Clive, pictured the morning after his 21st birthday.
“Back when I was in school, I seen a spider the size of a medium-sized man’s hand, in the jacks (bathroom). I ran out to Miss O’Shea, our teacher, and said; ‘Miss O’Shea, I just seen a spider the size of me Da’s hand’. It didn’t do no good. She just clattered me around the ear, and said; ‘It’s saw, not seen, Daniel’. I wouldn’t mind, but me name wasn’t Daniel back then. It was Clive”. – Clive (North Dakota, formerly Kilkenny).
A busboy, who may or may not be from Kildare.
“My family owned a pub in County Kildare, so, when I emigrated to New York, I wanted to keep that tradition going. Right away, I got a job as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn, which was owned by a lad from Roscommon at the time. I didn’t speak any Mexican though, and the only words I knew were from that Speedy Gonzalez cartoon. I used to shout ