Monday morning quarterbacking

It’s Monday so I will indulge a what-if scenario. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t left Ireland when I was 18. The plays of Friel and Synge, the poetry of Heaney and Yeats--all very much of the places where they spent their formative years. When I lived here, I was so in love with everything about Ireland--place names, turns of phrase, the low brooding sky, the infinite shades of green, the music. I wonder what could have happened if I stayed here rather than being committed to four years at a U.S. university then on to a career in the U.S. I wonder if I could ever have translated my love for the land and it’s people into prose? Could I have been a creative writer instead of a technical writer?

“It’s not too late,” David said. However, the passion you experience as a teenager--about everything--is potent stuff. As an adult, after decades in America, my intense adolescent feelings come back to me as a whisper, a pale ghost of what was. In the creaky museum, as I looked at yellowed newspaper clippings about fiddlers and ceilidh dances, I smiled as I thought of my youthful self, so in thrall to all things Irish. I still feel love for Irish culture but that feeling is maybe 5% of the teenage intensity--not quite the same potent source material for a writer.

I’m reading a book right now by Colm Toibin called New Ways to Kill Your Mother. It’s about the family influences on Irish writers (so far Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Brian Moore, Roddy Doyle, with many chapters to go). One of the themes is that of the emigrant writer, who has physically left his country (all men so far), but whose writing obsessively catalogs the mother country. This could disprove my theory that distance makes the heart grow disconnected. However all of these writers were older when they left--they didn’t all leave--and they returned repeatedly. So I think it was easier to write possessively about their homeland than it would be for a drop-in like me, who spent six years in Derry, then was forced to leave. I had a plan B, to live with the woman at my high school who maintained the science labs--Mrs. Murphy. But that just wasn’t on with my mom.

So I worked in the U.S. as a newspaper reporter for 12 years and a financial writer for 18. I listened to Irish music, read Irish authors, and dreamed of coming back to the place where I felt most at home. And, now I’m here, it’s fun to play the “what if I’d never left” game.
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