Ireland – Old Lady Writing

I have disliked Thanksgiving before it was politically correct to dislike it. Well, technically, that is an exaggeration, but the warmest emotion I ever felt toward it was indifference with a tinge of bafflement. And by “Thanksgiving” I mean the actual celebration and trappings thereof; I always have, and always will, welcome and support the idea of a four-day weekend. In fact, the four-day weekend is one of my most aspirational career goals. But I digress.

Of all the big American holidays, Thanksgiving was easy for my mother to embrace during our early immigrant years because of its secular nature and a very specific, mandatory, and exotic (to us) menu. Paradoxically, these are the very same attributes that eventually turned me off it.

For me, it has been a struggle to celebrate something to which I am not connected emotionally, religiously, or traditionally. The holidays of my childhood were deeply rooted in the Soviet calendar, the May Day with its first blooms of spring, the Victory Day with its patriotic pride, the October Revolution (celebrated in November during the fall break, so kind of like the long weekend of Thanksgiving). And then there were the traditional ones, New Year’s Eve conflated with Christmas, a kind of two-for-one complete with Grandpa Frost, gifts under the decorated evergreen tree, but also champagne and a glorious feast at midnight, Cheesefare disguised as Rites of Spring, and some very low-key, irreligious and food-focused Easters and Passovers.

And thus, Thanksgiving did not offer me anything from the very beginning. When I first watched Macy’s Parade on TV, it seemed chaotic and pointless. I was used to parades in which you walk, with classmates, with family, with balloons, banners, flowers, and it’s a party. Watching giant things float is faintly anxiety-inducing to me. The bland menu as well is almost opposite of comfort food, especially the turkey stuffing, which remains incomprehensible to me. My spouse enjoys pumpkin pie, and I can make a good one, but making a pie out of pumpkins continues to persist as an alien construct.

My first distinct memory of this holiday is, fittingly, one of attempted avoidance. My senior year of high school my mother and stepfather went on a cruise, taking advantage of the long weekend—a practice I later wholeheartedly embraced. I was left home alone, having just turned 17 and anticipating four days in the company of my VHS tapes and Little Debbie snack cakes. A caring friend was absolutely appalled at the idea of me spending the holiday alone, and took me to a large family gathering at her uncle’s farm. It was a very nice time, and her kindness stayed with me. This scenario played out again the following year, with different high school friends. It was my first year of college, my parents were far away, and being enveloped in the warmth of a family that was not mine, and thus non-judgmental, remains a cherished memory.

For the rest of my time in college, Thanksgiving became a prized homestretch to write the final term papers. I developed an efficient 24-hour four-day rotation of half hour writing/half hour listening to music while eating Oreos and mixed nuts and drinking black coffee. Before my mom gifted me a Mac and a dot matrix printer my senior year, Sunday after Thanksgiving was spent in an interminable line at one of the university computing centers, waiting to type up and print my handwritten pages. I will never forget when a frat boy from one of my Poli Sci classes spotted me sitting on the hallway floor in an unwashed mass of exhausted students and gave me his number that was dozens if not hundreds closer to being called for computer access than mine. It’s funny, these memories of random acts of kindness… I have to say that those solitary, but productive days were my second favorite iteration of this strange holiday.

The least favorite, by far, was the actual gatherings with family. Oh, it is not the family itself, as much as the rituals. Thanksgiving at my in-laws’, while casual and inoffensive, included the traditional menu I dislike and the obligatory mind-numbing football game that basically concluded with a disorienting midday nap for me. Thanksgiving at my mom’s was exactly the opposite, extreme formality in dress and elaborate Russianized variations on the dreaded poultry and other dishes, also followed by naps on stiff furniture and a desperate search for the nearest open WalMart as the only available diversion.

I don’t know who put this thing on my plate. I am sure I did not eat it. (2009)

The truly worst, however, were the Thanksgiving gatherings at my own house. One time, my mother literally broke her foot when she slipped while running on my newly mopped floor. Why was she running? Oh, because as soon as she arrived at my house and saw me manually mashing potatoes, she exclaimed that she brought an electric potato masher to my house in anticipation of just such a clumsy error on my part, and ran for it. Spouse finished the mashed potatoes and turkey, as I ate Lorna Doone cookies from the emergency room vending machine. It was a horrible weekend however you look at it, but there is a tiny moral here of letting adult children adult.

Another Thanksgiving saw my son run away from home. We assumed he was spending the night at a friend’s after one of the typical teenage fights. It turned out that he was driving all night to none other than my mom’s house. When he crossed the border into Tennessee on Thanksgiving Day, he realized that he did not know her exact address, and the gig was up. It was a strange, strange weekend, and the less said about it, the better.

I have to give a nod to a few gatherings in New York. There was my first year living in Manhattan, when I was wandering Greenwich Village with a friend (we saw “Home Alone” during its first run in a movie theater, and I also saw “L’Atalante”—and how is that for an eclectic mix that only NYC can provide), and because of exams coming after Christmas (creating a nightmare of a different kind), Thanksgiving was truly a four-day urban holiday. There were also milestone family birthdays that coincided with Thanksgiving, and we gathered in Russian restaurants in Brooklyn with our traditions, including singing, dancing, and the comfort foods such as caviar/herring/tongue/”Olivier” salad and copious amounts of vodka. Good times!

