Let Them Eat Cake

We had a plan for the day, a long , collective "To Do" list. It would have been a lie to say that any of us were particularly enthusiastic about anything on that list so it wasn't that hard to persuade the three younglings (though that's an increasingly anachronistic term for the giant of a teenager who fills the front passenger seat) to jump in the Mini and head to the midlands for their cousin's birthday party.

Quasar, coffee, bowling and cake. Sunny garden games, home made cup cakes and sunshine. Cliff hanging football on the television and great conversation in the kitchen. Doing rounds of country roads with the roof down, my ears ringing with the delighted screams of my God Daughter's friends. The modern equivalent of donkey rides on the beach (someone suggested getting the car a straw hat!).

An unexpectedly lovely afternoon.

Oh and the cake? Another magnificent creation from my baby sister.

Inspiration

Every once in a while, a seed of inspiration settles in one of those small, fertile crevasses in my soul, and manages to take root just long enough for me to be able to recognise its presence and nurture it before it is dessicated by the dry winds of work or torn up by the storms of life.

Sometimes that little seed will blossom into a poem or a turn of phrase that I'll feel confident enough about to want to share it with others. If I'm really really lucky, someone will say "I see" in response.

People: their presence; their absence; their words, have been the most recent sources of inspiration for me. The discovery that I had an ability to respond to that inspiration , however halting and inconsistent that response might be, is something for which I am truly grateful.

Places, whether it is the memory of laurel walks and the smell of turf smoke, or the sound of crunching gravel and the cooing of pigeons high in wind rustled trees have also fueled my imagination released crystal streams of words that surprise me every time they begin to trickle and flow.

The wonderful thing about words is that we are hardly ever without the means to share or capture them. Visual inspiration is a much more troublesome thing, for me at least. I can see in my minds eye, brilliant pictures, shapes and colours, but all too often they are as fleeting as a rainbow and I can never find the means to share them.

Sitting by the water's edge recently, on a brilliant summer's afternoon, in a place which as been the source of so much inspiration for me, a place where creativity and talent are so plentiful it must surely have infected the air and the water, I had a rare and lovely moment of inspiration. One where the idea , the means to express it and the joy of having someone say "I see" all came together in an instant.

Picking through a hoard of sea glass, I was struck by two pieces in particular and turned to my youthful beach combing companions and said "doesn't that look like....." , and soon we were caught up in excited chatter and plans for a little piece we called "Bride and Groom".

Beachcombing

A jumble of thoughts for today's blog, inspired by a recent trip to the beach where I watched my younglings explore the muddy , lovely, haven that is the Cove in Baltimore. Between mudbaths and body boarding, they searched with growing excitement for mermaid's tears. We sorted our hoard, grading colour and shape, throwing back those sharp edged fry whose formation by burnishing sea and sand was incomplete.

Amidst the glass, small shards of crockery reminded me of a lovely project by local artist Ginny Pavry which reflected on how the value of seemingly worthless things is transformed by their association with people , places or events.














And later, failing to find a poem or a song that captured the magic of that afternoon, I thought of this, by Pablo Neruda.



Ode to Broken Things

Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
It’s not my hands
or yours
It wasn’t the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
It wasn’t anything or anybody
It wasn’t the wind
It wasn’t the orange-colored noontime
Or night over the earth
It wasn’t even the nose or the elbow
Or the hips getting bigger
or the ankle
or the air.
The plate broke, the lamp fell
All the flower pots tumbled over
one by one. That pot
which overflowed with scarlet
in the middle of October,
it got tired from all the violets
and another empty one
rolled round and round and round
all through winter
until it was only the powder
of a flowerpot,
a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.

Let’s put all our treasures together
– the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold –
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway.

Shrine

I had seen a reference to this in last week's papers, without fully realising that it was my local bank branch. I've walked past this bank countless times in the past five years or so, head high and head down and yet I had somehow missed this Man. The thought that he could have been there so often and so visibly that other people who passed that way were moved by his passing, and yet I had no memory of him disturbed me. A man once told me that I saw nothing when I ran and should walk with my eyes open. It was good advice.

Da....

Some time ago, a friend chided me for using the term "Da Northside", assuming that I had been using it with a mocking tone, rather than with an affectionate humour that I had thought, wrongly as it happened, was obvious. A couple of weeks back, I spent the evening with my Dad and Brother, enjoying a drink in an old haunt across from my family home. The following morning, I went for a run, shaking off a well earned hangover and thinking about an idea for a blog about my Dad. I threaded my way around my old parish, past the landmarks of my childhood: the primary school where I has started as a junior infant in my royal blue jumper and grey shorts; the , all boys, "Big School" next door to which we graduated for first class; the red brick church where I'd served as an altar boy and attended mass every weekday morning during lent as a cover for meeting the girls from the neighbouring secondary school; the hall where I'd made my first stage appearance as one of the shoe makers elves; the half hidden monument to one of the more brutal tragedies of our country's history; the small house where my parents had begun their married life nearby and a small concrete post that tested our leapfrogging skills and almost cost us our manhoods on more than one occasion, particularly after our earliest experiences with alcohol.

As I ran on, still thinking about my Dad, but now in the context of the place where I had spent so much of my youth, it struck me that while I've shared a lot of that part of my childhood that I'd spent in the green fields of Co. Westmeath, with my children and my friends, I'd never really shared that much of my life in Dublin. It was as if there were no pictures to hang in these particular rooms in the gallery of my life. Perhaps a better way to think about it would be that there are images that have needed some restoration to bring out their full colour and meaning.

In any case, this blog is a small, first attempt to redress the balance. I've kept the title because in a way, its still about my Da.