“Wild Geese”
“Are any of you ‘wild geese?’” the tour guide asked his gaggle of listeners on a busy Dublin street in the summer of 2009. He used the term to mean anyone of Irish descent whose family emigrated away from Ireland. My wife raised her hand. A Murphy, an Ahern, and an O’Connell, she claimed the distinction, as did about half the group.
Originally, the term “wild geese” applied only to young men who fled Ireland to serve as soldiers for Catholic monarchs as the British Crown made it tougher and tougher for the Irish to feel at home and Catholic in their own land. These escaping Irishmen fought at various times for the kings of Spain, France, even Poland. Many others traveled to the United States, Canada, and Australia, although the vast majority went only as far as England. Liverpool is a short ferry ride from Dublin compared to a crossing of the dangerous North Atlantic. Paul McCartney and John Lennon are descendants of expatriates from Ireland who dominate Liverpool to this day.
I write all this because I watched Brooklyn the other night. Actually, I watched it twice. I’d rented it on one of those five-night deals and so viewed it a second time before returning it. Part of my obsession with this film is how much the story resonates with Marianne, my wife, and me.
The main character, Eilis Lacey, (pronounced Ay-lish) comes directly from Ireland to Brooklyn in 1951 and is several generations closer to her homeland than Marianne is to her ancestral home. And Tony Fiorello, a first-generation Italian-American born in NYC, is more like my parents’ generation than mine. Still, their love story parallels ours. It is is one of making a new home when the old home is no longer possible.
I was an expat of sorts, one of those many wild geese, because I had moved from California to South Bend, Indiana, leaving behind so much of the life I had there. I left a close family, good friends, a satisfying job. I was on this insane quest to earn a PhD in English literature and start anew. Until I got to Notre Dame in August 1978, I did not fully realize that anew meant alone.
I really was not comfortable at Notre Dame until Marianne entered my life. I met her after three years, much longer than it took Eilis to meet Tony in the film. But like Eilis, I had to endure a death back home. My father died when I was three semesters in. I was 29. It was and remains the most disorienting event in my life. And during those three preceding years before Marianne, I spent as much time as possible in Sacramento trying to build a life in two places.
All these ideas came together in my mind as I watched and re-watched Brooklyn. The strongest theme in the movie, it seems to me, is that love makes a home, not location. Eilis finds love, deep and true love. That’s what holds her. That’s what gives her a new home.
When I found Marianne, I felt I was making a home in Indiana. Soon our dating turned into an engagement, which meant we began setting our course to create a home together wherever the job market and fate took us. Together. Home. Two of us, or three, or more—we did not know when we were first planning and dreaming. We only knew we were doing this together.
One last thought ties in to all this.
In April, Marianne and I traveled to LA to attend an annual conference, the premier gathering of creative writers nationally. I heard several fine readers and panels. I reconnected with former students, many of them now professors themselves. Of all the panels I attended, the one that hit me hardest was on the need to give up your “hometown” when you move away. Make your spot your home and write.
One panelist was a NYC man who ended up at a Michigan university. At first as a young prof, every break he had, he spent it back in New York City as though he did not want to sever that link. He sought an authentic New York bagel every few months, to keep himself a New Yorker, not a Midwestern. In the end, a financial advisor told him to stop going to New York, use that money to buy a cabin in northern Michigan, and “go to your cabin and write.”
When I heard that vignette, I wrote in my notes, “Get to your office and write.” I’m not likely to buy a cabin at the lake in Minnesota, but I have a wonderful office in our home. And here is where I need to be. Because, like the Michigan/New York prof, I was a Minnesota/ California prof. My heart and mind remained in Sacramento for far too long.
At the close of that panel, one speaker summed up their collective epiphanies about giving up their hometowns. Those towns had changed. And these writers’ roots had been driven deep where they were now living. Besides, their hometowns of memory had become like that former girlfriend you every once in a while wonder about, thinking what if I’d married her and not my wife. But, as the panelist explained, that former girlfriend has aged too. She’s not there anymore. She’s part of your memory.
So too with place.
And really, it’s time that changes everything, not space. I have the financial ability to fly to Sacramento any time I want. But I have only a few friends there now. A few relatives. My parents are gone. Only one of my brothers still lives there. No one knows me at the high school where I taught. The other high school where I worked is closed—the campus currently used as a California State juvenile detention center.
That old expression is so true: there is no there there anymore.
And so, in a sense we’re all wild geese even if we haven’t moved more than a block from where we grew up. It’s time that separates us from our past more than distance. Time is the greatest distance, not miles. And for those unfortunate enough to not know this or accept this—as was the case with me for years—then the opportunity to have a home right here, right now, is passing us all by.
Home is where we love. It’s not what we remember or pine for. We will always be connected to that place and those times and those people we loved there, but we have to face up to the reality that we must connect with the people and place who surround us now.
It’s a hard lesson for many to learn, but we live now, not then, and not in what’s next. If we are not living now, we are not living fully. It all takes place in the present. “For we are here, and the time is now.”
A point we all must learn, especially since we are all wild geese.
***
Picture: Eilis learning to eat spaghetti by twirling it without splashing the tomato sauce.
***
Marianne passes the test of eating like an Italian. May 2015 in Modena, Italy.
