On Father's Day

the view from here is love

On this Father’s Day I’m posting a short piece that I read at our local library recently for an event called, ‘Carrick Miscellany’. It’s for my late father, Ned, one of those ordinary, yet extraordinary, people who faced each day, often in times of great challenge, and simply did the right thing. With no fuss, without fanfare. This is for all such people. I honour you.

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Omós¹

The mountain of the women² is hazy this morning, the lower slopes visible but softened by a haze to a white / grey palette. The summit is covered with a cap of cloud. From here it would be impossible to say how high it goes, definitely not advisable to climb, you could easily lose your footing.

Sliabh na mBan (without a cap of cloud) Photo: author’s own

My father rose every day for decades to go to work in the local tannery. There were cow hides to be processed, the only sure employment in the town for men. I think of him and who he was. A countryman who lost his footing, the first time when our mother died from cancer leaving him with five young children to rear. Despite this unutterable loss³, the stress and struggles of his situation, he somehow found the will to get up each morning and do what had to be done. He went to work in the mornings, in the evenings he baked bread, he shopped for the makings of dinners that Josie, his cousin, would come and cook for us while we were at school. He regularly nodded off at the dinner table in the evenings, chin in his hands, then woke up cross because my brothers and I had taken some advantage of his exhausted slumber. We, of course, bickered over which of us did the clearing-off, the washing-up, the drying, not wanting to give a sibling an inch.

He lost his footing again, years later, when the tannery closed, as did the entire town. But he wasn’t really a townie, the countryside was in his blood. We were all reared by then and gone out into the world, so when the protests were done he accepted the inevitable and moved on. He sold our terraced house at 51 Ard Mhuire, bought a cottage with a field a few miles outside of Carrick-on-Suir, in the townland of Reatagh⁴, beside where he had been born and reared. He fixed up the cottage, did a lot of the work himself, acquired a Collie dog (that he trained to obey commands in Irish) and some sheep and went on to learn how to shear, to learn through experience about lambing, and that the latter almost always happened in the wee dark hours.

When his first great-grandchild was born, our first grandchild, he visited the new arrival and the new parents with a bunch of flowers picked from his garden and simply wrapped in newspaper. Recounting this visit to me at the time, my daughter-in-love commented that, ‘it must have been lovely to be courted by him’.

Right to the end he continued to get up every morning to do what had to be done. He died unexpectedly just weeks before his 80th birthday. All five of us, his grown children, were then to learn that grief is cumulative. The view across the valley from his home in Reatagh was from a different angle to mine this morning, but equally wide and beautiful, across the river Suir towards the mountain of the women. Ever-changing yet constant.

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1. The Irish word for ‘Homage’

2. The literal translation of Sliabh na mBan or Slievenamon, in Co. Tipperary. It has mythical links with the legends of the Fianna and Fionn McCool.

3. He very rarely spoke of it, maybe it was too immense. I suspect he might not have been able to stay going if he gave way to the depth of his loss.

4. Pronounce approximately, ‘Ray-thok’