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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the podcast version of Sunday Masalini, which differs from the radio version for rights reasons. We hope you enjoy the programme.
My mother always maintained you could never train a man fully. She did her best with my father and my three brothers, Billy, Connor, and John, in fairness. She also had superhuman powers when required to clear our family bar, John B's, of raucous revelers in the early hours of the morning.
When she was 85, an American who owned a series of nightclubs in New York was mesmerized when he witnessed this formidable force of nature fearlessly giving the road to an inebriated youngster. He was so impressed that he immediately offered her a job as a bouncer in his Manhattan nightclub. When she was sick of us all, she would augustly declare, I'm going home to my own people.
Home was a hand by, where 60 years earlier, she helped run the family shop with her brother, Jim. A hand-by is six miles outside Castle Island and it was in this close-knit community she earned the fond title Mary the Shop.
She was an instant hit when she moved to La Stole in 1955 to open a grocery shop and bar in 37 William Street with her new husband John B. She was thereafter known as Mary John B. Theirs was a glorious romance which spanned over 50 years.
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Chapter 2: What personal anecdotes does Joanna Keane O'Flynn share about her mother?
As a young Irish immigrant in London, he had pined for her and wrote her achingly beautiful love poems. Throughout their courtship and marriage, they had their own love language, which they also lavished affectionately on us. Eilidh Vim was in our hellos and goodbyes. Eilidh Vim was code for I love you very much.
Fast forward to the 1970s when Mam and I would go on an occasional shopping expedition to Limerick on a Monday afternoon which was Lestol's traditional half day so Mam had a break from the bar. Dad would walk three miles out the Tarbert Road to meet and greet us on our return declaring that he was in total despair without his girls.
He loved us fiercely, generously, and unconditionally, and was somewhat overprotective. When I wanted to go on a J1 to America, he ruled it out, saying that I was a sure candidate for abduction or kidnapping.
After my first disco in the Lestore Alarms Hotel, my brother Connor was paid and dispatched to be my personal bodyguard as I walked home with a boy mortified, with Connor walking three steps behind. When my husband held my hand and we started dating, Dad asked, what is wrong with her hand? My mother was the makings of my father.
Dad was not to be disturbed when he was writing and no more about it. The Pope himself would get the door while the clamorous sound of typewriter keys could be heard rat-tat-tatting upstairs. With military precision and total selflessness, she gave him the space and freedom to write.
In the early 90s, a couple introducing themselves as Gabriel and Ellen casually called the bar asking to meet with John B. Gabriel explained that as a schoolboy, he had exchanged letters with my father and that he would love to meet his hero in person. My mother told him that he was not in. Dad could have been working upstairs, walking in the bog, or ambling by the field for all she knew.
She proceeded to have a nammicable chat with her new friends, Gabriel and Ellen, and even asked them to watch the bar while she slipped down to Pat Whelan's shop to buy onions for a stew she was making.
A week later, she, and I quote, nearly died when she was seated with my father beside guests of honour, film stars Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, at the premiere of The Man from Clare in the Gatey Theatre. My father was very insistent that I should learn to drive at the age of 16. Little did I know that there was method in his madness.
Once he had me on the road, I drove him to several football matches and many, many pubs. We were reared on Nash's red lemonade, the cure for all ailments. As I was a bit puny, my mother gave me a pony of stout to build me up until Dr. Johnny put a stop to her antics, saying it could give me a tooth for the drink.
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Chapter 3: How did Joanna's family dynamics influence her upbringing?
Dandelions are doing the work of superheroes, offering nectar for pollinators, their famously long tap roots providing aeration and nourishment for the soil. Their neatly descriptive wet-the-bed nickname explains their cleansing properties, and their Irish name, Carter Vaughan, tells you about the bitterness of their root. We have dandelion tea, coffee and wine.
There's latex in the milky sap, a cure for warts, and they make a handy symbol of resilience. We know these things only, really, it's the gorgeous colour that gets my immediate attention. They are so joyful.
