As a kid, I worried about Santa Claus’s feelings. For weeks—months—he was all we thought about and talked about. We laboured over letters with our tongues stuck out, explaining that we would please like a Ballerina Sindy Clear Casters a selection box and a surprise please. We listened to the radio on Christmas Eve, dying to hear Santy read our names. That night, excitement edged towards panic as the hours refused to get out of the way. Then—sandy-eyed after bad sleep—the breathless unwrapping. What is it? What is it? Strap-on rollerskates. Here’s the Sindy. A Timex watch! And Clear Casters? No, the selection box. (Disappointment.)

And as the wrapping paper piled up, Santy disappeared from our consciousness, like a porn star after the money shot. We stood ready to catalogue our swag: “Was Santy good to you?” the aunties would ask. “What d’ya get?” said the other kids, jostling to compare. But beyond that, we didn’t give him a thought. No reports, no thank yous. No more being-good-for-Santy. Stupid old stupidhead forgot the batteries again, anyway.
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In Ireland, we didn’t get to prove our “scholastic aptitude” with a multiple-choice test of our parents’ ability to pay for Kaplan prep. Instead we faced the Leaving Certificate, a national examination that would, we sincerely believed, determine everything in our future except the color of the curtains.

For two years we consumed seven subjects. Over a June fortnight, we regurgitated this knowledge into thirty hours worth of essays and proofs. The first day, we might dispatch Yeats, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Shakespeare for good, and then choose from a list of titles the last original essay composition we would ever write. The next day, we would think about calculus, trigonometry, and quadratic equations—intensely, for six hours, and for the very last time.

Our results—graded on a national curve—were converted to points, which could be traded for college places. Five points for an A, four points for a B, and so on. These were totted up by a computer in Athlone, which existed in our minds as a Borg, a god, and an oracle in one. This Central Application Office computer already held the ranked college choices we had sent off months earlier. Under this system, we applied not just for a college but for particular courses at that college, and entry requirements shifted every year with demand. No school plays or humanitarian awards could sway the calculations of the Borg; only the Leaving counted.

Like democracy, it was the worst possible system, except for all the others. In a small country, high school credits and college interviews would have turned into a riot of patronage. The Leaving Cert was rigorous, anonymous, and required some thinking as well as regurgitation. The shared ordeal bonded each cohort forever. Unlike our English neighbors with their narrow A levels, we weren’t forced to choose too early between science and arts, or languages and business subjects. But nor were we encouraged to read much beyond our textbooks, or to distract ourselves with the Enrichment Activities with which our American counterparts were lining their résumés. Our main Enrichment Activity—apart from underage drinking—was studying for the Leaving, with its promise of a college place leading to a good job. That fitted a country that had been in recession since we were babies. The Leaving favored those freaks among us who enjoy exams and have good handwriting, but even for us it was miserable.
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“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents Stanford UP 1995

On her visit from New York last weekend, Kit had joked with Jake’s brother, her host, while we sat in Mission-Dolores Park. “Are we those relatives?” she said. She meant the ones who take over your guest room or sofa instead of booking a hotel room; the ones who impose. They told of the codes they use to tell out-of-town family they’re welcome but not that welcome: “I’m not sure if you’d be comfortable here, just because there’s a little drug action on my block sometimes…” Someone else said it was kind of sad to have your parents still crashing at your place once they got to sixty. You—or they—should be able to afford a hotel room by then.

As a child I memorized books about English boarding schools and American summer camps, and latched on to independence as a high ideal. I don’t think it was prized in Ireland, especially, but my parents indulged me anyway. (At least until I confused independence with geographical distance so thoroughly that they switched tack with my younger sisters, hoping to keep at least one of us at home.) I was sent on French exchanges and grim au pair summers; let off to London the day I turned 18; allowed to go to college in Dublin and not call home as much as I should have. At twenty I spent a year living in Valencia’s thriving drug district. The Spaniards I knew made it clear that no loving family should let a daughter roam like that, and I looked down on them in turn. Their own kids lived at home until marriage, but I was an adult.

Maybe that’s why I can still push west with a few boxes of books, at an age when my friends are bound more deeply to their places. But now I wonder—I’m a late developer—what’s so great about this Anglo-Saxon cult of individualism? I decided to move to San Francisco when I realized that for all I loved New York, I couldn’t pass the Chemo Test: though my pals filled a room for a surprise goodbye party, I wasn’t sure who I’d call if I got sick. I think of Caitriona’s son, Liam, and am wrenched at the thought of him ever joking about his embarrassing Irish ma wanting to stay at his apartment.

On Sunday I went to a birthday party for a three-year-old friend, where the guests were a mix of Irish and American. The rowdier smallies mauled cupcakes and rear-ended plastic trucks into the kitchen walls, and the placid ones sat on their nappies and supervised the backyard vegetation.

