HEART BEAT:There are no hiding places when you delve into the past
WE ARE enjoying a late flourish of summer in this little enclave in Co Kerry. It is too late for many visitors who have to return to the real world.
The local wildlife re-emerges now to claim their lands, happy that the laughing children and city dogs are no longer here. The children are facing back to school, harassed mothers talking uniforms and books and in every way more practical than glum fathers facing departure from this magical place. That’s the trouble with fairyland. It fades away. We are afforded glimpses and veiled promises that it will return. The hope sustains, in the uncertain world that faces many today.
In my working life, the sadness of departure left me as I crossed the Co Kerry border. I did not dwell on what I had left behind. The focus became the work ahead, the patients, the operations, the entire fabric of a different life, professionally and socially. For most folk that is the pattern of life, work and earned relaxation. I had little reason to regret such ordering of existence. I was luckier than many.
Now in retirement from the treadmill, it is possible to sit back and think about different things. This morning we had breakfast outdoors in the sunshine. The calm, motionless waters mirrored the surrounding hills. Sitting there in peace, quiet and absolute stillness, the doors of memory opened. Memories tend to come in haphazard fashion – they are seldom layered precisely and you have to order them yourself. You can’t live in the halls of memory or rather you should not try. The world is present and future and, in the immortal words of Ivor Callely, “Yesterday’s history”.
The pathway starts with a word or a phrase, “Do you remember?”, and then you are off on your journey. The trip can be wide ranging and diffuse or localised and specific, but it should not be lightly undertaken. You need to be strong to go there and to balance the good, the bad and the sad. To the honest traveller, these all present themselves and suppression seldom works.
This particular foray was focused on the 30 years or so that we have been coming here. Initially, there was never enough time for the activities of the day. We made firm and lasting friendships and became mutual part-guardians for the layers of children that mushroomed around us. We knew 99 per cent of everything and in retrospect we all took ourselves more seriously than reason would allow. This was going to last forever.
We deferred to our seniors, we looked after them and we included them. In retrospect, we were a condescending shower. Our children, endlessly parsed and analysed and we thought, properly supervised, lived in their own world with its own rules, priorities and hierarchies as they grew, season by season, all around us.
The trouble was that day by day, holiday by holiday, imperceptively, we all grew older. These Elysian Fields were not to be ours forever, in this world at least. The vitality and strength that had carried us so confidently through the years of raising the family, slowly waned and we found ourselves catapulted into the category of senior citizens. One of the first intimations of this for me came when descending the steps of Skellig Michael in a measured manner, a polite young American inquired, “Are you alright, sir?” I bit my lip, thanked him and assured him that I was really a gazelle taking things easy.
The children so carefully nurtured and supervised were now condescendingly and obviously looking out for us. They laughingly told us escapades, hitherto unknown, that would have given us sleepless nights. I learned belatedly that “a few pints” meant up to six; “a rake of pints” covered six to 12 and that “a feed of pints” went from there to dissolution; and we thought we were hard men!
They’re all growing strong and solid around us, our own and those whose guardianship we were privileged to share. There are grandchildren unloaded for us to mind and we now, in pasture, witness the same strength and certainty that we thought was ours forever.
The pleasant ramble along the warm valleys of recollection inevitably brings you to the shadows, the memories of those gone. They are good memories, but sometimes they can be overwhelmingly sad. There are no hiding places on this road.