Trust Tommy

Today’s post is a guest post from Dad, who reminisces on his own dad (my grandfather) and gardening.

***

All the children’s tales begin with “Long, long ago” or in the Irish Storyteller way “In my father’s time”, so maybe its appropriate that I start some reminiscences about my childhood and my parents in this way.

Yesterday morning “I took a notion” to do some gardening/outdoor work. I have to admit, though, that what I mean by this is not what my father would have called gardening. Nevertheless, I think that if he were still around, he’d approve. It was just a general tidy up outside – sweeping paths, raking stones on the driveway, collecting leaves and pulling grass that grows on the paths (but strangely, is prevented from growing in the lawns by winter frost).

But in his case, gardening was about vegetables. He dug and re-dug the plots allocated to the different vegetables with steady determined ease. It’s not accidental that quite a few of the photos we have of him are with spade in hand.
Why spade? He used both spade and fork for digging. The fork, if the ground had been recently tilled and the “going was easy” but I do remember a lot of use of spade also, probably due to heavy soils which would compact quickly between growing seasons. Also, grasses and weeds – which don’t seem constrained to growing seasons – crept in, requiring the cutting action of the spade to break the ground.
And of course he was a good judge of a spade. I found it intriguing to listen to men used to gardening speak of the qualities of a spade. Lightness of course came high on the list, but also the length and thickness of handle, not to mention size and shape of base which in turn affects the weight of the soil lifted.

In fact, I saw and experienced evidence of the same phenomenon with pitchforks. (For the uninitiated, this is a two pronged fork – or “two grained” as we used to say – used in “saving” hay. Once when I asked one of my sons to bring me the four grained fork from the shed, he asked “why, what other kind of fork is there?” and I, amused, had to explain about the hay fork.)
Making hay the traditional way requires a lot of manpower since, due to the vagaries of Irish weather, time was always of the essence. A “meitheal” of men would come together from neighbouring farms and set about “saving the hay” a term which itself expresses the urgency of the task in hand. When the men would return to work after a break for tea or sandwiches and pick up their forks again, they would do so carefully, picking “their own”. Often it might actually be their own, which they brought with them, but even if not, they would have begun the day measuring the the feel of it – especially its weight and the thickness of the handle – before claiming theirs for the day. I’ve even seen men restart work only to stop, look down and say “this isn’t my fork” and go looking for the “thief” who had theirs.

But back to my father and his spade. It was long handled. None of this modern short ‘D’ top handle… I’ve never quite figured out how one could use this latter short spade for any length of time since it involves bending the back continually. Of equal or even greater importance was the flattened protector part of the base where the foot pressed to drive it into the ground. If this wasn’t flat enough it would hurt the foot, or damage valuable footwear.

I was commenting to Tommy recently how my Dad tried hard but failed to get me interested in vegetable gardening. While I did help him periodically, in particular if anything interesting was being sown, the bug never really bit me and in my mid fifties now, it seems I’m permanently immune. At least to that particular variety of gardening bug. However, alas, a different strain has taken hold and I have found myself looking forward to the simple jobs in the yard and garden and, unlike many people for whom trimming hedges and maintaining lawns is a necessary evil, I actually enjoy it.

Tommy and I were pondering whether it’s an age related condition… “late onset gardening bug”, or the likes but most importantly, he also feels quite immune at this stage of his life. We’ll just have to see how he is in forty years… perhaps medical advances will protect him, but if not, he’ll feel that invisible hand drag him out, and then before you know it, he’ll be reminiscing – “in my father’s time”.

Well, Christmas is over. The next big thing we have to look forward to is the coming of the New Year. I think the days between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day perhaps my favourite days all year. No one is working, in fact, no one is doing anything at all really. I think it’s the one big advantage that Christmas holidays have over a summer holidays are any other holidays. And so we have a pretty laid-back lifestyle over these couple of days – seemingly endless games of Hearts (try not to let Mum shoot the moon…again) or scrabble succeeded by intense bouts of endurance reading. Yesterday, we went karting, and today we have some relatives visiting. The former was actually a bit out of place in this lethargic, easy-going lifestyle.

