They’re not as young as they used to be

A long delayed visit to parents begs the question, ‘Where is home?’

Photo: canva.com/JByard

Photo: canva.com/JByard

You know...There is an instant when you are about to leave home with an idealised image of what you are leaving. A mental and emotional picture of people and place imprints a tourist brochure image on the memory that remains frozen in time. It is a useful sanity shield, which helps deal with the confusion and discomfort of new and unfamiliar surroundings experienced during the travels of life.

In times of confusion that idealised picture comes alive. Momentarily, it displaces the confusion. It is a source of security offering a safety net to pause, reflect, recompose and begin to grapple again with the uncomfortable reality of the present.

A tourist brochure picture is an asset in the migratory mind. However, it can also be a prison in which the past is lived out in the present, as if caught between two worlds like a bird whose wings are jammed in two branches, betwixt and between, neither here nor there, hanging between the past and the present, always on a threshold, liminal. It is an unhealthy, anxious situation, probably carrying a burden of unresolved grief, nostalgia, a hankering for the abandoned past. But that is not all this story is about.

My neighbour, Joe Divilly, possessed a business-oriented mindset from his early years. My lasting memory of him is from 1948, as a young boy in short pants reversing his father’s truck loaded with agricultural produce for the Galway City Market, stores and hotels, in the dark hours of a Friday morning before school.

After finishing school at 14, Joe started work, an apprenticeship in his parent’s village store. Gradually, he soaked up the procedures, processes and politics of running a business. At his father’s passing, he took on the day-to-day running of the business, helped by his mother and sisters. In doing so, he gradually became acquainted with the countryside and its people, who were his customers.

It must have been difficult as a teenager in the 1950s post-colonial, newly independent, rural Ireland with its high levels of unemployment, poverty and emigration. Joe must have been seriously tempted to emigrate like his contemporaries, as a declining population is not a good omen or encouragement for business expansion.

Yet, he stayed at home, using his energy and acumen to keep the business not just going, but gradually expanding. He had antennas for what was stirring in the country, as the government of the day gradually expanded the economy into the rural farming areas in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

He met and married Theresa. She had a business background from her role in her uncle’s hotel. Both experiences gelled and brought a new energy to an old, established rural enterprise. They were not just serving the needs of the public. Looking into the future, they were able to preempt emerging needs and market demands.

They knew the countryside and the people they served, not just those who came to the store, but through a mobile service that travelled the country byroads. They were, so to speak, the daily eyes and ears, the social media of the countryside. As their young family grew, they too helped with the daily chores.

Sometime in the 1980s, I was making my way home to visit my parents. Somewhere along the way, I met Joe, who welcomed me. As we sat having a drink and sharing our experiences, we also discussed the past, present and future. Joe talked about the happenings around the countryside, births, marriages and deaths.

He recounted how things had changed, people coming and going, business, politics and general gossip. He had a relaxed way of easy conversation about news and events not reported in the formal media. He assured me my parents were hale and hearty.

And then, he said something about my parents I had not thought of, but he felt a neighbourly need to remind me. Joe said, in a kindly under-toned aside, “You know they’re not as young as they used to be.” Temporarily taken aback, his remark was letting me down easy as it defrosted my frozen tourist brochure image of the way they were the day I left many years before.

There and then I realised I was not coming home to the countryside I knew or the parents I bade goodbye to many years before. In fact, I was not coming home at all. My home was elsewhere. I was a visitor. 

My tourist brochure picture of the home and people I loved was out of sync with the reality of the present. Time had moved on. It was a wake-up call to confront and deal with the reality of the present. There and then I realised my parents were in their feeble, senior years and I was no longer young either.

As we went our separate ways, I was confronted with the conundrum of where home was. Was it in the places I went to school, lived and worked, the seminary, the Philippines, London, Jamaica, or did I carry it around on my back?

Eventually, I reached the conclusion that home was in my shoes. Home was wherever I happened to be. Meeting Joe was a re-awakening I will always appreciate. Thanks Joe. ... they’re not as young as they used to be.

Columban Fr Bobby Gilmore lives and works in Ireland.

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