Working Class Irish?

 

      

          The couch has been calling my name lately. The weather has been grim—cold, rainy, muddy, wintry mix—for the last three weeks. We go out during the breaks; we cleaned out the shed yesterday, slogged through snow uphill on the trail last weekend, but the couch…is very attractive.  I’ve been reading a mystery set in Ireland, in a tightly woven working class neighborhood and all I can think of is—how did my English/German family (White and Seckendorf!) learn to be so….working class Irish?

                My grandparents lived, for years, in triple-deckers in Somerville Massachusetts, an architectural  design which I still love. My cousins and I would visit during our school breaks; we’d drink sweet hot tea with my grandmother, wander down the street to the corner store to pick up her cigarettes and some candy, read  or play rummy on the back porch, and fall asleep on the pull out couch to the sound of Boston talk radio at night. I would spend hours rearranging the pantry and occasionally making a boxed cake If I was really lucky, I could walk over to my cousins on my father’s side to visit. They all let me go on my own; I was ten.

                My grandparents were the center for parties, especially in winter. Christmas, New Year’s, Saint Patrick’s day (we went to the parade in South Boston some years), get –togethers  after wakes and funerals….it was all there in the second floor dining rooms. After dinner, cousins ran around in two packs, older and younger, and, as the middle child, I tried to stay small and still at the table, so that I could listen in on the conversation.  The air was thick with cigarette smoke; cans of beer ranged around the table. Three or four aunts, a couple of uncles, and my grandparents  would start with gossip, mild at first and growing juicier as they went into the second beer. By the third, they were ready to sing. They always started with a fragmented version of “”Fling out the flag of Newfoundland” because no one knew all of the words. They moved onto “Cockles and Mussels”, my grandfather would give everyone a ditty about “bedbugs and cockroaches in the Chelsea jail” and then popular songs of the day like “Knock Three Times” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.” No one had a beautiful voice but they could all carry a tune. They sang with gusto. After the third beer, however, they could turn maudlin—count off how many family members had passed over and how many years ago—or nasty. I remember arguments and guilt being thrown around, old grudges emerging from the bottom of the beer. Finally, everyone went home, leaving me and a cousin behind for a few days. Everyone had a hang-over the next day.

                We also had a challenging relationship with the Catholic church. We all attended though First Communion and had our photos taken in the white dress or the serious suit. And then we stopped going. I am not sure why; Sunday mornings were more interesting at home? My mother did not like the priest? It was the late 1960s and church was just not important any longer? We were on the road? But it left its impressions. We had St Christopher medals. I have a drawing of a heart with a crown of thorns that was in my bedroom throughout my childhood. I still know the prayers, the genuflection as you pass the holy water, and  the stations of the cross,  and so a Catholic service feels familiar in a way that others never will. And the guilt. My entire maternal side of the family was a master class in guilt.

                And this—the singing, the drama, the family weight of guilt—all appear in the background of my book. Working class Irish. How did it happen?