I think that this is why I enjoy Christmas. Being quite nonreligious, I instead enjoy the byproducts of the holiday season – the food, spending time with your family (everyone comes home for Christmas), the time off school. I’m not a Grinch, I don’t hate Christmas. What you believe is between you when your God, and being honest, it’s not so much that I’m a very tolerant, respectful person, it’s just that I don’t really give a huge amount of thought to what others believe.

Photo owned by rinkjustice (cc)

Patrick got the board game Diplomacy for Christmas, and we tried to play a game of this after Christmas dinner. Oh, and who would have thought that playing as 1910 countries could be so fun! I was France, and I attempted to make a crafty alliance with Mom, Britain to double-cross Dad, Germany, and steal his land. Meanwhile we had Patrick, Russia, coming down through Scandinavia to mount a northern attack on Germany. Finally, John went off and did his own thing, as Austro-Hungary, and captured the countries around the Black Sea. I feel sorry for the poor Yugoslavians…

However, in the end, negotiations broke down between countries and we all went off and played Hearts.

That’s totally how happened in 1910, right?

We are a family of precious few traditions, it has to be said. Well, tradition in the, erm, traditional sense of the word. You know, like going to midnight mass or having Grandma over for Christmas dinner, or everyone piling on the couch at 20:30 on a Christmas Eve to catch the Father Ted Christmas Special.

Then again, the word ‘tradition’ is actually defined by Google as an “inherited pattern of thought or action”. That, to me, seems a lot more lenient in that it says to me that it doesn’t have to be anything common, normal or usual.

And so, here’s a tradition. :)

Last year, around this time, I went Karting. I’ve always had a sordid relationship with karting to be honest. I was never a very tall child so when people went karting, I’d come out onto the track, into their self-titled ’smallest car’, sit in it and see if I could reach. Invariably, I couldn’t, so I’d wait in the main building while the others went karting. My annoyance as to not being able to varied, depending on whether there were books and TV wherever I was waiting, or if water was readily available, things like that. I was always one of those kids who could stare at the wall and entertain himself but you do kind of grow out of that.

So because this time last year was my very first time behind the wheel, I was a bit of a Granny, and the only way I would’ve won is if they’d been measuring from the bottom up, or by the number of overtakes. I wasn’t very experienced and wasn’t aware that you could go faster than I was going. In fairness, the kart makes a loud, guttural roar when you floor the accelerator and that probably put me off.

So, since I approach this with experience under my belt, this time will be different. I didn’t overtake anyone last year so that skill still escapes me. Once I get that sorted nothing stops me from coming first, right?

Check back here to see if my confidence is placed well or not…

This morning, John arrived home for Christmas. I decided to join Mom and Dad in going to collect him, joking that good brothers came and met their siblings from the airport when they came to visit, because when I had gone to visit John and Patrick in Boston, neither of them had been able to come and meet me from Logan Airport. Not that it had been a problem, because I was able to fetch public transport into the city to meet them.

So, yesterday morning, I woke up at 5:20 AM to make the journey out to Shannon Airport with Mom and Dad. We’d subscribed to e-mail updates from flight EI 132, and I checked my e-mail en route to see that the flight had been delayed until 6:40 AM. The junior to the report was interesting because we saw a truck that had entered a roundabout too quickly, hadn’t been able to stop, and ended up ploughing onto the grassy verge.

The weather really has been crazy over the past few days, and this morning we had freezing fog that put the visibility down to terrible standards. eventually, we got to Shannon Airport, and met John, who arrived in about 6:50 AM. while I was waiting, I read a bit of a health magazine from the Irish Times, which really is a fantastic magazine; Adam Brophy’s column “It’s a Dad Life”, is fantastic. This week, he was talking about his dog, which had given birth the three puppies. What seems like an everyday occurrence is transformed into a very entertaining read purely by his vivid descriptions and engaging writing style. These are the sorts of writers I aspire to.

Right now, John’s catching “40 winks” on the couch, while I sit at the kitchen table writing this. Patrick doesn’t arrive for another few days, at which point, the Collison’s Christmas Reunion 2009 can actually begin. :)

On that note, can anyone actually believe that it’s almost 2010? Like, it’s a decade since the turn of the millennium, which I remember. Wow.