I talked to a Cork woman whose five-year-old son was a hit with the girls at the party. After years in the Bay Area, she was trying to move back to Ireland. It was too hard here as a single parent, she said, and she felt there might be more support at home. You could rely on basic health care, and probably still count on decent free public education. But since she had a good job, those weren’t biggest factors that pushed her home. What wore her down was the lack of community here, the lack of a set of friends and neighbors that the kids could run in and out to, and whom you could call when they were sick. People are friendly here, she said, but still you have to arrange the playdate at a set time and place. It’s always about the kid’s social development, never about giving each other a bit of a break.

I’ve watched my Irish friends with children, and that web of casual support is still there, at least among the ones who aren’t wealthy. “We’re bringing our lads to the park,” Joy might say, “and sure why don’t you send Maya along with us so you can get a few things done?” I thought this was how it worked everywhere. But in San Francisco, Noreen says, she knows one single father in her apartment complex with whom she can trade babysitting from time to time. The kids have no chemistry, and the father regards the time as a bartered commodity to be precisely measured, rather than a way to look out for one another. In itself, the calculation becomes exhausting.

I don’t know how her experience fits with the spirit of the party, which seemed free of the high-impact “parenting” that defines upper-middle-class families. These relaxed parents seemed happy to be nouns, not verbs, and I felt you could drop a snotty-nosed child or two at any of their houses, in a pinch. Tonight I’m going for drinks with a pair of sisters who just bought a three-unit house with their partners and a friend. Laura’s baby is a month old, and Dorothy is due soon. Their lucky babies will grow up with family in a common backyard.

Still, it’s true that American cities have started to price and market many services here that are part of the social contract elsewhere, at least for now. Places like New York and San Francisco, where so many of us live far from our families, are turning to trained and paid doulas for the pregnancy wisdom they no longer get from the community. Human mammals now seek advice from “lactation consultants.” Childcare is bought and paid for, even for a run to the shops. Adult children don’t give up their beds in tribute to the parents who reared them; they show their love and success by buying them a hotel room—and preserving that precious independence.

But “I can do it by myself!” is a line for a three-year-old, not an adult.

Further reading: Doug Rushkoff, intellectual imp, on the American childrearing experience:

Nothing like having a kid to turn you into either a communist or a capitalist.The long radio silence has been due to the intensity of parenting an infant. Sure, it’d be intense under any circumstances, but I can’t help but believe that the difficulty attending to the 24/7 needs of a baby are compounded by the dissolution of both the extended family and community of days past. Indeed, I’m beginning to believe that the fact that human females pretty much require assistance in giving birth might be a way for nature to enforce a bit of community on our species. Human beings do better in groups. Read the rest

When Elvis sings “I’m just a hunk, a hunk of burnin’ love,” I’m ready to sign up for U.S. citizenship right then and there. Only a country of genius could produce that kind of art. Nevertheless, America needs to get out more. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist , has recently discovered that the world is flat, that Indians are smart, and that other countries have workers and telecommunications infrastructures as sophisticated as the homeland’s. Perhaps we foreigners can even produce glib essays for a tenth of Friedman’s wages (as long as you pay us in Euros).

Eight years ago I shared H1-b visa gripes with Indian engineers in Times Square, while we worked to fix bugs with the Hyderabad colleagues who lived twelve hours in the future. The older IIT engineers, who had gone to graduate school in the US, acted as cultural brokers for the delegations that went back and forth between Hyderabad and Broadway. We could have told Friedman what was coming, if we’d been at the right cocktail parties.

Gokul, my colleague and running partner then, went on to MIT graduate school and now runs Google’s AdSense program. We’re neighbors again, in a region where fully a third of start-ups were founded by immigrants, including Google. Eight years on, at a time when USCIS has made it much harder to come here, we could now do just fine or better where we came from. The next generation of Gokuls can start their empires at home, and that’s why the US Ambassador to Ireland has had to tour the universities to beg Irish students to take up summer visas to visit the US. They’re not interested.

On New Year’s Day, strong winds at Dublin Airport blew an Aer Lingus plane off the runway and into another parked plane, knocking out two international jumbos from a small fleet. More than a week later, the schedule still shudddered with the force of those flapping wings. My flight was delayed for hours as Aer Lingus borrowed planes from the neighbors to ship emigrants back to Boston, Chicago, and New York.

I sat in front of Jonathan, who was unhappy about the delays. He was 16 or 17 and made like an egg: round, pale, and hairless. He wore a beige knitted hat pulled down tightly like a swimming cap. He was getting over the ‘flu, and wailed as his stuffed-up sinuses expanded in the pressurized cabin.
    “No no no no no no no NOOOOO! I’m getting very angry. I hate it I hate it I hate it. Hurts TOO MUCH. I hate going on an aeroplane.” He pounded my seat. When the baby opposite started to cry, he stuck his fingers in his ears. “Shut up shutup shutup SHUT UP!”

