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I remember many times being cared for by her when I was sick. In one memory, I’m probably about five years old. I’m in bed late at night with the flu, nauseated and feverish. My parents are still out at a party. A white enameled basin is on my desk chair pulled near the side of my bed. I know I am going to throw up, but I try not to. I start crying, “Missy, Missy, please come!” She comes in quickly from her room in the back of the house. She has left off her rimless bifocals, and her long grey hair is down, unpinned, no longer rolled in a neat bun at the nape of her neck. She is wearing a shapeless flannel nightgown, buttoned under her chin, hiding the scapular medal she always wears under her clothing. She takes the basin and puts it on the bed beside me, sits down in the chair. Her hands are cool and capable as she holds my head over the basin, pressing my forehead with one hand. I’m suddenly relieved, no longer afraid. I vomit into the basin.

Miss McGinty was a well-loved member of our household for twenty-one years. Nevertheless, upon reaching the age of seventy-five, after Carolyn went away to school, she returned to Ireland and lived with her nephew, Father Liam McCaul, the curate in the tiny village of Bruckless in County Donegal. On the 6th of November, 1979, our dear Missy passed away at a nursing home in Sligo, Ireland, aged ninety-eight. My two sisters and I later converted and became Catholics. Carolyn once said to me, “Missy prayed us all into the Catholic Church.”

In August 1960, just four years after Missy went home to Ireland, Carolyn and I made our very first visit there. Both of us fell instantly in love with Ireland, a love that has lasted ever since. I was coming to Ireland from Tel Aviv via Rome and London after traveling around the Middle East all summer with Anne, the woman I was in love with at the time. I had picked up a sports car in London, a brand new Sunbeam Alpine two-seater convertible that I wanted to drive around Ireland and the UK for a couple of weeks, putting some miles on the odometer before shipping it back to Pittsburgh as a used car. Carolyn had arrived in Ireland earlier, and I was to meet her there in Bruckless with Father McCaul and Missy.

I took my time, spending a few days enjoying London theatres, restaurants and night-life while the dealer prepared the car for delivery. Then I drove north, stopping overnight at a North Yorkshire village pub and watching a local cricket match on the village green, then on to catch the Irish ferry the next day from Stranraer in Scotland to Larne, just north of Belfast. Driving the Sunbeam on English roads was challenging, to say the least, since I had ordered left-hand drive for the US. That made it very hard to see oncoming traffic when I had to pass slow-moving trucks going up hills, but somehow I managed and arrived in Ireland intact.

The widow of one of my Irish cousins was living in a working class district of Belfast and had offered to put me up for the night after my crossing from Scotland. She was an attractive single mother with a cute, towheaded little boy named Tommy. Although we had never met before, Tommy seemed thrilled to see his big American cousin when I showed up at their row house in a shiny new sports car. After a whole summer touring around the capitals of Europe, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Israel, I had a savage tan, a rarity in wet, gloomy Belfast, even in August. Tommy wanted to know all about cowboys and seemed disappointed when he learned that I wasn’t one. The only other American he had ever met was Carolyn, who had spent the night there also on her way through. I slept badly on their sofa and ate a big Irish breakfast, called an “ Ulster fry,” with them before getting back in my car and heading for Donegal.

The drive to Bruckless was only about 130 miles across Northern Ireland and should have taken only three hours or so, but, between driving on the “wrong side” of what I thought were “bad” Irish roads and my stopping often along the way to see the sights, I took almost all day getting there. I realized as I drove through Omagh that I was only eight miles from Seskinore, my grandmother’s village, where most of my Irish cousins still lived and farmed. But Carolyn and I had planned to visit them later together, after spending some time with Missy and her nephew, so I didn’t stop.

Seeing my dear old Missy again after four years was wonderful. She and I both shed happy tears as we met in the parlor of the Parochial House with Carolyn and Father McCaul. They had waited for several hours for my arrival, and Carolyn had even set out walking down the lane to the village, thinking that I might have lost my way searching for the house.

We spent several days there together, being entertained by the voluble priest and driven around the rugged landscape in his little black car. Missy loved outings and would always be ready to go in an instant, wearing her hat and coat and waiting by the front door. We crossed rocky highlands, treeless and barren except for scattered patches of heather and gorse. Father McCaul had been assigned to a Catholic mission near Salt Lake City, Utah, when he had left the seminary in Ireland and been ordained. To remind his listeners of his years in the Utah desert, He kept saying things like, “Ach, Lord, would ye look at that now! Why, we’re in Indian country!” He was a terrifying driver, frequently turning around to talk to the passengers in the back seat while still negotiating the curves of the narrow, hilly country lanes and avoiding the many sheep wandering across them. Fortunately, there was very little traffic in Ireland in those days. About the only people who drove “motor cars” in small Irish villages in 1960 were the priests and doctors, their version of “first responders.”

Catholic Bruckless was a very small village, inhabited mainly by sheep farmers and fishermen. Unlike Protestant Seskinore, however, it was served by several pubs. They were nothing like the cozy fireside pub in the John Wayne — Maureen O’Hara classic, The Quiet Man. There were no prosperous, rosy-cheeked, tweed-clad, pipe-smoking country squires gathered around a polished bar enjoying perfectly poured pints of Guinness. There was no impromptu accordion player leading a harmonious chorus of The Wild Colonial Boy. No, when I ventured into the village and went into the nearest pub, it was like entering a dark, smoky cave, redolent with the odors of pigs, sheep, fish and human sweat, and guarded by a few solemn old men sitting around the walls on rough benches, trying to make their pints last forever.

It was during that first visit to Ireland that I came to appreciate the full significance of the old saying, “Make hay while the sun shines.” A typical weather forecast for a summer day in Ireland is “showery with sunny spells.” Driving around Donegal with Father McCaul, we would come over the top of a rocky hill and descend into a green glen that was enjoying a few hours of sunshine. People of all ages and genders seemed to have appeared magically from nowhere, wielding scythes and rakes and “saving the hay,” as Father McCaul put it. Many of the men stripped off their shirts and worked in sleeveless undershirts, their faces red and sweating in spite of the fact that the temperature was only in the sixties. Women and children were raking, bundling and stacking the hay so it would stay dry after the next shower, never very long in arriving.

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