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| The scene at Skibbereen,
west Cork, in 1847. From a series of illustrations by Cork artist James Mahony (1810-1879), commissioned by Illustrated London News 1847. |
After my Scandinavian friend via Labrador from way back when moved out a few years back (though his stuff remained around the property for years afterward, gypsy that he is), Steve was rather quickly replaced by a Haitian-American family as new tenants. The father was gregarious and friendly to me when he felt like it, and the mother to their young son never spoke to me at all, which is rather typical for the seriously sick. The man would appear at odd times of the day and night, and I soon became accustomed to the habits of a household struggling with manic depression made worse by their recent move.
Believe it or not, they fit in with the rest of the household far better than I did at the time, better tuned in as they were to the various traumas at play throughout the big old house and its surrounding property. Like some mysterious theater for the insane, cars and trucks appeared and disappeared, sometimes for sale at the garage next door, to be back in use the very next day. What were their reasons for so many back-and-forth decisions? I never knew, as the resident healthy elder among a group of disordered individuals adrift in their diseases, cut off from forming families like the rest of us do out in the real world.
"Fritz" was charming, talkative (when he did appear), and spotty in all of his endeavors. At times, he would be cheerfully waiting with his adorable little boy outdoors for the short bus that took him to nursery school for half a day, as is fitting for a toddler still growing. Fritz would manage some tasks fast and efficiently, while he struggled to adapt to other basic day-to-day schedules on a regular basis. I say "Fritz" because I have also become used to a dizzying array of names over the years, some real and some ridiculously false, and my man from up north had the former thing going on with him.
First, he gave his son a name so weird and difficult to pronounce that I knew it was some sort of joke only he knew about. OK....whatever. I'd been told that people on the run often assume names to prevent the long arm of the law from reaching them, and after awhile, his new family seemed to fit that bill. The father said he was a Haitian-Canadian-American immigrant, with another family living in Montreal that he never saw, which was made odder because unlike his young wife, he was the one at home with his boy. The mom left early in the morning every day, to be replaced by a series of gradually more inept nannies, culminating in a tall angry woman who became abusive after their boy lingered on the porch to get a closer look at my Halloween pumpkin that lit up at night, made less scary in daylight but still interesting to him, nonetheless.
As I made coffee and got ready for the day, I could see them on the porch from the light of the tall windows; the boy was with a woman unknown to me. We knew he was trying to work out babysitters with his mother's assistance because the landlord told us. I saw the babysitter grab his hand, tugging him towards the front door and chastising him more harshly than he deserved, growing more aggressive with each tug on his little hand. I heard him rebel against it by yelling out loud (as I would have, too, because he wasn't doing anything wrong), so that I instantly stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and the large living room, clearly visible to them both through the big windows facing the porch. After that, the father was in charge of the boy, and he and I struck up an uneven acquaintance based on his daytime errands around the house. He told me that emigrating was easy for someone like him, expressing disdain for anyone who did it poorly.
I told him that were all immigrants here once, and that our histories didn't speak of ease and luxury, but rather of harshness and long voyages. I knew he wasn't interested in me as a person, because he never really asked me any questions about myself, but as one of the few people around the house who dared to openly speak with me outdoors, I was content to listen while observing his brilliant little boy. The boy, like me, was utterly unlike the other shut-ins living in the place. He seemed alive, curious, and energetic, picking up objects for a closer look and naming them aloud, when he did emerge from the house with his father on nicer days: "Car! Truck! Cloud! Sky!" He'd point out all the life moving around him happily to his father, and they seemed like good friends. He clearly cared for his son very much, and that's something I always approve of, under any type of conditions.
Their residency upstairs wasn't an easy one, unlike Fritz's glib pronouncements about relocating as told to me. At first, me and my closest neighbor Mike heard loud banging sounds and a furious back-and-forth pacing upstairs every night that wasn't right, and we knew it. The landlord largely ignored our inquiries, getting involved only when the nighttime banging became so glaringly obvious, that he told them to buy area rugs to muffle the sound, like I've done in the past to assuage the complaints of people living beneath me (per NYS law). Fritz didn't like spending the money to do it. He told me the landlord didn't reimburse him for his own rugs! I added in my conversation with the owner that active toddlers (like large dogs named TeddyBear;) need to be taken outdoors to play because of their natural energy levels, but just like the poor girl living in the attic space with her parents, I never saw the two children in residence playing at the playground right here in town, or at any of the library events for kids, even though I'd left information about our community center for him to use.
