To some it is a literary masterpiece, cluttered and idiosyncratic as the city it chronicles. To others it is the world’s longest obituary, but whatever your view, one thing is clear, and that is that 107 years after poor Paddy Dignam was finally laid to rest, James Joyce’s Ulysses remains the only book in the Anglo sphere (apart from the Bible) to have its own day.
He is gone from mortal haunts: O’Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, o ocean, with your whirlwind.
So settles the cloud of tobacco, stout and grief between Bob Doran and Alf as they spy Leopold Bloom hovering outside the chemist shop on an errand for his wife, Marion of the bountiful bosoms. Bloom, the eternal outsider, child of Abraham in an Apostolic nation, and bookish to boot.
I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.
As any of my legion of drinking buddies both past and present would blearily attest, I identify strongly with Leopold Bloom.
But there is another reason Bloomsday sounds a particular note for me each June. For it was on the evening of June 16, 1996 that my good friend and drinking buddy, Alison Gooch, was run down and killed by a drunk driver on the sweeping bend of King street just south of Newtown bridge. Fifteen years and I can still hear her laugh.
Vale “Bootsie”, and your lovely mother, Robin, who passed away last year.
2 comments:
Oh how we all loved Alison Gootch. Taken far to soon. What a joy she was xxx
I was 9 years old when Alison died. I never knew her personally. I grew up in Newtown, and every time we walked past the place where her life was taken, my mum, who had never known Alison either, would gently remind me of her and tell me to be mindful of that spot. Even as a child, I understood that something heartbreaking had happened there.
For years, I passed her plaque on the footpath and thought about her every single time. I would wonder who she was, what her life had been like, and all the years she never got the chance to live. Somehow, Alison became part of the landscape of my childhood, not because I knew her, but because her story stayed with me.
I'm 39 this year and no longer live in Newtown. To be honest, I hadn't thought about Alison Gooch for a long time. Then today, while creating a new employee contract at work, I saw the surname "Gooch" and was instantly transported back to those childhood walks and memories.
I think that says something incredibly special about your friend. She touched the life of a little girl who never met her, and more than thirty years later, her name still carries meaning. Her story was never forgotten. Even as a child, I felt the weight of the life she should have had and how suddenly it was taken away. Alison's memory has stayed with me all these years, and today it reminded me just how deeply one person's life can resonate with people they never even had the chance to meet. I hope you still celebrate her in June x
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