Meeting
Dad Again
My father emigrated from Ireland to
the United States in the early 1920s. He had been released from Spike Island by
the English who "occupied" Ireland at that time. Spike Island was the
"Guantanamo" of that era, located just off the coast of Ireland. It
was there the English warehoused prisoners of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
My father had been imprisoned by the
English at age 16 for running guns through the marshes of County Kerry to aid
the rebels fighting to free Ireland from the rule of the English. Young Irish
lads were recruited for duties like this because they would be less apt to be
captured by the English--or so the IRA thought. My father was not coerced into
doing this. He volunteered for the duty and would have done it again if the
English had not insisted that he and other prisoners leave Ireland as a
condition of their release.
On arrival in America, he found work
as a grave digger in Brooklyn, NY. Later he boxed professionally and sang in
night clubs that catered to Irish immigrants. After he got married, he moved
with my mother to Chicago where he was hired by the Commonwealth Edison
Company. There he spent almost four decades as a lineman, often working as a
"troubleshooter" who was called out in the middle of the night
whenever a storm knocked out the power. He liked this work and was very good at
it or so I was told by his peers when I visited him in the hospital. They had
gathered in the hall outside his room after he had survived an electrical
accident that occurred high on a pole in an alley. He survived 12,000 volts, an
incident that got his name in the Chicago Tribune.
In January 2012, decades after my
father had died, my wife discovered a photo of him on the Internet. It showed
him as a prisoner on Spike Island, circa 1920. He was a farm boy, poor as the
chickens he fed as a child, but the English dressed him up nicely for the photo
that accompanies this story. Perhaps they didn't want his age to show and to a
degree they succeeded in that. You would think they had treated him well but
they broke both his legs with rifle butts and let him sit on an earthen cell
floor for a long period of time.
In the photo, my father is in the
first row, third from the left. He is identified as “J. O’Mahony,” which was
the family name until he became a citizen of the United States. On that
occasion, the judge suggested he change his name to "Mahoney," which
was "more common" in the United States. My father agreed to the
change but it was a decision he would rue for the remainder of his life. More
than once he told me, "I should never have done it but I was a greenhorn,
what did I know?"
My poem, “Meeting Dad Again,” below,
was written many years later after my father and I reunited in Chicago briefly
after he had been out of my life for awhile. His two years on Spike Island as
an adolescent had taken a toll. He suffered
from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) before that ailment had been
identified and named. Despite this problem, however, he was a sober
Irishman who labored hard in Chicago for decades to save money to put me
through college. His goal was to make certain I would never have to "work
with my hands." He didn't have to worry. I can operate a hammer but have
no manual skills beyond that.
My poem records our reunion when my
father, back in town unexpectedly, phoned me at work and, to my surprise, asked
that I meet him for lunch. He suggested a cafeteria that was then a Chicago
landmark. No fancy restaurants for him, even though in retirement he could
afford a touch of the posh. I can't remember for certain but I doubt that he let
me pay the check. He knew that I had bills as the father of five stair-step
children.
The lunch went well. Conversation
was light. I did not ask him where he had been or what he had been doing and he
asked only pleasant questions about me and my children. He showed no mood swings to indicate that he had once been
a guest of the English, a confinement that affected him far more, I believe,
than absorbing 12,000 volts. The voltage crippled his hand and gnarled his arm
but the English crippled and gnarled his nervous system. On this day, however,
he was in fine fettle, as he liked to say. This time he was more interested in
seeing me than my report card.
Meeting Dad Again
Thirty years later, Dad came back
and we met for Ham and Yams at
Toffenetti’s.
Pouring his tea, he told me he had
to restore power once
at a newspaper warehouse
and the storm broke again
and the lightning cracked his
ladder.
He spent the whole day, he said,
sitting in that dark warehouse,
waiting for the lightning to stop
and for the truck to bring a new
ladder.
He had a great time, he said,
sitting next to a flickering lantern
and reading for hours the Sunday
comics
printed and stacked
six weeks in advance.
- Donal Mahoney 2016
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