A tribute to a confident man.
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As our nose picker in chief, was hob-knobbing it at the coronation of King Charlie of Tampax I got to thinking about confident and faux confident men. Vardakar and King Charles fit very much into the latter category of confidence. However, while this crowning, watched by hundreds of millions, took place in the UK, a funeral was taking place in the west of Ireland of a genuinely confident and humane man.
A neighbour from the homeplace died earlier in the week. I’d like to tell you about him if you have a moment or two. Now, if you happened to hit adolescence in small village Ireland in the mid to late eighties, Ireland had a dearth of many things. Money, jobs and hope not least amongst them. It was also missing, to my mind anyway, another ingredient. Authentically confident men.
Just to be crystal clear, I don’t mean a shortage of arrogant, pompous, swaggering or boastful wide-boys. Big men for the small occasion were in plentiful supply. I am talking about men who were certain of themselves and their place in the world and who you could parachute into any city on earth and rely on them to continue being certain of themselves in that world too. My neighbour Jack was one such man. A real gem of a human. But the curious thing about Ireland in that era was how, outwardly cocky, but genuinely unconfident men, responded to a confident man like Jack. More than a few were afraid to engage in rigorous debate with him perhaps suspicious of embracing the real thing. If Jack, god rest him, sat down with Charles or Varadkar he’d probably surmise the truth in the variation of an old proverb. Only in the land of the blind could one-eyed men become kings.
The problem with faux-confident men such as these two is not that they lack stature and foundation (which they do) but rather that they insist nobody else should be allowed to reveal their strengths for fear comparison inadvertently unmasks their weakness. Anyway enough about these two dimmer switches and back to Jack.
Our family lived across from the national school. Jack was a primary school teacher there and his six sons lived across the road too and to the left of it. Jack taught us in third and fourth class. He was a natural story-teller, so for instance, I remember once as part of our geography lesson we were learning about all the counties in Ireland that had coastlines and which county had the shortest one. The lesson answer came via a story about a national scór na n-óg quiz competition he once took part in years earlier. And how he was asked this very question in it.
“ I was just about to answer county Meath and I said to myself I better just do a quick run through of the map of Ireland in my head, just to be sure, and there I was coming down along the coast of Donegal and heading for Sligo when it hit me. Leitrim. “
I spent most of my childhood hanging around with his two youngest sons and our playground was the schoolyard once the pesky business of school-hours was completed. We lived in that school yard and Jack’s house during the summers because it had a piece of tarmac at the front and a piece of concrete at the back with a shelters and pillars ( natural soccer goals in layman’s terms). With pieces of baling twine tied together we played out Wimbledon, the edge of the concrete that met the grass was perfect for long-jump competitions in the summer of 1984 for the Los Angelus Olympics, Euro 88 wasn’t in fact played across soccer stadiums in Germany but on the concrete yard of our national school. A lot of people don’t know that you know.
Two chimney pots on the arched roof of the school acted as the tip-top of GAA goalposts and we’d teach ourselves how to kick points high and handsome by trying to dissect them. One of us on each side waiting for an O’Neill’s ball to drop out of the sky or the sound of broken glass. If you asked any of us what we were gonna do when we grew up we’d have probably have put kicking points for Galway down as our desired profession.
All you needed back then was a ball and a little imagination to be perfectly happy. Afterwards, we’d always decamp to Jack’s house for strong tea brewed with tea-leaves and post match analysis with his two sons. Jack had many qualities but a shining one was that his ease chatting away to a bunch of teenagers was the same as with men of his own age. He didn’t converse at you but with you and he was funny, loved to laugh and owned a strong booming voice. A cross generational man and the proof of that was in the hour long queue outside the funeral home this evening. All waiting to pay respects to a man born in 1928.
Jack was a great man. I don’t say that lightly for greatness to my way of thinking is determined by how you handle the tragedies and misfortunes in your life. Jack’s traumas, and he had major ones befall him, never bent him into a different shape of person as far as I could see. Sometimes, no often, tragedy flogs a man into something unrecognizable from the one that existed before the misfortune, his, never broke his spirit and a love and determination for life always managed to re-flower.
Our family moved into the village in the fall of 1979 and a couple of months before our arrival his wife died a year short of the age of forty. So, I only ever knew Jack as a widow and a man raising six sons aged 6 to 17 or so at the time. All through my growing up years his love for her was clear and remained a living thing. He never re-married or entertained thoughts of another relationship for the rest of his life and believe me there would have been plenty of takers.
As kids turned to adults three of his sons made homes and lives outside of Ireland and the rest within it and all have doted on him for as long as I can remember. It would be a regular topic of conversation with my own mother when one or other of them would be regularly home from the UK or the States not to mention the lads settled in Ireland.
“ Oh sure now wouldn’t it be great to have sons like that looking after me and ringing me every day of the week “
The dig, of course, would be deserved and well known in our home house. I wouldn’t be one for extravagantly long chats with family on the phone or for even answering it on occasion.
Jack liked a drink, a Powers and a drop of water, and it was working in the old’s man’s pub, in the village, that I used to have great conversations with him usually along with one of his two youngest sons. The dinner was the centre-piece of the day in his household and he’d dock into town at lunch-time everyday to buy fresh meat, usually red meat, from the butcher and then regale us with stories of what he was going to conjure up on that evening’s menu. Some days the door of the pub would open and he’d land in quoting Shakespeare or a Yeat’s poem. Other times he’d bring news of something topical and interesting that was in the Irish Independent which the postman delivered to his house every day.
In a village that often only centred around the four F’s - football, farming Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - he was like manna from heaven. I can only imagine how harsh earlier decades of Ireland must have been but in the eighties the rural country still was stifled with too many secrets and a state and church institutionalism oppressive in nature. Jack spoke his mind freely on a range of subjects some that were taboo for the time and possessed a keen intellect well capable of backing up his thoughts and arguments. No doubt, there were the odd snipers and back-biters, people that would make the occasional snide remark behind his back but I never paid much heed to them. They rarely, if ever, had the balls to say anything to his face which tells you all you need to know. When I reflect on the proper amount of confidence a man should aspire to attain - Jack is the benchmark closest to the ideal in the people I have known throughout my life.
One Saturday evening, on a night when winter and spring were still in an arm wrestle with one another, his second youngest son was hit by a car and killed walking home not long after mass. In that era, before technology, the shock waves of this tragedy still managed to hit my boarding school bed the same night. I’ll never forget how he dealt with the local man who drove the car that killed his son in the accident. I was in the house with his youngest son as throngs of mourners packed the house. The grief was almost suffocating and at some point the man driving the car found the courage to face the father of the boy he’d hit. I didn’t know how Jack would react and I guess nobody knows until it happens to themselves. Unless my mind is playing tricks with me Jack put his two hands on the man’s shoulders and gently said:
“ You killed my son but I forgive you “
In the months and years that immediately followed, from my traipsing in out of his house, and Jack’s visits to the pub, he lived those words of forgiveness. I’m sure he had many moments of hellish pain in the years that followed but he never stumbled towards a bottle marked bitterness or rage or vengefulness. Only great men possess that kind of strength and grace.
He’s with them both now and the light there is a little brighter still.
Ni bheidh a leithead aris ann.
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A tribute to a confident man.
A wise man Jack was, sometimes things in life make no sense but handing it over to God, forgiving and trusting it will all work out brings true peace RIP
Beautifully written Gerry.A lovely tribute to a man that was,it seems,a Legend.