March 10, 2007

The Ireland Prologue

A map of Ireland was laid out on the kitchen countertop. We were reciting our bus tour and tracing our route from Dublin to Galway.

“Looks like we won’t be passing through Carrickmacross.” My father said.

“Where is that?” I asked.

He extended his arm across the map with his pen in his hand. He let the tip fall at the intersection of several lines several inches above Dublin.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I finally got in touch with my cousin, Little Kay” my mother answered.

She wasn’t returning my calls. Turns out she winters in Florida. The girl who watches her house finally listened to the messages and called them down to her.

My mother had inquired about her family history several weeks ago, in preparation for our family trip to Ireland. Her family tree has been pruned close to the trunk and there is little left of it and few to ask about what remains. With nothing more than a surname, my mother was led to Monsignor James Carroll who serves in Arizona. He is a cousin of my grandfather. The Father, in failing health was not able to take the call. But his care taker, Mary Francis, was an informed caretaker. She told my mother all she could. My grandmother’s surname, Finnegan was confirmed, and my mother learned that the families origin was a town called Carrickmacross, on County Monaghan.

It was a small town situated at the end of my father’s pen, roughly splitting the distance between Belfast and Dublin. With that information, my parents dug a little deeper and found there is no shortage of Finnegan’s still in the area today.

“You’ll be happy to know” my mother added, “that one was a proprietor of a grocery and spirit store.”

Upon verification, I learned my distant relatives were not witches, they sold liquor.

My father sat down his pen and continued reading the week’s itinerary.

“And one other thing.” My mother added, as an afterthought. “Mary Francis said they came through the port in Boston. They were told they could find work in Albany, so they bought train tickets to there. But they accidentally took the train to New Albany, Ohio. Hence, I was eventually born in Columbus."

Family ancestry has been a recent topic for me. I have had the good fortune to travel many places in recent months, some near to the places from which I came. The effects of uncovering this information and trying to define who I am - from a pedigree’s standpoint - have been tumbling in my head. So too for that matter - is why is why anyone is born into what they are and where they are, and why it never seems to be questioned too much.

I looked again at the map lying on the kitchen counter. I stared at the small circle with the mark from my father’s pen tip. I stared at that spot where the lines crossed in the white space north of Dublin. I looked up from the kitchen counter and out the window into the dark Ohio farmland. Even in the black of night, I could still visualize the flat and quiet horizon that cleaved clean across the landscape; the silent backdrop of every sight and every memory I have ever made of my home; A home that was made in part from a mistaken train ticket from an unemployed family that took them 500 miles too far past Albany. I looked out into the blank darkness. My mind drew the line for me, dividing everything is see and everything I know.

There is no such thing as fate. It is just another man’s mistake at a train depot in Boston. It is not divinely prescribed nor inherently controlled. We are all bastards born of unanticipated consequence. We are born into a reality that is made unknowingly for us. It is made from the residual effects of past lifetimes full of everyday actions and the effects they create. It is a reality I cannot escape, even if I wanted to. Life will always have an outcome. And it is the only outcome we can ever know. Whether the 190 pounds of the world I occupy would be from upstate New York or Central Ohio, it is meat and blood and bones just the same.

[For thoughts on 95 lbs. of it, read: The Germany Impact ]

I folded up the map. I abandoned fate. I looked again into the dark and silent landscape a mistaken train ticket eventually bought for me. My mind drew that long horizon that divided and defined my life. For it, I am grateful, I reminded myself. And to honor it I must question it. Understanding is the greatest respect I could pay. Life is not preordained. It is being written everyday with the hands and train tickets of men.

I fell asleep in my parent’s house on the couch in the front room. The couch sits under the big picture window overlooking the fields south of the house. I closed my eyes and saw a mountaintop in the Great Rocky Mountains under a full moon. I stood alone at the summit in the velvet snow glowing from the moon. I screamed from the top of my lungs upon that mountaintop. It echoes through the canyons and granite. It resonates through space and through time, making sounds I could scarcely foresee, and could never intend.

Such is life, I supposed.

And should I have decided - by my own inclination and my own two feet - to turn and stand in another direction, and scream my scream down a different canyon, the echo would be of a different sound, but of equal volume just the same.

I fell asleep with the echo from Carrickmacross in my head. Outside the picture window, in a farmhouse in Ohio, the southern horizon cleaved clean through the night.

Footnote: The Thompson Ridge Road Incident

Posted by Todd Roeth at March 10, 2007 08:42 PM