When I was young and in my bloom, my mind was ill at ease, dreaming of America and gold beyond the seas.
Often, as a small child going to school, I called into a neighbor's house to say goodbye to a son or daughter that was going to America that morning.
One kitchen I went into was so dark inside the young man couldn't shave himself there, only a tiny window.
If you threw your hat into it, it would be like an eclipse of the sun.
And I have a clear picture in my mind of Pats Padden-Deneen, barefoot in his thick woolen undershirt and long woolen drawers, covering him from his Adam's apple down to his ankles.
I'd say he got out of that regalia very quick when he hit New York at ninety in the shade.
And there he was outside the open door, where he had plenty of light, shaving in a looking-glass held up by his small brother.
He was lathering himself with Ryan's Celtic soap, and after saying,
Goodbye to him, I remember wiping the soap off my hand on the backside of my little trousers as I went down the road to school.
I remember, too, being taken by a neighbor's daughter to a dance.
I was only twelve years of age at the time, more's the pity.
The dance was given in a house in the locality for those going to America in the morning.
Good fun it was, too, for the best American wakes at that time were held in Ireland and the best Irish wakes in America.
The old people sat around the hut.
They were grouped and sorrowful.
The red glow of the fire lit up their faces, their feet keeping time to the music.
A set dance was in full swing, the young dancers knocking sparks out of the flagged floor,
the lamplight throwing their dancing shadows on the whitewashed walls.
And down at the room door the musicians were playing.
And it was said that these musicians never repeated a tune in the whole run of the night, and they had a name for every tune.
The Pigeon in the Gate,
The Turkey in the Stubbles,
The Cat Rambled to the Child's Horsespin,
The Maid Behind the Bar,
Tell Her I Will.
And if a strange musician didn't know the local names, and the dancers wanted a specific tune,
there were rhymes to recall the tune to the fiddler's memory, like When Henny Got Up.
Oh, when Henny got up to admire the cups,
She got a stumble and a fall,
Fell o'er the chairs and broke the wire at Tedney and Andy's Ball.
Or Take Her Away.
Take her away,
Down to the quay,
I won't marry her at all today.
She's too tall, and I'm too small,
And I won't marry her at all at all.
Day, day, yiddle, yiddle, day, day, yiddle, yiddle, day, day, yiddle, yiddle.
Those dances were outlawed, and often the American wakes to if there was drink there.
They used to be raided.
In fact, a well-known Kerry footballer, the first time he saw a flash lamp, he told me he was sitting behind the door on a half-sack of bran, a girl on his knee,
when the parish priest flashed a light into his face, and coming at him as it did all of a sudden out of the dark,
especially when he had something else in his mind he thought it was the end of the world.
Oh, the effect it had on that man put his heart sideways.
He never scored after.
All dancing was banned at that time.
Sentries used to have to be posted outside the dance house to raise the alarm when they heard the wheels of Father Mac's sidecar.
That was before he got there.
The rubber tires.
And one night is gone down in history.
Around twelve, when the hilarity was at its peak, high drinks in the kitchen and capers in the room,
the front door burst open and a sentry rushed in shouting,
"'Punnaman Dukes! He's down on top of us! He's coming in the Boreen!'
Well, the back door wasn't wide enough to take the traffic.
All out into the yard.
The women's coats and shawls were thrown on the bed below in the room.
Those shawls used to come in for a bit of a flattening.
In the fuss and the foosted to get them, two big women got stuck in the room door.
Couldn't go up or down.
And there they were.
And they'd be there yet.
Only that a very clever man put his hand on one of their heads and pushed her down till their girts de-coincided and they were free.
Mal Sweeney was the last one out of the house, pulling her shawl around her.
Of course, when she left the light of the lamp, she was as blind as a bat.
And who did she know?
She'd run straight into, head-on collision, but Father Mac, who was coming in the back way.
Look at that first strategy to catch them all.
And Father Mac, to keep himself from falling in the muddy yard and ruining his new top coat that he had bought only that day,
he put his two hands around Mal to maintain any relationship with the perpendicular.
Mal was trying to disentangle herself and she said,
Will you let me go now? Will you take over me? Will you stop this? Stop! Stop, I'm telling you!
Take your hands off me, whoever you are.
And isn't it hard up you are for a squeeze and the priest coming in the front door?