After awhile, even the father was forced to admit to me that he was hanging in there, but the going was rough. Uh, yeah! Yes, America is hard. Freedom is hard, and our lives often reflect the battles we have daily to preserve our way of life here. He finally admitted to me that if he had a choice between here or Canada, he'd probably have chosen Canada, because it's so much easier. Of course it is! French Canada is great, as long as you can bear up under a wintertime so severe, you'd be begging for a Haitian beach after it, poor as that nation historically has been. And for a Haitian man like him, I imagine driving a cab is a breeze when the native tongue is French, too, and therein lies the problem with a largely white Quebecois entrenched in their separatist ways: you can drive them around to earn a living for your family, as long as you snap to their ways, like a slavish devotion to a French culture that exists overseas in Europe. Know what I mean?
There's a steep price to pay for socialized healthcare, in a taxed system that presumes everyone on the planet (which is Quebec, where else?) is healthy and unhealthy in the exact same measure, which is about as far from life as you can get. College is free! Isn't that great? Sure! Just ask a hippie guy named Jean-Paul. I met him on a trip to McGill back in my college days. He preferred to matriculate in school after school after school, as a way of ignoring real life. His first degree was in history (like my ex-boyfriend) and then he was going to Nova Scotia for an art degree, as a way of deferring adult decisions like: who am I, and who do I want to be when I grow up? It was absurd.
And their "free" clinics are great, as long as you don't die on their waiting list for that also "free" gall bladder removal subject to approval by a board of people selected to make those decisions without consulting a Doctor of Medicine. That's what you get there. I'm not saying I dislike the province of Quebec, I'm just saying that resistance is futile. Back in the 90s, Montreal still had a large group of people who wanted to break away from the rest of Canada, like the state of Texas or the ancient city-states of Rome, and we all know where confederacies lead: nowhere good for the rest of the emigres.
Like the rest of the household of people who habitually need the healthcare we have to give them, he gradually stopped "bumping" into me outside, finding himself in the rough ride of democracy like every single one of our ancestors have felt keenly. I knew he realized the strength behind our life imperiled here as it sometimes is, and the true grit it takes to make a "go" of it in a free society, which is why people often fall back on the care and decisions of others. As their family fell apart upstairs, I knew instantly knew what was happening to him; he couldn't make it here.
He told me as much on the last Fourth of July, running into me on the porch as he drank next door on the first floor, waiting for me to show up for the fireworks, like we had discussed a week before. He seemed put out that I was just appearing outside at nightfall, as I explained to him that the Mets game was on. I'm from Queens, homeboy? I'm a native, bro! He never really knew my lineage, nor did he ask me, preferring instead to wander down the hill with a beer bottle in his hand, letting his boy run freely down the hill ahead of us. Uh....I was nervous at first, but Eli knew how far to go and when to turn back towards us.
We watched the small town fireworks from the crowded sidewalk, and he seemed overwhelmed at the size of it, like people had just sprung up from the pavement beneath his feet as we walked downhill. He was disoriented by this show of support in such numbers, like it wasn't what he expected, and I could tell as he looked around, that he was trying to form an impression that was not forthcoming. Eli threw grass and pebbles around to attract his father's notice again, which he did. People turned to our little trio to smile, and I could see that he saw a diversity reflected back at him that was new to him. Welcome to "The Land of the Free", homeboy! We made our way back up the steep hill, with his young son walking in front of us.
As we chatted out on the lawn, Eli thought it fun to play with the grass while we spoke, so I joined in the fun, tossing handfuls of the fragrant grass softly into his face to watch him giggle. I laughed, too. It was a happily gentle night for us, and the weather was perfect. We talked about the town below, and the largely Irish-American crowd who lives and thrives there. Rather than piquing his interest in our town, like a real newcomer, he cut me off with a tale told of dumb Africans driven onto ships past by evil slavers sporting mirrors with which to fool those poor unfortunates with. Huh. He's never met my ferocious African-American friends from around the way. They'd know their reflections from bathing and scrubbing their wash in the water, dude, like every other human being on the planet before them.
Sensing a game was afoot, I cut him off in turn, with my own sad tale of woe about our beleaguered Irish past, like the deliberate impoverishment of Ireland by England, for their defiance of empire-building ways. He seemed taken aback by that, and also quieted by it. Oh, he hadn't heard of that....he trailed off like a tragic Shakespearean character, humbly wishing his apologies to me for such a past. He just didn't know...oh! You didn't know that soldiers watched families die by the side of the road from hunger like the Soviets had, or perhaps China during their "people's revolution"? Well, excuse me, monsieur. You're talking to the daughter of wars survived, droughts tolerated, and crops deliberately destroyed. Ain't life grand?