Though he kicked my seat like a metronome for ten hours, I grew fond of this raging bundle of id, who gave the only sane response to airborne life. Why shouldn’t you weep and wail and protest, Jonathan, after being herded like a veal calf, stripped of belt and shoes, finger-printed, photographed, kept waiting, strapped to a too-small seat, and fed ugly food? I knelt up on my seat to distract him from his torment. He lived in Ireland, he said, but he lived in New Jersey too. New Jersey was where he went to school. He was sick and his head hurt. He didn’t like flying.

I had gathered as much.

When we landed at last at JFK, he broke free of his bonds and launched himself into my lap, not bothered by the fact that he would have made two of me. He grabbed a handful of my hair and began to sniff it, then pointed to his meaty shoulder.
    “He wants you to pat it,” said his mother weakly. I had little choice. He sniffed another handful of my hair and demanded another pat.
    “I like you,” he shouted cheerfully. “Are you looking for a husband?”
    “A marriage proposal. Now, isn’t that a grand start to the new year?” said the man across the aisle.

Just back in Ireland for a lagged Christmas holiday. I get overwhelmed by the changing skies and social structure (though the Aer Lingus flight attendants are still timeless orange frumps). Mum presented Eggs Benedict on a bagel for my breakfast. McCambridge’s soda bread doesn’t cut it any more.

More entries to follow, now that I’m on vacation. Any volunteers for pints in Limerick or Dublin?

The B train carriage is papered with ads for Jameson whiskey. One shows a dry-stone wall sitting on what appears to be snooker-table baize.
“Maybe people just like things that come from Ireland,” runs the tagline.

I look around at my fellow passengers.

Maybe people just like things that come from Puerto Rico.
Maybe people just like things that come from Korea.
Maybe people just like things that come from the Dominican Republic.
Maybe people just like things that come from China.
Maybe people just like things that come from Belize.
Maybe people just like things that come from big drink conglomerates like Pernod-Ricard.

Or maybe, just maybe, they couldn’t give a rat’s arse.

A year ago I wrote a piece on Van Morrison that sparked a small discussion on the meaning of the Irish term “the crack was good”. This morning Eddie enlightened me on the roots of ‘craic’.

So there you have it. The crack is as good as knockin’ boots and rock ‘n’ roll. Thanks, Eddie!

In my own mind, I more or less reared my two sisters, who are six and eight years younger than me. It may say something for the trauma this caused that neither remembers the hours I spent changing their nappies, plaiting their wispy hair, and reading stories.

The one recollection I’ve been able to pull out of them is of a game I invented called Drunken Hanleys. When they were very small, this was far and away their favourite game. I would stand at the bottom of the double bed and play a scandalized biddy chatting to a neighbour:
   “Well, I met those two Hanleys last week and do you know what I’m going to tell you? The minute I saw them walking down the street, I knew straight away by the looks of them…”
Claire and Caroline would stagger down the bed towards me, giggling and hiccuping. Claire usually managed a few belches.
   “You’re not going to believe me, now, but they were drunk out of their minds! Could barely even stand up! They were stocious, I tell you…”

When they reached the end I’d give them a shove each, knocking them off their feet so that they bounced and shrieked while I continued the tale of outrage.
“So I says, hello, how are you, and they just fell right over onto their bottoms! I couldn’t believe it! Drunk as skunks, the pair of them. And the young one with her bottle of whiskey…”

Up they got, weaving dramatically and swigging milk. At that age, Caroline was still unsteady on the floor, and on a soft mattress she made a marvellously convincing drunk. As for the story, it could go on for hours. I had listened to plenty of gossip by the age of eleven.

I also considered myself an outstanding child psychologist, and carried out several experiments on the girls. In particular, I had solved the problem of getting Claire to sleep. We shared a bed, and at bedtime she acted her age—three. This was tedious, because I wanted to read my Enid Blytons. These English boarding school tales were very instructive, and I preferred to think about Midnight Feasts and Mamzelle the French teacher and lacrosse, whatever that was, than the immature blither that passed for conversation with Claire.

So I started to whisper stories of monsters and bogeymen and ghosts. Certain monsters spent their time looking for small girls. When they found them, they liked to pop out their eyeballs to play marbles with, and in the eyesockets they left spoonfuls of soggy cornflakes. Other were crying specialists. Snotty noses were a key ingredient in monster bubble bath, and they found crying children a particularly good source. If they smelled your tears from fifty miles away, they were liable to come and steal you—or maybe just your nose. The bogey man lived in the coal hole out the back, and lived on tea and toes. At night he crept around bedrooms, sooty enough to hide in the dark, and bit off people’s big toes with his green teeth. Then when you stepped out of bed in the morning you fell over with no toes to hold you up.

