The Letter She Read To Her Father

Céad Míle Fáilte, and welcome to your Letter from Ireland for this week. It seems we are coming to the end of our dry spell here in County Cork, and the tractors and harvesters are taking to the fields to beat the weather. The evenings are also the best of it at this time of year, when you’d go out to do one small job in the garden after dinner and find it’s gone half nine before you straighten up again. How are things in your part of the world today?

I’m having a cup of Barry’s tea as I write, and do hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy as we start into today’s letter.

A question came in recently from John, and it’s one I’ve been asked in many ways over the years:

“How do you keep writing the Letter from Ireland after all these years? Where do you get all the ideas?”

So, I thought it would be a good time to put down the cup of tea and give the answer some serious thought. Here goes, John, and thank you for asking. I’ll take the second half of your question first, as that’s the easier of the two to answer.

Where Ideas for the Letter Come From

Finding ideas to go into this letter has never really been a difficulty. Right from the beginning, trickles and then hundreds of replies landed in my inbox from readers across the world. Inside those replies came questions, corrections, family stories and half-remembered scraps, and so many of them went on to seed letters for months afterwards.

Call it an affliction, but when somebody sends me something or asks me a question, I go and look into it, and I usually come back with three more things I didn’t know myself. I’ve been at this for over thirteen years now, and I’m still finding out more about my own country, sometimes from people who’ve never set foot in it.

So, the answer to the second part of your question is straightforward enough. The ideas come from the people who read this letter.

But the first part of your question-How do I keep writing the Letter- really got me remembering, and to answer it I have to go back to the beginning.

When You Are Close to Letting Go…

I first wrote this Letter from Ireland in June of 2013, and at the time it went out to a small handful of acquaintances. People I knew, and a few who’d asked me a question on Facebook about Irish surnames or townlands. There was no plan or strategy behind it, but I did have a notion that I’d something worth saying about the place I come from, and that there might be somebody out there who wanted to hear it.

One year later, I was close to giving up on the letter. After all, it was taking an hours out of my Sunday mornings, and I had no real sense of who was receiving it or what impact, if any, it was having. I’d started to think that the best thing would be to admit that and stop.

Then, one Monday, a reply came in from Margie (not her real name) in Hamilton, Ontario. Her father had died a few weeks earlier. The two of them hadn’t really been on good terms for much of his later life, and he was, to put it mildly, a poor communicator. You know how it can be sometimes. At least Margie called it what it was.

She visited him every Sunday all the same and had done so since her mother died.

When he did talk, it was usually about relations and people from the old days. He talked about his parents, one of whom had come from Ireland, and cousins back in Ireland whose names she only half recognised. He’d said more than once that he was sorry he’d never gone over to see the “old country” for himself.

Some months earlier, Margie had signed up for the Letter from Ireland. She then had the idea that, instead of reading it to herself on Sunday morning, she’d save it up and read it out loud to her father during her evening visit.

He listened while she read, nodding away, and she was grateful to have something that helped her through the visit. Then, one Sunday, she forgot to bring the letter. He asked her had she “the Irish letter” for him that week. She knew better than to forget it the following week.

And so, over time, they began to talk about the contents of the letter once she’d finished reading. He’d add something of his own: a thing his mother had told him about life in Ireland, or a name, or a piece of a story.

Sometimes he said nothing. Once, he even held her hand gently as she read.

He died in his sleep a short time before she contacted me. She wrote to say that she was glad for those Sunday evenings, even though they had come late in his life.

I read her reply at least three times and then shared it with Carina. Here I was, huddled over a keyboard on a Sunday morning, wondering if the effort was really worth the bother, and Margie’s reply landed in the middle of my wonderings. So I kept writing, and I’ve never gone even near giving it up since.

That’s your answer there, John, and thank you for asking it. The ideas come from the readers’ replies, but the reason there is still a Letter from Ireland all these years later goes back to that one reply, sent from a house in Hamilton, Ontario, during a week when I’d more or less decided to give up.

Thanks to Margie, wherever she may be now, and to her father.

So, let me leave you with one question this week: Was there someone in your family who kept the past to themselves and only opened up, if ever, when you least expected it?

I’d love to hear about them. Do leave your answers in the comments section below.

That’s it for this week.

Thank you for reading and sharing this letter.

Slán for now,

Mike