And this brings me to the best Thanksgivings. They were all non-traditional and European. There was paella in Spain (2008), rabbit in Malta (2010), Kir Royale at the Deux Magots in Paris (2012), discovery of Guinness in Dublin (2013), fresh turbot in Italy (2014), this incredible smoked orange liqueur in Portugal (2016), discovery of Beaujolais Nouveau on the French Riviera (2017), and the surprising charcuterie in Dublin (2019).

Also whiskey tasting in Dublin. Tealing Distillery. (2019)

Honorary mention goes to Vegas 2015—not quite out of the U.S., but still, Vegas is not your typical Thanksgiving venue—and Chicago 2018, with this failed Beef Wellington.

Last year we attempted to have a first firmly post-pandemic family Thanksgiving, albeit in Chicago, and I woke up to a smell of smoke and a wail of sirens. The building next door caught on fire. It was a restaurant, so closed for the day. No one was hurt. But as I passed the fire trucks on my morning run along the lakeshore, I said to myself, strike three.

Paella in Benalmadena-Costa, Spain (2008)

When I was a young girl, Ireland was not on my list of “places I could only visit in my wildest dreams” (or in another lifetime). So, when another lifetime arrived, I was not even mildly interested. And who knows why? Maybe it is just not a place that influenced my culture. For some centuries, my people looked to Paris—the literature, the music, the films, and, aside from that brazen Corsican conqueror, the history. Of course, we have forgiven the French after La Grande Armée was soundly defeated by the grander Russian winter.

In the ‘80s, as a Poli Sci college major, Ireland first burst on the scene of my life through a World Politics class. I was so spectacularly ignorant of the land’s history, demographics, and political structure (and, in fairness, the professor was terrible), that it came as a bit of a surprise to me that the island is divided, in every possible way but geographically. In that Dark Decade, The Troubles were someone else’s. Car bombingswere often in the news, the IRA was a terrifying specter of terrorism, and Sinn Féin seemed scarier than the Nazi Party. Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers were already dead, and “The Crying Game” was not yet made. In my mind, Ireland was a lawless, scary place, Belfast was Beirut, and no one in their right mind would go there. This is how well they taught us in college—or how well I paid attention: I figured that the entire country was a mess, with Belfast at the center of the steaming rubble. It kind of sort of did not make sense to me that the island was partitioned and Ulster belonged to Great Britain. It still totally does not make any sense—the 18 year old me was right on the money!

Quite obviously, I have no Irish roots. But, many Americans do, and I have a “real American” (as my relatives initially referred to him) spouse. At some point in our European travels, he started lobbying for an Ireland trip. When the previous decade’s Big Birthday was coming up, it was his fervent wish. This is how much I thought of Ireland: we went to Greece. (Don’t feel bad for him, he loved it. Greece is great! And we did eventually make it to Ireland.)

In the spring of last year, I had an opportunity to go to Dublin for work. (Yes, there are occasional flashes of brilliance in this job…) The week following my business trip, “Chess” was starting a very limited engagement with the English National Opera at the London Palladium. Nigel Havers was touring England with “Art”, one of the best modern plays. And the original “Les Miz” was still at the Queen’s Theatre (sadly, no more, as of the date of this writing, replaced by the 25^th anniversary abomination). So, Dublin, then London, but I had the weekend in between at my disposal.

In my lifetime, so many “enemies” changed. As scary as the IRA was in the ‘80s and ‘90s (I know the 70s were even scarier, but not on my personal radar), 9/11 changed all that. And then it came to me, for reasons passing understanding—Belfast. I will go to Belfast for a couple of days, just to say I went. It might be a terrible depressing place, but just the fact that The Troubles are over and I have the opportunity to visit—well, never could I imagine such a thing a couple or three decades before. I mean, BELFAST!

Words cannot do it justice. Maybe more accurately, *my* words cannot do it justice, because I am simply not skillful enough in describing how this entirely foreign, previously unknown town of sorrow and rebellion got under my skin and into my heart. I finally not only understood, but felt the history of these people, NOT my people, NOT my religion (on either side, really), yet still deeply moving and traumatic. I sobbed throughout my visit—the walls surrounding the Catholic enclaves, the murals (oh, those murals!) depicting their struggles for self-determination and the right to join their ethnic brothers and sisters in the Republic, the room in the City Hall with quotes from the families of the disappeared and the murdered…

Dublin is like the continental South—joyful, friendly, party town. There are some dark moments there, of course, and memories of the Empire’s oppression are alive and well. But Dublin is a capital of its own country and people. The Republic is still a comparatively new political entity, of course, but these days, it is a fabulous country with a rich heritage, and God bless it!

Belfast is a Northern city, beautiful but sad, the Empire not a distant memory but a giant wing over the skyline, the memories fresh in their defiance despite the recent reconciliation, the specter of the martyrs ever-present, the separation of religions still a reality, the most bombed street in Europe (not in Stalingrad, not in Dresden) eerie in its quiet, the very ground almost unsteady with the winds of unrest of those few recent decades.

And what about the IRA, heroes or villains? Hard for me to say now, after walking through Belfast. The violence is suppressed, but it all just feels unfair, even to this semi-detached outsider. In the immortal words of Rodney King, “Can we all just get along”? It hurt my heart to think of what happened in that city and in that lovely land just a short time ago. I left a little bit in love with Belfast, and over the past year, I have been aching to return. It touched me in a way few other places have over the years. It’s almost as if I find its troubled past enticing. It’s almost as if I want to go back and be reassured that it continues to thrive. And, as we say back in the Old Country, what is not a joke to the devil—might we see a United Ireland yet this side of paradise?

Category: Ireland

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