaration of non-faith for some, not wishing to be part of a religious procession – though certainly not for all because I know of people of strong faith who do it. Whatever it is, to me it defies the very central core of the Pattern: we remember our dead, all our dead, and walking among the graves is surely an outward symbol of that remembrance.

Strangely enough, the other traditional Bray activity at which you were always guaranteed to meet people who had lived in the town for generations had also to do with death and burial – according to the dictionary, at least.

My dictionary defines ‘tontine’ as a co-operative society in which poorer people saved money to cover the cost of a funeral. And that was exactly what it was in Bray, with a little more added. My parents, along with most of our town, saved a small amount of money every week in the local Tontine, and volunteer collectors wrote receipts and banked the money, until Christmas. At Christmas, a percentage was taken out of each person’s savings to help pay for funerals in any member’s family – a cost that added immeasurably to the distress of a bereaved family that had perhaps lost its breadwinner – and the rest of the money was distributed back to the members to buy whatever small luxuries they could afford for Christmas.

Thus, celebration for the living and respect for the dead were inextricably entwined, and the Tontine, with its staunch core of locals, even when economically Ireland was a better place to be, continued right up until the Credit Union took its place as the ‘bank’ of the working class.

When I checked the word Tontine on the web, however, I find it defined by Wikipedia as an investment scheme, named after Neapolitan banker, Lorenzo di Tonti, who is credited with inventing it. According to Wikipedia (and other web sources), dividends were paid on the invested funds, but, as each investor died, his/her share was divided among the remaining investors until only one remains.

Originally, says Wikipedia, the remaining investor received only the dividends: the capital went back to the State and was used to fund public works. Later, the scheme changed so that the capital devolved upon the last survivor, dissolving the trust.

It puts a whole new slant on the connection between the Tontine and the vast crowds attending the Pattern of the Graves in Bray for so many years…

…And, if you think that’s irreverent, it’s because you never knew so many of the people whose graves we tended and prayed and laughed over yesterday in Little Bray. Laughter was a shield against poverty and illness and death. It was a kind laughter, that eased much sorrow.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam go leir: may all their souls be on God’s right hand.

Posted in Ireland, McManus Family | No Comments »

Where Am I?

By noeleenm on May 2nd, 2006

Thursday evening: No time for a family conference tonight. I forgot we had a core group meeting of our flood campaign group, SWAP, scheduled. It was a long and sometimes very heated meeting, and we were all pretty wrecked at the end, but we emerged finally with clear plans and solidarity in place again.

Friday evening: We had our ‘family conference’ – and several glasses of wine. Both Gint and Dong Kwang are adamant that we do not need another male in the house. The single room must go to a girl. A Lithuanian girl, Grazina, arrives with a friend (who speaks a lot more English than Grazina, who is only three weeks in Ireland) to see the room. We agree that she will move in on Sunday morning.

I e-mail the French boy, explaining that where he is going to work turns out to be some 15 km from our town, on a very infrequent bus route, so living with us wouldn’t have worked for him anyway.

Dong Kwang told me the other night that his friend, Chang Won, was not coming to our house after all. Some of Chang Won’s friends had told him that our part of town is dangerous at night, and he is nervous about this. I explained that, unfortunately, most streets in big towns and cities are now dangerous at night, and our neighbourhood is no more dangerous than anywhere else.

But, if Chang Won is nervous, he is likely to attract bullying on the street, so I’d prefer also that he wouldn’t come. Dong Kwang wants to look for another young man from his English college to share with him. I’m happy with this. I like Dong Kwang and generally people choose friends with their own set of values.

Saturday 2.15am: An enormous bang outside our house seems to give credence to Chang Won’s fears. Amazingly, I sleep through it, but Gint is down the stairs in a flash when he realises that ‘Baby’, his precious 1992 BMW, has mysteriously moved down the road from our gate – and has another car locked into it in a hideous embrace. It turns out that this car had come speeding around our corner, ploughed into Gint’s ‘Baby’, and pushed it down the road into another neighbour’s car. The damage is enormous. The driver(s) had run away from the scene.

When Gint finally roused me, the police had gone, taking the car with them. It was reported stolen the following morning.

By the time, Gint and myself cleaned up the debris from the crash, tied up the broken bumper, tied down the smashed boot, and tried to make sense of what had happened, it was 4.30am.

