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Friday, December 16, 2022

In bed at 10 up at 5:45, 5 pss, one cognac. Geri was up at 5:30 prepping to leave for Alexandria. 

Mickey the Mope.  This is a term my mother used to use, disapprovingly.  She, who had so much to mope about in her short life, chose not to mope through her life and to discourage it in others, including me.  I feel some real shame in moping but nonetheless wallow in it whenever Geri is out of town.  Today is no different.  I'm so happy that she gets to spend a few days with her dear niece Katherine and husband Jordan, and perhaps (I don't know yet) with nephew Steve and his beautiful wife Maggie, a favorite of mine.  And of course with her beloved brother Jimmy who, Katherine's reports tell us, is sinking deeper into the mire of Alzheimer's.  On the few occasions when Geri is out of town I'm unavoidably aware of how empty my life is without her.  I'm like the Jackie Gleason character 'The Poor Soul," or in my mother's words, Mickey the Mope.

Bird Alone.  I started this novel maybe 10 years ago, maybe longer.  I finally finished it today.  It's been my Throne Room reading for a long time.  I love Sean O'Faolain's wonderful way with words (forgive the alliteration.)  I enjoyed reading the story slowly in large part so I could pay attention to his diction, his metaphors, his descriptions of emotions, and states of mind.  But I also enjoyed the story itself, set in Cork City, and Youghal.  It reminds me of my grandfather's 1904 departure from Ireland and his hometown near the Kerry-Cork border via Cork and Cobh, then called Queenstown.  It reminds me of the friendly couple Geri and I met on the dance floor in the hotel we stayed at in Killarney on our honeymoon.  It reminds me of my upbringing in what was essentially the Irish Catholic Church in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, all those pre-Vatican II years when it seems like 9 out of 10 American bishops had an Irish name and an Irish upbringing.  Samuel Stritch, Richard Cushing, Terrence Cooke, Francis Spellman, first-generation Irish-Americans.  As O'Faolain describes the rites and rituals in the Irish churches in 1891 (the year Parnell died), he could have been describing the rites and rituals I grew up with in St. Leo the Great parish under the stern governance of Rt. Rev. Monsignor Patrick J. Malloy, a humorless cold nasty disciplinarian.  And the music - O Salutaris Hostia, Tantum Ergo, To Jesus Heart All Bur-ur-ning, with fervent lov-ov-ove for men, my heart with fondest year-er-er-ning , . .  But the story is a tragedy.  Cornelius "Corney" Crone gets his girlfriend Elsie Sherlock pregnant, to her profound shame and guilt.  Late in her pregnancy, she walks into the ocean to drown herself and despite Corney's rescue effort, dies from the attempt.  He blames himself and the Irish Catholic culture with its focus on sinfulness, shame, and guilt.  It was the Ireland of the now notorious mother and baby homes run by orders of religious sisters.  He is never at home with that oppressive Church and that sick culture of shame and guilt.   ". . .I am become an old man and my friends are few, and that new faith I set out to find I never did find, and because I have sinned all my life long against men, that whisper of God's reproof, Who made men, has been my punishment.  I have denied life, by defying life, and life has denied me.  I have kept my barren freedom, but only sicut homo sine adjutorio, inter mortuos liber - a man without help, free among the dead. . "