Caitriona Balfe, Buddy’s Ma
An assassination attempt two days ago. A political convention today where some of the most draconian plans are being seriously considered. A good leader stumbling publicly. Record heat. Wildfires.
Though I was born in the final two weeks of the Truman administration, I was a Kennedy kid. That world would last forever, wouldn’t it.
Apparently not. I practice receiving whatever this world presents me without turning away or averring or preferring. I’m not very good at it. Some old habits never die. But nevertheless, I persist.
But these past days having risen like a king tide, challenging my hard won and tenuous equanimity, summoning fear and despair, and I need to step away, just for a bit. I’ll be back.
I have an aching heart today, seeing the losses we face. I’ve never gone in for narcotics, and my less threatening drug habits I’ve given up years ago. Words, stories, and music seem to serve as salve these days. Films are especially accessible and potent palliatives.
So, I administered Kenneth Branagh’s masterwork, Belfast, therapeutically yesterday, as I’ve done five or so times since it premiered in 2021. It’s worked well for two hours. There is something about these Irish people that echoes up from deep down below the floorboards for me. And Van Morrison’s soundtrack stirs movements that feel like memory.
I am only third generation Irish American. My parents and theirs were born in the States, but the generation before them came here from Cork and near Ulster and other places. My Dad’s family were McDonnell’s (Mac Domhnaill) from Antrim, but I’ve never been there. And I was a sixteen-year-old American kid during The Troubles, so how can there be a connection to Belfast in 1969?
I would love there to be that connection, a meaningful cultural or familial umbilicus to Ireland. I have three of the required Irish characteristics: quarrelsomeness, poetic verbosity, and an unquenchable thirst–none of which get one ahead in this world–and a couple of those it’d be good to limit or eliminate altogether. But those don’t make me bona fide.
I was born in Washington State, USA. There is no real Washington culture or heritage like Boston, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, or San Francisco have. Sure, I love salmon, coffee, Blue Moon beer, and Mount Rainier, and I’m proud of Jimi Hendrix, but it ends there. We’ve no special slang or colloquialisms or insider insults like the Brits. Perhaps we are best known for being plain. God forbid.
I have a chosen and adopted lineage running back through Japan to Tang China, that is rich and warm and happily without a shred of meaning. It’s just been my life fifty years or more and it fits like old Levi’s.
But the Irish thing is mysterious. It’s there. I can feel it. But I can’t have it, like hearing a lighthouse horn in the fog, or being startled, thinking I see an old girlfriend in the airport, or waking from a nap, unsure I’m not still asleep. I saw some of it in my grandparents, but the second world war and the boom-boom fifties homogenized the Irish out of my parents.
Branagh’s love poem does it to me, though. We understand this screenplay is loosely autobiographical, which is sweet but not needed. The black and white film and brilliant cinematography by Hans Zambarloukos are stunning. Branagh gently slips in color sequences to support the story (I won’t spoil), and Van’s songbook is on full display.
But it’s the acting, these characters who are believable and who elicit that foghorn feeling in me.
This scene between Judi Dench (who was 83 when this was filmed) and Ciarán Hinds echoes my grandparents just a wee bit:
GRANNY and POP sit by the window. Cup of tea.
POP Everybody’s leavin’ home.
GRANNY People have to move on.
POP “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”.
GRANNY Is that what does it?
POP Yea, well you don’t usually buy your wisdom with a walk in the park. Your heart has to explode.
GRANNY Mr. Philosopher. When did your heart ever explode?
POP That time I saw you in those brown stockings.
GRANNY (Laughing) Holy God. I remember that. It took me half the day staining my legs brown with tobacco water, and then our Annie took half the night to draw the seam down the back of my legs with a pencil. You couldn’t understand why you couldn’t get your hands round them. You thought it was magic.
POP It was magic. When you’ve got grey hair people think your heart never skipped.
GRANNY Did yours ever skip?
POP Aye, it danced a bloody jig every time you walked in the room.
GRANNY Ach you were full of it then, you’re full of it now.
Or this exchange between Buddy and his Granny on the bus, showing us a level of resignation coloring it all:
BUDDY We’re going to the pictures. He’s taking us to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.
GRANNY What in the name of God is that?
BUDDY It’s a flying car.
GRANNY Oh, God, I’ve heard it all.
BUDDY It goes over a cliff, and you nearly fall out of your seat. Do you want to come? It’ll be company for you till my Pop’s home.
GRANNY If God had wanted me to see flying cars, I’d have been born with blinking wings. You love your films, don’t you? I was a great one for the pictures when I was your age. I used to think you could climb right inside the screen and visit all those strange places you saw. Like that one in that film. What was that, uh…? Uh, “Lost Horizons”. Did you ever see that?
BUDDY No. What was the name of the place, Granny?
GRANNY Shangri-La. That’s what they called it.
BUDDY Did you ever go there?
GRANNY There were no roads to Shangri-La from our part of Belfast.
Thank you for listening. I realize I found my Irish heart. When mine is breaking, I find something so sad that it makes me cry, and that feels good. And, I cannot not tell you about it.
“Yes, Brendan. I believe I will have another.”
July 14, 2024
Fantastic. I feel my Irish connection strongly in reading this.