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From Bill Pfleging, Volunteer Services Manager:

     I never knew my Irish grandmother.

     Well, that's not exactly true. I knew an old lady who talked with a kind of funny brogue, who ruled her domain with a swift and unerringly aimed wooden spoon, and doled out coffee cake or a couple coins for candy whenever I fell and skinned a knee. I knew a wrinkled old woman who brought me tea and toast when I had the mumps and couldn't swallow anything else, the bread cut into four strips so I could dunk it in sweet, milky tea. I knew a bent, ancient crone who would refill your dinner plate with second and third helpings of meat and potatoes before you could say "no thank you," and who had perfected the art of guilt.

     That was my Grandma.

     Intellectually, I knew that she had had a childhood — played games like all children do, perhaps grew up to have boyfriends and giggle when the cutest boy in town walked by. But I couldn't visualize it. I don't think any child can grasp the fact that their grandparents were laughing, skipping children once, climbing trees and spinning tops, and just as wide-eyed with amazement at seeing their first elephant at the circus as their children and grandchildren were decades later.

     I did't really meet my Grandma until she was close to death, her mind ravaged by the supreme insult and indignity of Alzheimers'. While she could not seem to remember from one minute to the next which grandchild I was, sometimes even mistaking me for one of my uncles, her long-term memory had become crystal clear. Between bouts of "Jimmy... er, Frankie, I mean... oh, I don't know what I mean. Whose son are you again?" and lamenting that someone had come in and changed her whole house around, she would launch into long recollections of her childhood. She has lived near the town of Bailieboro, in County Cavan, Ireland, and had left there at an early age to come to America just after the beginning of the 20th century.

     Yet the memories, like her sharp brogue, remained clear and bright as though she'd gotten off the boat yesterday. I had only to ask a question or two about Ireland, and Grandma would launch into some fascinating story. Descriptions of cutting the peat with the rest of her family, small children passing the chunks up from a deep hole in the bog, and pony-carting it several miles back home so they could heat their small, whitewashed cottage. Memories of handing bundles of neatly-tied thatch up to the men who were recovering their roof to keep the house dry in the damp Irish weather. The clarity of these more then eighty-year-old memories was amazing. I filed them all carefully in my mind, and made her and myself a silent promise to follow those memories someday and find my own ancestral roots.

     I finally got the chance to last autumn, when my fiance Minda and I traveled to Ireland for several weeks of touring. Minda had been there almost ten years ago on a horse trip through the wilds of western Ireland, and had fallen in love with the country even though her own ancestral roots were far away in Russia and the Phillipines. This trip was a wonderful birthday present from her to me.

     We drove across the country for about a week before we finally found our way into County Cavan. All I had to go on were some names and places Grandma had mentioned, so I followed them. The best place to get directions from the Irish, and indeed the best way to do any real tracking there, was in the local pub. Asking for possible leads on my relations was tedious — in County Cavan the name Lynch was much like Smith here, very common.

     Eventually my searching paid off. I found her old home in the tiny parish of Tunneyduff, still owned and lived in by one of my Lynch cousins.

Walking down the road where she walked as a child, I came to the church where she had attended weekly services and went daily to school. I found her parents' graves in the churchyard there. She'd buried both of them, so I knew I was walking on the very dirt where she'd stood.

     Turning around, I saw the new school across the street from the church. Next to it was a very old schoolyard. It was full of boys and girls laughing and screaming with delight, running in circles.

     I knew I'd finally met my Grandma.

Take care,
Bill Pfleging

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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