MEETING KIN IN KINDRED LANDS
Sipping tea in this charming Yorkshire living room is as unlikely an event as the British turning defeat at Dunkirk into victory in World War II.
Watching Mom laughing away with my Aunt Joyce — great friends who haven’t actually seen each other since the 1980s — I laugh, too, knowing this is a cup of tea 30 years in the making.
While our family’s American history is long and colorful, Mom traced other roots back to the west coast of Ireland and the Oxfordshire countryside just northwest of London.
My previous trip here a decade earlier left me feeling the pull of time and history and blood. I knew she’d feel the same way.
But she’s scared of flying. And after a few decades of living in a rural area, she’s gotten kind of scared of cities, traffic and much of the modern world as well.
But I knew the stimuli would be good for her. Getting a woman in her 70s out of her bubble would add years to her life and make that genealogy real to her.
I bought the tickets and dropped a map and guidebooks in the mail. The next day I phoned her, asking how she’d like to spend her Mother’s Day. I suggested, “How about with me in Ireland? Because that’s what we’re doing.” It took until her passport arrived that she began to embrace at least the idea of the trip.
Over the 12-hour flight, she began to rewrite her notion that air travel was merely a roller coaster ride with jihadists. She slept better on the plane than I did.
Still, it wasn’t until Banbury, in buckets of English rain, where we found the large cemetery, but not the headstone of a few ancestors, that she began to act like this was a vacation.
The next day, I walked along the Oxford Canal as Mom bought out the Banbury Museum gift shop nearby. The remarkable old trade artery between London and the Midlands is now a scenic waterway and something of a time machine. A voyage on a canal boat would have to wait until next time.
A few hours later, the James-Herriot novelinspired Yorkshire in her mind began to spring to life as we pulled off the M1 and into Huddersfield. To use English slang, she was gobsmacked. A long row of 19th-century, brick-andstone cottages surrounded by rolling green countryside lined the way to my aunt’s house, itself a nearly 200-year-old barn converted into homes.
Before my aunt could brew the first pot of tea, a conversation commenced that only stopped long enough for sleep the few days we were all together. It was obvious each of us was trying to wring the most out of each moment, knowing this would be the last time my mom and my aunt would see each other. It was bittersweet, but more still lay ahead.
The first people we met in Ireland were two Dublin motorcycle cops. What began as a request for directions out of Dublin Port ended up a nearly two-hour communion over all manner of topics including how much they enjoyed meeting the Obamas during the first couple’s visit here a few years ago. And here began the geo-social charm offensive that is the Emerald Isle.
The next day, it happened. As we squeezed through the entrance to New Grange, the massive monument built around 3200 B.C. in the Boyne River Valley northwest of Dublin, I reminded Mom the passageway was put in place by ancient Irish hands well before the pyramids.
“This was built by us,” I told her. She agreed and put her hands out to feel the rock walls. She felt that same pull I felt a decade earlier.
Bullet holes in the giant columns in front of Dublin’s General Post Office are reminders of the battle for independence that began here just over a century ago. On an honor roll of men who served in that battle, I find a man with my name. It’s humbling.
I don’t need to sell her on this anymore. She thanks me for the time together and for what we’ve been able to do. And she buys more souvenirs.
We find a pub just down O’Connell Street and begin sorting through the moments in time we have revisited. The tiny bits of ourselves we have revisited.
We raise a couple pints of Guinness, and I laugh knowing it’s a mother-and-son beer centuries in the making.