My grandfather was born in Pomeroy, a village of about 300 in County Tyrone. He stood to inherit his family’s farm, but didn’t want to be a farmer, and so emigrated to the United States in his early twenties–around 1928, I believe. There he married, had children, and moved about, eventually settling in Alaska, but by the forties or fifties, he’d lost contact with the family in Ireland.
In the early 1970’s, after his wife died, the Old Man, as we called him, went back East to visit New York City. While he was there, he stopped in an Irish bookstore to ask after a specific book. The woman running the place, who had an Irish accent herself, said she didn’t have it, but that she went back to the old country regularly and could get a copy.
No, my grandfather said, I live in Alaska, it’s too much trouble.
Not at all, the woman said. Just give me your address, and I’ll ship it to you. So Grandpa wrote down his name and address and handed the woman the slip of paper. She took it, looked at it, and said, very slowly, “Your father was a schoolmaster, and you left home when you were very young.”
Her name was Annie, and she had been eight years old when Grandpa left Pomeroy for America. She remembered it vividly; it had been an enormous occasion, for the son of the schoolmaster to go away, and the whole village had marked it.
“Do you mind,” she asked, “if I say that I saw you, when I go home again?”
The Old Man didn’t mind, and went back to Alaska, where he related this story to his befuddled family, who thought it was astonishing that in a city of eight million, he should happen on a woman who’d come from his own tiny Irish village of three hundred. He himself shrugged it off with, “It was an Irish bookstore.”
Fast-forward to 1989.
My uncle Hugh, Grandpa’s oldest son, was walking down the beach in Juneau, where he lived. He heard a woman calling her dog, and because the woman had an Irish accent, stopped to talk to her. She spent several months a year visiting County Mayo, and they exchanged names and chatted a while, then went their separate ways.
Some time later, this same woman flagged Hughie down in a grocery store parking lot, shouting that she’d been looking all over for him. She’d just returned from Ireland, where she’d been visiting her mother. One afternoon her mother had a visitor over, a woman named Maureen McAleer, who, upon hearing that she lived in Alaska, inquired if she knew any Malones, “because the last she’d heard of her brother, he was in Alaska.”
As a matter of fact, the woman said, she’d just met a man named Hugh Malone.
Maureen clapped her hands together and said, “That must be them. My father’s name was James Hugh Malone,” which was, in fact, my uncle’s full name.
Hughie called my mother, and my mother called Maureen that night. She was, indeed, my grandpa’s youngest sister, who’d married and moved to the west of Ireland.
The next spring, my mother and grandfather flew to Ireland, sixty years after Grandpa had left, to be reunited with the old family. Grandpa said, quite seriously, to my mother, “Maureen’s changed,” as if in sixty years he hadn’t changed at all.
Maureen wasn’t the only thing that had changed. His brother and other sister, Peter and Eileen, had died, and Ireland itself had changed dramatically. Grandpa was astonished at how liberal it had become, and how little daily effect the Church seemed to have on the country anymore. He grew up during the Easter Rebellion years, and wasn’t prepared for the lack of passion regarding the ongoing problem in the north. For a man who’d grown up Catholic in Protestant Tyrone, in a time when Catholics literally were not permitted education and met in secret to do their learning, it was an entirely different world.
But his brogue got thicker as they drove across the country, and by the time they reached Westport, where my family now lives, Mom said you’d think he’d never left.
There’s a song that was sung when the Old Man left Ireland, called The Parting Glass. The lyrics without the music don’t do it justice, but I imagine it’ll be sung at Maureen’s wake, as it was at Grandpa’s, and as I’d like it to be someday at my own.
Of all the money that e’er I spent
I’ve spent it in good company
And all the harm that ever I did
Alas it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you allIf I had money enough to spend
And leisure to sit awhile
There is a fair maid in the town
That sorely has my heart beguiled
Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips
I own she has my heart enthralled
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you allOh, all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all