It’s a phenomenon stranger than jet lag the way a person’s nationality transforms itself in the air mid-way between America and the Old Country.
A few weeks before departure, an Ireland-bound young Canadian with Irish roots is, most positively, an Irishman. Sure, his thick, Irish accent’s lost a little in 150 years and he’s a few freckles shy of a faceful but he’s as Irish as whiskey, spuds and the colour green and eternally proud to call himself so.
“Yes, well, I’ve never actually been there before,” he tells you before he leaves, “but I know the country like the back of my hand. My ancestors were from there, of course, and I’ve been readin’, hearin’ and singin’ about Ireland all my life.”
But to his seatmate on the airplane, a “real” Irish native heading home for a visit to Dublin after three years in Toronto, our young traveller begins to confide his tremendous pride in his native Canada and before the five-hour flight is over, the conversation has switched from talk about Irish pubs, castles and cobblestones to Canadian landscape, history and hockey teams.
When both feet finally land on Irish soil for the first time, the proud young Irishman from Stratford, Ontario, turns suddenly as Canadian as Pierre Trudeau, Gordon Lightfoot and Anne of Green Gables. And to all the other natives of Ireland he meets over the next three weeks, he introduces himself, not as an Irishman, but as a Canadian.
Before the trip ends, though he loves the Emerald Isle even more now than he did in his dreams and his songs, he begins to miss home. Small things he longs for. Like a hot, dry sun on a dusty day in mid-July. Country music on the radio. The National TV News from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The sight of wide open fields, not a hill in sight. And people with suntans.
Heading home, mid-Atlantic, le voyageur Canadien gets clunked again across the back of the noggin by the shillelagh of whatever leprechaun knocked the Irish out of him at about the same in-flight spot three weeks earlier and once again, he’s an Irishman.
Next night. Gathering of relatives. Guess what? In a newly acquired, mild Irish accent, he tells them there’s not a country on earth as beautiful as Ireland. People are the friendliest in the world. Food tastes best. Women are the prettiest. Singers are the finest. Music’s the most musical.
And get this. Can’t wait to go back.
He really can’t.
©1986 Jim Hagarty
(Update 2019: The nationality-confused boy has been back to Ireland five times since he wrote this story.)