After the flower comes the fluffy seed head, a bunch of hairs attached to a seed at the bottom, which doesn't sound impressive until you see how the dandelion presents it, transforming like a magic trick from dense yellow to a perfect globe of downy white. Irresistible to children and songbirds.
In her novel Snowflake, Louise Neelan describes an eight-year-old going out in the moonlight to collect wishes, dandelion clocks on her birthday. Feathery parachutes that can be sent floating by the soft breath of a child. It's a clock in harmony with the diverse give and take of the natural world.
My mum watches sparrows in her garden, launching themselves feet first against the stems of dandelion clocks, knocking the seeds to the ground as if they're shaking apples from a tree, she says, and then rapidly eating them. I had a go at eating the seeds. I can't say they had much flavour, but it wasn't unpleasant. I'd do it again.
Dandelions remind me that we don't have to have lived an exceptional life in order to have something to share. Simple things done well and offered with love are all we need. The writer Charles Lamb worked six days a week for over 30 years as an unhappy clerk in London. Drudge work, he called it, and wondered, what's it all for?
For someone who knew the physical and mental toll that endless work takes on us, Lamb understood the luxury of spending an hour in leisure and contemplation, lying in bed, thinking of a dream or a memory or a flight of imagination or how a tired body responds to rest and generosity. A man can never have too much time to himself, nor too little to do, he wrote, nor can a woman.
Take a midsummer's day, for example, meandering along the Atlantic coast with no particular place to go until you come across a house out on the Dingle Peninsula with a sign at the bottom of the drive to stop in for refreshments. I came across this very place by chance with my sister on a day in June. We went through the open door and found ourselves in a living room.
The only item on the menu was homemade apple tart. Take a seat in the garden, the lady said, coming through from the kitchen, and I'll bring you out some tea. What she didn't say was this was the best cup of tea and apple tart you'll ever have while sitting in a sunny garden in Kerry, looking at masses of wildflowers and seagrasses out across the water to the Blasket Islands.
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Chapter 4: What unique experiences did Joanna have growing up in a family bar?
Of late, she'd been coping with a pain in her back, realisation dawning slowly that it grew differently from the warm ache that resulted periodically from heaving churns onto the milking stand. She wondered about the doctor. When finally she went, it was too late, even for chemotherapy.
And still she wouldn't have got round to telling him, except that one night, watching television, it got so bad she gasped and struggled up holding her waist. Do you want a hand? he asked, taking a step towards her. I can manage, she answered, feeling for the stairs. Three times like that he tried to reach her.
But being so little practiced in such gestures, three times the hand fell back and took its place on moving at his side. After the burial, he let things take their course.
The neighbors watched in pity the rolled up bales standing silent in the fields with the after grass growing into them and wondered what he could be thinking of, which was that evening when, almost breaking with a lifetime of taking real things for shadows, he might have embraced her with a brother's arms. Thank you very much.
So I'm going to give you a bit of if you feel like singing, if it's not too hot.
Oh, oh, oh And now it's time to go home. It's time to go home. It's time to go home. Come home with me, come home with me. Come home with me, come home with me. Come home with me, come home with me. Come home with me, come home with me. Come home with me. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Thank you very much. Echoes in the Garden, my old suggestion. The Palestinian-born scholar Edward Said argued that music is a contrapuntal force, where multiple voices and lines operate independently but together, providing a way for us to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity. Survival, he said, is about the connections between things, music, literature, friendship,
what T.S. Eliot called the other echoes in the garden. Ultimately, we get our voice from the voices of others.
It puts me in mind of the great Dublin phrase, Mielsegosia, which is close enough to Miel flower, which may well have come from the celosia flower, which you and I might know as a cockscomb, or, since it resembles that great force that we mysteriously carry around in our noggins, the brain flower. Or indeed, the word might come from the Irish, shiditia. There you are.
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