The only way she would be safe, I explained night after night, was to put her head under the blankets and lie very still. They were mean, but they were also relatively stupid and most were inexperienced child hunters. If they didn’t know she was there, they couldn’t get her. This sent her to sleep—rigid with fear, but asleep. Or at least, quiet enough not to bother me, which was the main requirement. I did wonder vaguely if she could breathe.

After a week or so I had refined the experiment enough that she fell asleep almost immediately, in a kind of panic-triggered narcolepsy, I suppose. I was so pleased with these results that I told my mother all about it on the way home from school, thinking that she could learn a few things from my approach. The next night, I got my own bedroom.

Recently, I started to worry about the effect this had on Claire, who now has her own pair of toddlers to warp. On her last visit I brought it up very casually over a glass of wine. Did she remember, I asked, that I used to tell her stories to send her to sleep when we shared a bedroom?
   “When did we share a bedroom?” she asked.

I kept going. Did she have no memory at all of these stories, which might have been a little scary? She insisted that she did not.

I made one last try. Did she not remember having to pull the blankets over her head and lie very still so that the evil, savage, smelly bogey man wouldn’t get her and eat her up?

She stared at me.

To this day, she said, she cannot fall asleep unless the duvet is drawn over her head and she is perfectly still. If her face is exposed, she feels panicked. She had never known why. She is twenty-six years old, and her boyfriend insists she’s a freak.

Since I left Ireland I’d worried that I was running low on guilt. But it looks like I’m good for a few years yet.

I use postcards, flyers, letters, and photos as bookmarks, and tend to leave them in place when I’m finished. It’s a message-in-a-bottle to my future self, tying, say, a ticket stub from a film I loved to the book I read waiting in the queue. Stuck on page 173 of Toni Morrison’s Jazz is the US Embassy receipt for my first J1 visa application back in college. The combined artefacts make for found memories as powerful as songs or smells.

On Bloomsday I took down Ellman’s biography of Joyce to look for more pictures of my new love, Nora. “Dearbhaile Hanley Christmas 1992 Limerick” said the flyleaf, and out fluttered a small photo from long before that: my secondary school class at the end of our first year. Thirty twelve-year-olds, arranged in three rows under the school crest and motto, Crescentes in Illo per Omnia. I’m still not sure what that means.

Our classes were named for dead Jesuits, with each intake year given a letter. Briant, Bellarmine, Borgia, Berchmans, Bobola. Our class was De Britto. We never thought much about the man behind the name. Did he die of malaria in some equatorial swamp, doubting God in a sweat-drenched soutane? (This was before Google, which shows Blessed John De Brito—with one ‘t’—to be an interesting fellow, a Portuguese nobleman who became a Jesuit Swami in Madras, and was beheaded for his trouble.) I always liked the name, and more so when an unfortunate religion teacher snapped and rechristened us. He was a country farmer who came late to teaching, and our toxic behavior disillusioned him fast.
    “De Britto!” he yelled. “It’s De BRATTO ye are. De BRATTO! A shower of brats and no more!”

We don’t look like brats in the photo. The front row kids have hands neatly placed on their knees, and the back row stands on plastic chairs, arms hanging down like Riverdancers. Our faces have the unformed blurriness of going-on-thirteen. Every single one of the girls has cut the long hair we started the year with. None of the kids is fat, not even the one we thought was at the time. Our shoulders are narrow in navy, crested jumpers. The girls wear kneesocks and navy skirts, the boys wear grey pants. (We all wore tackies, as Limerick called trainers/sneakers. For some reason we weren’t allowed to wear proper shoes. They’ve reversed that rule now, just as arbitrarily.)

I feel like God, holding this photo from the era of Live Aid and moving statues. I look at the formless little faces of my classmates and know their futures. I see which of them will marry each other and what their children will look like. I know who will get religion, become an actor, come out, or move to San Francisco. At the end of the front row sits the sweet and quiet girl in whose bedroom four of us compared notes after our first class party that same month. (The girls a head taller than the boys, and Phyllis Nelson lowing at us to “Moooooove Closer” while Fr. McGuckian read a book…) Her squishy white boot tackies are as familiar as my own scuffed Dunnes’ Stores efforts, and in the wisdom bought with twenty years, I see her future. “Don’t worry about kissing Frosty,” I want to whisper, “You’re going to grow up to be a sound engineer, and you’ll meet Peter Gabriel.”

In 1984, we hadn’t yet seen the great Sledgehammer video on Vincent “Fab Vinnie” Hanley’s MT USA. But reader, she married him.