Saturday: 10.00am: Meeting with the Communications Committee of our church. I’m resigning from looking after the web site I developed two years ago for the parish, and have maintained since. I can’t keep up with my present workload, and they have new, enthusiastic people on board, who will give it the time and attention it needs. Time to go…

My brother, Pat, and his wife, Judy, call on their weekly visit, and our cousin, Marie, arrives to stay overnight on one of our ‘cousins re-union’ nights out. In the middle of it, Dong Kwang’s new room-mate, a Polish guy called Wojciech, comes to meet us, and moves into the house.

Saturday afternoon: In between talking with my cousin, and talking with Dong Kwang and Wojciech, I talk to the police about Gint’s car, and I talk to our neighbour about his car. Nothing can really be done about any of it until Tuesday, because this is a long, Bank Holiday weekend. But all weekend, I talk to Gint about ’Baby’ (he is really upset and so am I because it all seems so unfair), and how insurance companies might deal with crashes caused by stolen cars… 

Saturday evening: Cousins re-union, and old and new photos passed around the group, along with the wine. It was a great night. I fall into bed around 1.30am.

Sunday morning, 10.30am: Grazina moves into house, and then goes off to work for the day. Marie’s husband, Joe, comes to collect her around 2.30pm. I went to bed, unusually, and slept till after 6pm. Then I got up to do my weekly housework as the new house family came and went around me.

Monday am. Despite the weather not being very good, I mow the grass before heading off to collect a friend (she of the ‘peruke’), who has to go to hospital for an injection because they suspect she has a clot in her leg – and there is no ultra sound availabile in our wealthy country until tomorrow to check. Then we went to meet other friends for a pub lunch to cheer ourselves up.

Monday afternoon: When I dropped my friend home, she had been doing a jigsaw… “I’m having a bit of trouble with the edges”, she said. At least an hour later the jig-saw frame is looking a lot more intact, but I’ve almost missed the shops, where I need to get weed-killer and sandpaper for some chores around the house. Race back and make the shop just before it closes…Monday evening: Wine with Gint and Grazina, amidst a Russian/English conversation. It seemed to make sense at the time. Dong Kwang and Wojciech have visitors and watch a Korean film on Dong Kwang’s laptop in their room till after midnight. I’m still reading when the house finally settles down for the night.

Tuesday, 2nd May, a.m.: Where am I?

Posted in Friends, House Family, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, McManus Family, Poland | 1 Comment »

Pal

By noeleenm on April 24th, 2006

Yesterday was census day in Ireland – 23rd April, 2006. And I smiled to myself, thinking how typical it was that my dog, Pal, should have the first anniversary of her death highlighted in this way. Pal was a shameless seeker of attention, an affectionate, snuffling, lighthearted, insinuating presence – and she was my friend for almost 14 years.

I had brought her home from the local animal sanctuary, near Rathdrum in County Wicklow, on 5th November, 1991, exactly one month to the day following the death of my sister, Sally. It had been a month of devastating aloneness, despite the compassion of family and friends, equally ravaged by her loss and by the series of family bereavements that had preceded it.

I think that if I had decided having a baby python, two elephants, and a Bengal tiger might help, family and friends would have encouraged it. Instead, I found myself a month later driving with a friend to the animal sanctuary and collecting a cheeky little mix of Springer Spaniel and collie, the last of a litter for whom a local farmer hadn’t been able to find homes. She was seven weeks old.

Black and white, with floppy velvet ears and wet nose, she climbed all over me on the drive home, trying to lick my face, being restrained from licking the driver, trying to see out the window, trying to climb onto the back seat…

I called her Pal, because already she had become a friend, and because it was only one letter away from my sister’s pet name.

Pal was life, she was happiness, and the following morning she couldn’t seem to walk very well. I told myself it was probably the change of food and surroundings, and I took her to the vet.

She has Parvo Virus, I was told, and her chances of survival are about 30%. They put her on a drip and told me to take her home as the disease is highly contagious, to keep her warm, and to try to keep her hydrated with boiled 7-Up every 15 minutes. …If she survived the night, I was to bring her back the next day for another session on the drip.

