Home Again

This video was shot by my nephew Jim Hagarty on his first trip to Ireland in 2018. Jim is a professional filmmaker. – Jim

One of the games I like to play with history is to imagine myself present at an historical event of hundreds of years ago or in the presence of a noted figure from the past, such as William Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln. The fantasy doesn’t last long and it is not unique to me. I wouldn’t mind being a time traveller, I suppose, providing a stray bullet didn’t find me during a real Civil War battle I was attending.

So when I think of my ancestral farm cottage in Ireland, it gives me a guilty pleasure to imagine myself entering that long, low stone house in County Cork in the early 1840s when all ten members of my kin, the Hegartys, were living there. I wonder what sights I would see. Would I be welcome, would I be run off?

Growing up, I always believed that my Irish ancestors were perfectly fluent in the English language. Where I was raised in Canada, we were surrounded by immigrants and I often heard the German and Dutch languages spoken, maybe others. Those languages sounded so strange to me and because I couldn’t understand a word that was being said, I clearly identified those neighbours as foreign.

But my family spoke English for hundred of years, I believed. Actually, I never even thought much about it. I took it for granted.

However, in doing the research I did for my family history book Home Again, I was assured by not one, but two men in Ireland, one of them a historian, that English would have been a second language for my ancestors. They would have known enough to get by in the business world, but would have conversed with each other and their neighbours in Irish. This astonished me, and the only indication I have that this was the case, was the story handed down about how the children of Bridget Hegarty and Timothy Regan would giggle at night to hear their parents on their knees saying their bedtime prayers in what to them were the funny sounding words of Gaelic.

So if I knocked on the door of the cottage in Coolbaun Townland near Conna in 1842, and was invited in, would I even be able to understand what my family were saying to each other and to me? Having not yet left for North America, they might wonder why this time traveller couldn’t speak their language.

I would hope for a warm welcome. I wonder if that is what I would get. What food would I eat, what drink would I drink? Would they play games I am unfamiliar with? Maybe the scene would be such a culture shock for me that I would want to get back home as soon as I could.

I wonder.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

I published a big history book 15 years ago and at the time, Canadian author/historian Pierre Berton also had one out and he was charging $50 for his. So I charged $50 for mine. Even at that steep price, I sold a lot of them. I would like to sell even more of them but sales have fallen off.

Yesterday, however, I got an urgent request from someone who had bought my book. Her dog ate her copy and she wants another one. Ca-ching. Another 50 for me!

This has had me thinking all day about the meaning of all this. It’s obvious. If more dogs would eat my books, sales would skyrocket. The woman left my book on a lower level of her bookshelf which is how the dog came to dine on it. Therefore, I need to contact the many people who have bought my book and encourage them to put it lower on their bookshelves. I will tell them heat rises and the book will deteriorate if they put it too high on their shelves, near the ceiling. I would suggest the bottom shelf or one up from the bottom.

Next, there needs to be some encouragement for the dogs to make a meal of my book. I might tell the owners that to keep bookworms and mold away from my book, an effective precaution would be to rub the cover with a dog biscuit, maybe even leave a few crumbs inside. Meanwhile, from my end, I will work on somehow scenting, with dog-appealing aromas, every new book that I sell.

Who said I don’t know anything about marketing!

Ha!

©2014 Jim Hagarty

Please forward all future mail to my new home in the Welsh village of Llanfair­pwllgwyn­gyllgo­gery­chwyrn­drobwll­llanty­silio­gogo­goch. In English, that translates St. Mary’s Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of Saint Tysilio of the Red Cave. I checked out two other villages before deciding on the one in Wales but I found that the people who live in A in Norway and Y in France keep things just way too simple for me.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

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.)

Here is a cover of Rita MacNeil’s Working Man, recorded recently by my friend and fellow Saturday jammer Johnny MacMillian. I include this song because I know that Rita MacNeil, of Nova Scotia, was popular in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. – Jim

I don’t know how this works, but apparently it is not enough that I invited you to join my Facebook page by the same name as this blog. I am getting a lot of messages from Facebook telling me to tell you that you will get more of my blog postings on Facebook if you “like” my Facebook page. Apparently Facebook is rationing what it is showing users now so while I assume you are seeing everything I post to Facebook, you might not be. So please like my Facebook page, Home Again, and you will get to see more of my stuff.

Thanks. I am so glad for your interest.

Jim

It rains a lot in Ireland and one time when I was there, I saw a painter painting a storefront in the pouring rain. It wasn’t raining too heavily and the part he was painting was probably not in threat of getting too soggy, but the thought of painting in the rain brought a smile to my face. Dancing in the rain, maybe, but painting?

Being of Irish descent and prone to exaggeration, I have now extrapolated this little scene into a general theory which I often mention to people. When the subject of Ireland comes up, I always work into the conversation the “fact” that it rains so much in Ireland the painters have to paint in the rain. All because I saw one guy do it. So, forgive me Irish people, for “painting” you with an unflattering brush, if that’s what I did.

I especially beg forgiveness in light of the fact that on Friday, I painted my shed in the rain. It wasn’t raining when I started the job but halfway through, it started to come down. I cleaned up my brushes, roller, etc., but within an hour, the rain stopped. The sun even peeked out from the clouds. So, I took out all my equipment again, ventured out to the shed, felt the walls to see how dry or wet they were, and started up painting again. After a few minutes, the rain started again, but I didn’t want to quit. I was determined to get this done. I painted over some wet surfaces so I hope the whole thing doesn’t peel right off by Wednesday.

It’s hard for me to describe the colour I used to paint the shed but the best I can do is tell you it was a light shade of karma.

Did you know that it rains so much in Canada, some fools have been known to paint in the rain? It’s true. I saw a guy do it once. He might not have been the smartest painter in the world but boy did he work fast.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I was in a Canadian village called Wellesley today, not far from my home, and saw a cat stroll across the main street, sit down in the middle of the road and have a bath. A car was coming, slowly, and a teenage girl walking along on the sidewalk tried to shoo the kitty off to the side. Finally, with absolutely no urgency, the cat got up and sauntered the rest of the way across the pavement, letting the car go by. That must be an example of how you know you are in a small town. I was driving down the main downtown street in Killarney, Ireland, years ago when I spotted a dog having a sleep in an area of the road where the sunlight was shining. Cars, bikes and even a tour bus all drove around the dog and so did I and left him to enjoy the sun which sometimes is a very welcome sight in the soggy environment of the Emerald Isle. I liked that.

©2012 Jim Hagarty