Sunday Morning Dreaming

Every Sunday my parents would open the travel section of the newspaper and set about planning a trip.  Mostly they picked whatever destination was featured, and it might have been anywhere.  In great spirits my father would ask, “Where are we going this week?” and my mother’s eyes would light up.  Hunched over the kitchen table with a pot of tea, they figured out airfares, hotel rates, sights to see, things to eat.  They brought to this pastime a zest unmatched in the routine of their everyday lives.  Inevitably, by Monday their plans had been scuttled:  “Too expensive,” or “Too far,” my mother would explain, and that would be the end of it.  The end of it, that is, until the following Sunday, when some other location was featured.  There was never a chance they would take any of these trips; yet in their imaginations, encouraged by travel writers, the whole world was just waiting for them to show up.

But as a family we did travel.  For several years my mother packed us up to visit what they called “home,” meaning Tipperary, where she, my sister and I stayed for the summer. Most years my father came for a few weeks as well.  My parents were Irish-born; they took to these visits as natives, but at first it was hard for Nora and me to adjust.  For one thing, my uncle’s farm was in the same condition it had been in his youth—maybe worse.  Against the chill of Irish rain it was heated (in a manner of speaking) by the open hearth on which he also cooked.  Rainwater from a trough and well water gathered in buckets stood in for plumbing.   In an upstairs bedroom made bright by kerosene lamps, with a staticky radio that broadcast nothing but weather reports, we would be set for the summer. Or rather, set after a few days, when Nora and I had recovered from the airsickness that was our companion the whole flight across and the carsickness that followed during the three-hour drive from Shannon Airport.

We loved being “home,” more each year, which was why my mother kept taking us back.  We ran wild through the countryside with a swarm of cousins who seemed remarkably capable; actually, I later realized, they were just seasoned farm kids. We always had jobs.  We fed the chickens, opened the gates for the cows, and we took tea out to the meadow every day at four o’clock for my uncle and his hired men.  “Tea” meant a thermos plus bread, jam, bacon, and the cornstarch custard that my mother had made.  As the men rested against a haystack, we would swirl jam into the custard and savor it, declaring it the best thing we had ever tasted.  My mother boiled the custard since neither of us could keep down raw milk. She boiled the drinking water, because that also made us sick.  We got sick from too much fat in the bacon and from the smell of the kerosene. Once Nora even had to be taken off the hay wagon, nauseous, after she had clamored incessantly to ride with my uncle.  He was out of patience so he left her by the side of the road; when he picked her up on the way back she became sick again.  The extreme version of nausea that afflicted Nora and me was considered by our parents to be an unremarkable aspect of our childhoods.  Apart from my mother’s few adjustments to our diet, they thought nothing of it; then again, they should have been used to it, as we even got sick on the New York City subway.

Travel to Europe in those days—we are talking the 1950’s here—was undertaken mostly by ocean liner.  But we always flew, nine hours on a prop plane.  Even when plotting their imaginary trips my parents disdained a sea voyage; my mother claimed she couldn’t bear the sight a ship after having emigrated on one.  More likely, it would have been too expensive.  But one year my father cashed in our plane tickets and reserved passage back to the States on the HMS Media.  Nora and I were quite excited about this; we did not anticipate, nor did anyone think to tell us, that the seven-day crossing would make us even more sick than the prop planes had.  That boat rocked and rolled its way across the Atlantic as we languished in our cabin day after miserable day, subsisting on water.  Our parents, of course, were NOT sick and they had a great time parading around the ship. For the following year, and all the years thereafter, we stuck to flying.

Ireland was the only place Nora and I ever got to, but we thought it was heaven…nausea and all.  But that was long ago.  Now I can actually take the exotic trips my parents only dreamed of, and I don’t get sick.   Whenever I touch down in a place that they pretended they might visit, Turkey or Hong Kong or Alaska, my mind flows back to the happy Sundays they spent figuring it all out.  But always, my heart is still in Ireland on my uncle’s farm.