- Written at 13:42, 22/12/09

I arrived in early yesterday. The journey was uneventful, apart from crashing the TV screen, as shown in the picture:

I reached the terminal at about 15:30, thirty five minutes before schedule. After getting someone to fish my cane out of the overhead bins (I never knew I wasn’t tall enough for my hand to reach into them) I left the plane, whizzed through customs and out the door. Turning right, I found the bus station, which I presumed was the one I needed. This was confirmed when I examined the map and saw it went to South Station.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I needed for this in terms of tickets, so I just put in the ticket Mom gave me from when she was over there, which worked. The bus ride itself was rather crazy – I slid across my seat so many times as it flew around corners and was jerked back into my seat when we braked. Honestly, it felt like the bus from the Harry Potter movies. I don’t use buses back home very much, but the one or two times I’ve used them were totally more dulcet than this journey was.

I arrived in South Station, which looks like every other metro station in the entire world. I quickly found the outbound red-line T platform, and waited for the train to arrive….

….until I remembered that it was the inbound one I wanted, and quickly switched sides. There were a ton of Windows 7 posters around the place; and I got the impression that they were trying to appeal to the student population of Boston by making all the people in them young adults. They carried captions like “I wanted to worry less about crashes; now I worry less about crashes. It must have been my all-caps email”. They’re good enough, but they smell of desperation on Windows’ part.

Once I got to the Harvard Station, I took the first set of stairs up to ground level. John had given me directions to the café I was to meet him at, and they began with exiting the subway and being faced by some ‘grandiose Harvard buildings’. As I debated whether or not the buildings in front of me constitutes grandiose, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and continued my journey onto the café. The café itself is a small little place, tucked away in a corner, and I walked up and down Brattle Street about 5 times before finding it.

The Crema Café itself is wonderful – very bohemian and yuppie. The food is delicious too. I deposited my bag on the ground, retrieved The Da Vinci Code from its depths and began reading. Patrick came along about 45 minutes later. I haven’t seen him in a long while, so it was great to catch up. He recommended a dessert for me which was beyond awesome. I don’t remember the name of the dish, but I’m totally going back there before I leave here on Sunday evening.

After that, myself and John, who joined us while I was finishing my dessert left and he showed me round the place. The evening was spectacularly mild, so as we wandered around Harvard (with me forgetting the names of the dorms almost as soon as John told me) I decided that this place was truly awesome.

We caught some food in the dining hall after that, which was turkey and ham. I think it was like a dress rehearsal to Thanksgiving. Then again, isn’t Thanksgiving just a dress rehearsal for Christmas? It’s the one American tradition I just never got. I was introduced to some of John’s friends there (the names of who I, er, also forgot as soon as he told me). There was definitely one called Ellen.. or Eva.. or Erin! Ah yes, Erin, that was it.

Tomorrow, Harvard play Yale in American football – it’s a massive occasion and we stopped by a pep rally for it last night. There was an epic marching band and everyone had tshirts wittily proclaiming Harvard’s awesomeness (a sentiment I now agreed with). They included: “Fale” and “Today, I woke up and remembered I went to Yale. FML”.

After the pep rally, we went to John’s (different one, not my brother) dorm, to watch the Office. After that an impromptu Charades game took place. The opposing team gave us crazily difficult ones, such as “Alexis Zorbis” (a movie, we’re told) and ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (a book). Then again, we weren’t a whole lot better. “Sense and Sensibility”, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and “HMS Pinafore” were all ones the opposite team had to perform. The latter was insanely hilarious because, as we found out, Gilbert & Sullivan are virtually unknown to Americans.

At around 12.30am Harvard time, I realized that I’d been awake roughly 24 hours – and decided to call it a night.

It’s currently coming up to 11am here in Harvard. I sit in the common room of John’s (my brother) dorm. I’m not sure what we’re doing today. Let’s just say a visit to Crema wouldn’t be out of the question…

People I never really had.

I read blogposts by different people (mainly from IrishStudentBlogs folks) about their experiences with their grandparents, and I try to imagine what my interaction with mine would have been like. The only grandparent I have living memory of is my mum’s father, and I don’t think he ever left the house while I was alive. We certainly never had the relationship that the movies portray – going fishing, watching Countdown or whatever.

Of course, Patrick and John knew our grandparents longer than I did, what with being older, so they probably know more about them. My only mental picture of them is from what Mom or Dad say about them. I know my dad’s mother was a teacher, and that my mum’s dad built the house they lived in himself, but they’re only small snippets of information – not much.

