Reading and Remembering

I feel moved to interrupt the regular course of events this morning to put fingers to keyboard. We have had our walk on the malecon and soon I will resume my pattern of going up to the roof for a swim. In the meantime I want to send serious condolences to all of you up north, many of whom have been sending me reports of unparalleled cold, ice, and snow. I feel here somewhat as I did the first time I visited Vancouver: all I could think of was, “Why isn’t everyone living here?” I know that I am amazingly fortunate to be in Vallarta, not just because of missing the difficult winter, but because it is in itself such a place of beauty and delight.

Last night I took several books around the corner to A Page in the Sun, a local cafe and used book store. Gaby, the owner, is Mexican; her husband is French-Canadian. They have lived in Canada at times and he continues to go there to work during the summers. Gaby accepts used books for her shelves in return for credit on others. I have picked up a couple of her books since we arrived; last night I purchased a large volume of the collected stories of Frank O’Connor. Wow! He packs a tremendous Irish punch. I am five generations removed from the old sod on my father’s side, though there is also a great deal of Celt in my mother’s Scottish background. Every now and then I come across a film or a story that sets that heritage alight within me in ways that probably would mean little to my children, and even less to my grandchildren whose polyglot backgrounds set within a “multicultural” and secular Toronto bear little reference to the “olden times.” The BBC series ‘The Irish RM’ did that for me as did the books upon which they were based. James Joyce Dubliner stories, and powerfully the film by John Hughes’ son of the last story of that collection, “The Dead,” completely wowed me and put me in touch with some sense of the society that my great-great-grandparents, Martin and Mary Doyle left when they immigrated from Wexford County, Ireland to Perth, Ontario in 1826.

In the second story that I read last night a shanty-Irish lady is telling the narrator about the tragedy of her only son’s mental illness. The patois, the lyricism of her words is faithful to the Irish-English of her era and social location. Two words were used by her that I recall from my childhood: fornenst and whisht. I suspect that they were more commonly used at my maternal grandparents’ farm or by my mother when in a particular mood. Fornenst was used in the following context: “I can’t find my book.” “It’s right fornenst ya.” Whisht (pronounced Whee-shu-st) was a command to be quiet, to shut up. My grandfather John Alexander Craig who religiously followed the politics of the day would adamantly rap out this word when his hourly news came on the radio. And we would obey!

As I read that story and another this morning I was filled with a sense of my father as I had known him when I was very young, in my first few year of life, some delicious, lovingness about him. He was my daddy and I loved him passionately. I remembered how later in his life he would speak of his own father, Charley Doyle, whom he always called Charley. “Ah, Charley would love that,” he would say, or, “I wish that Charley could see this.” He spoke of him with such love, such fondness. Though my father and I had many difficult times over the years and only on one occasion were we able to speak some painful truth to one another, I think that on another level I knew and valued something about him that I connect with in these spaces created by the stories of Joyce or Frank O’Connor. It makes me ever so happy.

I plan to launch another blog on which to post my pictures as like with the Holocaust blog, I find it difficult to manage the photos with the written word