I sat up all night with her cuddled on my lap, using an eye-dropper to get the 7-Up into the mouth of a by-now obviously very sick puppy. And I cried, prayed, and felt that if she died I would never allow myself to love anybody or anything again.

In the morning she was still alive, and I took her back to the vet for another session of feeding medication into her tiny leg. But the news was far better this time.

“I think you could try giving her some chicken soup”, the vet told me. I bought chicken breast, and made soup. Not only did Pal gulp down the soup, she started to chew on the bits of chicken meat left over. I let her.

Within a week she was not only eating solid food, she was also eating shoes, clothes on the line, wallpaper off the wall, the upholstery in my car… By Christmas, she was climbing Bray Head with me, her boundless energy forcing me into fresh air and activity that were good for my body and soul.

I learned quickly, though, that, despite the fact that she was keeping me sane in my grieving, I had been right to worry about getting a pet when my work as a freelance journalist took me away so much.

We muddled through somehow until, in March, I developed shingles. Again, family and friends rallied round, this time to nurse and feed me, and to walk Pal. But it was impossible to give the four month old puppy as much company as she needed, while minding me as well.

I lay in bed and listened to her cries downstairs, and went through every scheme I could think of to hold on to her while meeting her needs and mine.

A ‘Gingerbread Dog’ club was my first plan. I advertised for other single dog owners who would be willing to take turns in minding each other’s dogs, or walking each other’s dogs, on a barter basis. Nobody replied to such a mad advertisement.

I tried leaving her in a kennels when I had to go away – and returned to find her well, but so subdued that I swore I would never do it again.

Finally, I advertised for a new home for her, but when a really lovely couple came to see her, Pal and I sat curled up against each other in mute misery, and they kindly told me that it wouldn’t work…

Eventually, friends who lived on the old convent farm, just across the road from my home, became a second family for Pal. I dropped her into the O’Reilly’s home, and world, in the morning on my way out to work, and collected her each evening. I left her with them when I went away, and we had a joyful, yelping reunion each time I returned.

In between, we walked most of the Wicklow mountains, all of the Wicklow Way, and wore a track down to the park each morning and the beach each night.

I got used to being greeted with a rather abstracted kiss and hug and: “Hi, Noeleen. Where’s Pal?” from my younger grand-nieces and nephews, who made no real secret of who the really important person was that they were coming to visit.

But when I decided to extend my home, and share it, I worried at first about how young strangers would react to a dog. I shouldn’t have…

They each talked in their own language to this wagging-from-head-to-tail dog, with the lopsided ‘grin’ that someone once told me was a characteristic of Springer Spaniels. She greeted them from her favourite spot on the rug in the living room (if she couldn’t manage to sneak up to the landing on top of the stairs where she could really survey everything), she ‘listened’ to them, she begged food shamelessly, despite my best efforts, by placing her chin on any available knee and managing somehow to look skinny, and she taught them exactly where she liked to be scratched on belly, under chin, and behind those soft ears.

Pal went ‘to death’s door’ many times in her life, following that initial Parvo Virus scare. She almost died from turkey bones that I had stupidly let her have, she picked up poison so that her stomach lining began to literally peel away, and towards the end of her life we battled cancer. Again and again, she bounced back, until finally she could fight no longer, nor would I ask it of her more. The vet came to our house and she went to sleep, quietly and unafraid, in my arms.

The O’Reilly’s little grandson, Emmet, who had formed an extraordinary bond with Pal, asked his grandmother recently: “If I made a big, big ladder, could I climb up to heaven and see Pal again?” If he does, I responded when I heard, let me know: I’ll be on the rung beneath him.

While Pal was alive, it was difficult for me to be late home from work, particularly on a wet, cold day, because – unless she was locked in – I’d find a cold, sodden creature inside the O’Reilly’s gate when I arrived, despite the fact that she would have played and slept contentedly all day till then. When I went on holidays, she never bothered about the gate until I returned home, but, once, when I arrived in Dublin airport late one evening, Tom O’Reilly told me the next day that she’d gone out the evening before to lie waiting there.

I still feel her gentle presence quite often in the house, particularly in my room late at night, and I truly believe, like Emmet, that when I die, along with family and friends, there will be a black and white spaniel and collie mix lying waiting patiently inside Heaven’s gates for me to finally return home.