Because of that, I think that my siblings and I (probably me more than the other two, being younger), sort of ‘adopted’ people in our lives into the grandparent role. My dad’s uncle used to live near us when we lived in Tipperary, and he’d sometimes call up to our house for dinner and he’d tell us of things about his time as a missionary. I distinctly remember thinking that he was a grandfatherly figure – grey hair, thick glasses – a quintessential old person, in my 7 year old eyes.

We also had a ‘grandmother’. She’s married to my dad’s cousin and also lived near us. She was an epic cook, and to this day she always comes to our house around Christmas (it should be soon enough this year, actually) and do a load of baking. It became a sort of tradition around Christmas, which I think is nice, even if I’m not a fan of mince pies. When we lived near her in Tipperary, she’d always be the one who’d mind us if Mom and Dad were away. I always got the feeling that since her kids were practically grown up by the time that we’d be asking her to collect so and so from school, she assumed the role of mother unto us. She was a person willing to take on the role of ‘Mammy’ unfalteringly, when we needed her.

A couple of different things have occurred, which have led to no-one in my life today really assuming the role of ‘grandparent’. Firstly, dad’s uncle passed away a few years back, and since we now live in Limerick, our ‘grandmother’ doesn’t take on many psuedo-mother duties. Also, John and Patrick are now away at college, leaving me effectively an only child. Finally, I’m 15, which means there’s less babysitting and emergency collections from schools needed.

So whenever I read blogposts or hear people talking about grandparents, I often find myself wondering about what might have been…

If you could get all your Simon Cowell facelift jokes out of your system right around now, it’d be just great, thanks :) Botox is also a muscle relaxant, which means that a rigorous stretching system of the muscles involved could yield greater motion in said muscles, which is why I got it.

We left for Dublin on Tuesday evening. I didn’t get any sleep on Monday night so didn’t go into school the following day but needed to finish writing a speech for Wednesday’s debate (that we lost :( which sucked) the following day. I spent most of the journey in the car listening to loud music, which I’m certain helped my productivity. Once we got to Bewleys, I was delighted to find out that they’d finally got their wifi sorted, which meant that their (heavily sandwiched by air quotes) “working” wifi actually allowed one to connect to the internet. I got it send off to some friends and my debate teacher for comments. My teacher had also graciously offered to print it off and stick it on cards for me.

The next morning saw me heading over to the clinic where Wednesday is actually botox day. A lot of kids with CP and other musclier problems find it very effective. There, the chirpy nurse showed me to a cubicle. Normally, chirpiness appeals to me – birds of a feather and all that, but today, my mind was on obscenely large needles, so no matter how much she smiled, it still annoyed me. I always maintain that life would be awesome if people’s enthusiasm matched yours – no more, no less. And regardless of much cream she actually put on, it seemed like too much – ‘what’s the ratio of square centimeters of anesthetic cream versus centimeters of the length of needle?’ I thought anxiously to myself.

She gave me the option of being a man and getting the injections sans anesthetic, or getting the cream, but having to wait 30 minutes for it to wear in.

Of course, I went with the obvious choice..

Yep, I’m a gigantic scardey cat when it comes to needles, I opted for the cream. :P

The surgeon herself is actually rather hilarious. The flames on my cane brought us onto the subject of House, whom she didn’t know. I summed him up by quoting one of his team, after announcing his plan to leave in one of the earlier seasons: “You’ll save more… but I’ll settle for killing less“. I thought her reaction would mirror the one of every other doctor I’ve talked about House to.. but it wasn’t.

“Well”, she began. “If you’re in say, a car crash, it’s the first hour that’s critical.. so if you have some nancy boy of a doctor who comes in and is all apologetic and all, you’re probably gonna die. However, if you have someone like House who’ll do anything to save you, jump MRI queues and all that, well then your chances are good!’

How right she is :)

Anyway, the injections (all 5 of them; four on the leg, one in the forearm) went grand – cream reduced a needle penetrating my muscles into a sensation that someone was squeezing my leg/forearm tightly. I didn’t see any of it because I was suddenly very interested in the metal joining between the blinds and the wall of the little cubicle I was in. Book of Endings blared out of my iPhone through headphones so loudly that I was sure

I know ‘Hello, how are you’ don’t seem like much to you
But I wrote you this song and I owe it all to you

could be heard by everyone.

