Haunted By Irishmen

I'm being haunted by four Irishmen -- I thought they were all dead but I just went on Wikipedia and found out that one of them (the one I've never met) is still alive. My ghosts are not the typical ghosts of Irish writers -- no James Joyce or William Butler Yeats for me. No, I am haunted by my father, John, my uncle Jess, my high school English teacher Frank McCourt, and Liam Clancy.

As I've reported, I'm having a tough week. Can't get going on a writing project, pretty sure I hate the protagonist of the novel I've plotted and thought I was excited about, wondering why I'm trying to do any of this.

For the last few days whenever I've sat down to do something that is amusing but clearly a time waster (watching French soap operas on TV, reorganizing the closet in the garage where cleaning products are stored, looking for new people to friend on Facebook), I get this weird feeling in my shoulders and I can almost see the four of them sitting on the sofa behind me, all in jaunty tweed jackets, their heads tilted a bit to the side, just watching me. Finally one of them will say to me: "So, what are you waiting for? You think you have something to say, so say it."

I don't know that much about Liam Clancy, but the other three were certainly not the sort to sit around waiting for perfect circumstances to get on with the thing they thought they wanted to do. My father spent his best hours playing and teaching music while working an office job to feed and clothe his family, my uncle Jess was an amateur historian who filled his house with volumes on English legal history which he read after he retired from the New York fire department. And we all know the story of Frank McCourt, who apparently was struggling to find a way to express himself during the very years he was showing me and my fellow students the beauty and joy of simply reading our language out loud.

One of my favorite memoirs is Pete Hamill's "A Drinking Life." Hamill grew up in Brooklyn and is quite a bit older than me, but his description of growing up in an Irish neighborhood where the accepted path to nirvana was a government job with a pension and a dependable tavern at the end of the street rang very true to me. But there is a passage at the beginning of Chapter 6 that I listen to over and over again. Hamill describes his decision to turn down an apprencticeship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he was in high school, wanting to pursue his dream of becoming a cartoonist and bohemian. Hamill wonders if what he is hearing from his priest and others around him is true -- is it arrogant and a sin of pride to conceive of a life beyond the neighborhood? He expresses this point of view in a simple way: "Who did I think I was? Who the f--k did I think I was?"

I think it's a phrase that runs through the mind of not only thousands of children of Irish immigrants, but probably just as many aspiring writers, musicians, painters, etc. as well. I see now that I am among the fortunate. While my mother did subscribe to and espouse that view of the world, many other important influences in my early life didn't. So, as I sit here wondering who the f--k I think I am, there are four other people filling my brain with the message that I need to just get on with it.