Posted in Friends, House Family, McManus Family | 2 Comments »

Easter Gifts

By noeleenm on April 18th, 2006

Gint arrived down to breakfast on Easter Sunday morning, looking a bit sheepish, and handed me a box of mint chocolates. It was a gift for me from Elke, he explained, which she left with Gint before going home, with instructions to deliver it at Easter. The reason for his embarrassment was that he had told me the day before that Easter is celebrated in Latvia on Monday, not Sunday, and it took phone calls from home on Sunday morning, wishing him a Happy Easter, to make him realise he was mistaken! 

I understood perfectly. When I went to Ecuador, way back in the ‘70s, I arrived in Esmeraldas in April, just after Easter. On the first Sunday in May they celebrated Mother’s Day, and I sent a tearful message home to my own mother. … Except that Mother’s Day in Ireland is celebrated, as it is in England, on the fourth Sunday in Lent: it was originally called Mothering Sunday, and tradition has it that on that day apprentices were released to visit their mothers. I had already celebrated Mother’s Day at home with my mother before leaving for Ecuador, except that by May – in pre e-mail and pre cheap telecommunication days – March seemed like another century and Ireland like another planet. My family, of course, thought the equatorial sun had already baked my brains when they got my homesick greetings… 

So I understood Gint’s confusion, particularly as I knew precisely from where it had come… 

Katerina, from the Czech Republic, works on reception the local hotel of the Group for which I work (where Gail still works in reservations, and where Elke worked on reception till recently). She had explained to me on Good Friday that in her country, and in Slovakia, Easter Monday is the big celebratory day. One of the nicest customs, she explained with great enthusiasm, is that, on that day, the men and boys of the house leave early in the morning to return with switches plaited from willows – and ‘beat’ the womenfolk until they are given eggs… They have until 12 noon to do this, so the women must be prepared with the eggs from early morning. 

That evening the whole village gets together, men and women, and celebrate. Do the women get a chance to beat the men then, I asked? Apparently not… 

Now Katerina is no wilting female, and, as far as I know, she isn’t into bondage. She’s studying journalism, and seems to me to be an extremely well adjusted individual. This pretend ‘beating’ is simply something that reminds her of her beloved village. When she went on to explain that herself and her partner, Martin, have already plaited some willows and they will ‘make a little Easter like home’ with friends from Slovakia in Charlesland, near Greystones, where they now live, I found myself going ‘aaah…’ Over a beating…?! 

When I told Gint about this, he said they don’t have the custom of beating the women with plaited willows (he’ll probably start it when he goes home), but they too celebrate Easter on the Monday, rolling eggs down nearby hills. Hence, his confusion when he got calls from home on the Sunday – and his sheepishness. He hates to be wrong about history, geography, or cultures, his great interests.

It didn’t spoil his day out with his friends, though, and I enjoyed my day at home, ending with a meal out with friends. As I was spending Monday morning at the car boot sale with my SWAP colleagues, and then going on to visit my sister, Mary, and her family in Wicklow, it meant that Gint and I would not have celebrated Easter together at all. So we arranged to share a meal and an Easter bottle of wine in the house around 8pm.

…But, in the course of a walk along the river in Wicklow with Mary (as we fell about laughing over a visit to her doctor in which Mary’s memory was tested, because of a very unfunny fall in which she banged her head very badly), we were approached by two young German girls who were looking for the local hostel. We directed them and carried on, only to meet them again later. The hostel had closed down. They were exhausted, didn’t seem to have the money for a B&B, and we decided, after consultation, that I would drive them to the next closest hostel in Rathdrum. We left them resting by the river while Mary and myself went back for my car. 

As we walked back, we got to talking about whether or not there would be beds available in Rathdrum, about how it would be if some of the young people from our family found themselves stranded abroad without a bed for the night, and about how there’s an empty twin room in my house right now… 

Ingrid and Steffie ended up back in my house for the night – the best Easter present I could have given Gint, who brightened up considerably from his loneliness since Michele and Elke and Gail have left. The girls will head on to Belfast tomorrow morning, as Gint and I return to work. But the talk and the laughter tonight, and the feeling of a quiet, full house around me as I write this in the early hours of Tuesday morning, was a good way to end this Easter time. 

Posted in Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, McManus Family | 1 Comment »