Luckily, the loud music blocked out her saying those words I hate surgeons to say – ‘now, deep breath’ or ‘we’ll be done in a second’ or, to complete the awful trinity: ‘you’ll feel a slight pinch’. Because Adam Pascal’s rocky voice was the only thing reverberating around my skull, I didn’t hear which one she went for.

After about 15 seconds, Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-NinjaSuperFastSurgeon had administered 5 shots of Botox (5? in 15 seconds? I hear you ask. Yarly!) and I was dazedly sitting up, reaching for my jacket and pulling my headphones out of my ear all at once. I was given some gummy sweets (which tasted terrible) to keep the blood sugars up and sent on my way.

Once we’d got into the car to head home, the old debate started. The Irish Blogosphere probably are well up to speed with my mum’s love affair with Avoca, and it’s always a necessary stop on the way home from Dublin. I felt that getting 5 injections from a Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-NinjaSuperFastSurgeon merited getting to choose the food of choice, but I eventually caved at the prospect of free wifi – I had gotten some emails that needed replying to. Not wanting to lose the battle entirely, I negotiated one Eddie Rocket’s visit voucher, to be redeemed whenever we were in Dublin or Limerick City next.

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it? Nah, the quickest is to appear to cave, but include your own strings for the future :)

Image is of Botulinum Toxin, from Wikipedia

Today’s recipe is salad of figs encased in a sweet and crusty pastry, and was prepared by Dad and myself.

This is well tried and tested recipe in our house and never fails to impress. What’s really great about it is that its easy to prepare and keeps well without even being refrigerated.

As with making anything, the key is good fresh ingredients. Here’s Dad in the store:

Making doubly sure they’re the best money can buy:

Yes, they seem to pass our rigorous inspections:

As regular readers of Lily’s blog will know, presentation is key, so as we carefully prepared our fig rolls, we also made ready the ornaments that would create the backdrop of our pictures:

A quasi-guest post by Denis Collison

Does he mean a writer of fictional books or a writer who’s not real..? :D

Like all kids, I’ve gone through more career changes then changes of socks. First it was a train driver, then astronaut, then teacher, then TV actor, then stage actor, then blogging consultant.

As I’ve grown up (unsure whether to use ‘matured’ there too, because of the (albeit possibly fictional) shocked and verbal disagreements I may attain) the diversity of the innumerable vocations has decreased, yet the uncertainty has stayed constant.

For a while though, since about the start of this year, I’ve known that my vocation should be linked in some way to this blog, or blogging in general, or websites and the internet, if we’re broad. Having said that, there are few jobs out there that don’t involve the internet in some form or other, and that’s only going to increase once I wrap up my education.

It would be a wee bit silly, like, to keep this personal blog going, and take up something thoroughly offline like, I don’t know… fishing, because I’ve only ever fished once and on that occasion I found out that I was too compassionate with the damn thing because I let him get away. On that note, what’s the most hilariously offline job you can think of? No prizes because we’re too broke, but try have some fun :)

Photo owned by dan paluska (cc)

Getting back to the post title (oh how I ramble..), everyone seems to think I’d make a great fictional writer. Whether that means I’m better off not existing or that my verbal ramblings are pleasing to a small minority of the world’s population; I’m not 100% sure. I like to believe the latter :)

I know I could never be the next Eoin Colfer, or Stephen King, or Jane Austen, because I can’t write fiction. Everyone talks about how you gotta know your character’s favourite food and what’d be in their pockets on a normal day and know all their dreams and hopes and fears.. That’s too much connection for me! I can’t bear to be around my characters for so long, telling them how to react and what to say and everything.

I much prefer fact. I wouldn’t mind writing someone’s (or my own) autobiography. Like, I love writing (this is post #725 on TrustTommy, I’d want to love it! :P) but don’t make me invent stuff because I’m not sure I know people well enough to invent intricate details about them!

When I saw this movie, I was immediately attracted to it.. especially the scarf:

And as it turns out, I have a mum who rather enjoys projects. Many an evening we then spent watching House MD together – her needles clicking away while I rolled off the wool.