“Are any of you ‘wild geese?’” the tour guide asked his gaggle of listeners on a busy Dublin street in the summer of 2009. He used the term to mean anyone of Irish descent whose family emigrated away from Ireland. My wife raised her hand. A Murphy, an Ahern, and an O’Connell, she claimed the distinction, as did about half the group.
Originally, the term “wild geese” applied only to young men who fled Ireland to serve as soldiers for Catholic monarchs as the British Crown made it tougher and tougher for the Irish to feel at home and Catholic in their own land. These escaping Irishmen fought at various times for the kings of Spain, France, even Poland. Many others traveled to the United States, Canada, and Australia, although the vast majority went only as far as England. Liverpool is a short ferry ride from Dublin compared to a crossing of the dangerous North Atlantic. Paul McCartney and John Lennon are descendants of expatriates from Ireland who dominate Liverpool to this day.
I write all this because I watched Brooklyn the other night. Actually, I watched it twice. I’d rented it on one of those five-night deals and so viewed it a second time before returning it. Part of my obsession with this film is how much the story resonates with Marianne, my wife, and me.
The main character, Eilis Lacey, (pronounced Ay-lish) comes directly from Ireland to Brooklyn in 1951 and is several generations closer to her homeland than Marianne is to her ancestral home. And Tony Fiorello, a first-generation Italian-American born in NYC, is more like my parents’ generation than mine. Still, their love story parallels ours. It is is one of making a new home when the old home is no longer possible.
I was an expat of sorts, one of those many wild geese, because I had moved from California to South Bend, Indiana, leaving behind so much of the life I had there. I left a close family, good friends, a satisfying job. I was on this insane quest to earn a PhD in English literature and start anew. Until I got to Notre Dame in August 1978, I did not fully realize that anew meant alone.
I really was not comfortable at Notre Dame until Marianne entered my life. I met her after three years, much longer than it took Eilis to meet Tony in the film. But like Eilis, I had to endure a death back home. My father died when I was three semesters in. I was 29. It was and remains the most disorienting event in my life. And during those three preceding years before Marianne, I spent as much time as possible in Sacramento trying to build a life in two places.
All these ideas came together in my mind as I watched and re-watched Brooklyn. The strongest theme in the movie, it seems to me, is that love makes a home, not location. Eilis finds love, deep and true love. That’s what holds her. That’s what gives her a new home.
When I found Marianne, I felt I was making a home in Indiana. Soon our dating turned into an engagement, which meant we began setting our course to create a home together wherever the job market and fate took us. Together. Home. Two of us, or three, or more—we did not know when we were first planning and dreaming. We only knew we were doing this together.
One last thought ties in to all this.
In April, Marianne and I traveled to LA to attend an annual conference, the premier gathering of creative writers nationally. I heard several fine readers and panels. I reconnected with former students, many of them now professors themselves. Of all the panels I attended, the one that hit me hardest was on the need to give up your “hometown” when you move away. Make your spot your home and write.
One panelist was a NYC man who ended up at a Michigan university. At first as a young prof, every break he had, he spent it back in New York City as though he did not want to sever that link. He sought an authentic New York bagel every few months, to keep himself a New Yorker, not a Midwestern. In the end, a financial advisor told him to stop going to New York, use that money to buy a cabin in northern Michigan, and “go to your cabin and write.”
When I heard that vignette, I wrote in my notes, “Get to your office and write.” I’m not likely to buy a cabin at the lake in Minnesota, but I have a wonderful office in our home. And here is where I need to be. Because, like the Michigan/New York prof, I was a Minnesota/ California prof. My heart and mind remained in Sacramento for far too long.
At the close of that panel, one speaker summed up their collective epiphanies about giving up their hometowns. Those towns had changed. And these writers’ roots had been driven deep where they were now living. Besides, their hometowns of memory had become like that former girlfriend you every once in a while wonder about, thinking what if I’d married her and not my wife. But, as the panelist explained, that former girlfriend has aged too. She’s not there anymore. She’s part of your memory.
So too with place.
And really, it’s time that changes everything, not space. I have the financial ability to fly to Sacramento any time I want. But I have only a few friends there now. A few relatives. My parents are gone. Only one of my brothers still lives there. No one knows me at the high school where I taught. The other high school where I worked is closed—the campus currently used as a California State juvenile detention center.
That old expression is so true: there is no there there anymore.
And so, in a sense we’re all wild geese even if we haven’t moved more than a block from where we grew up. It’s time that separates us from our past more than distance. Time is the greatest distance, not miles. And for those unfortunate enough to not know this or accept this—as was the case with me for years—then the opportunity to have a home right here, right now, is passing us all by.
Home is where we love. It’s not what we remember or pine for. We will always be connected to that place and those times and those people we loved there, but we have to face up to the reality that we must connect with the people and place who surround us now.
It’s a hard lesson for many to learn, but we live now, not then, and not in what’s next. If we are not living now, we are not living fully. It all takes place in the present. “For we are here, and the time is now.”
A point we all must learn, especially since we are all wild geese.
***
Picture: Eilis learning to eat spaghetti by twirling it without splashing the tomato sauce.
***
Marianne passes the test of eating like an Italian. May 2015 in Modena, Italy.
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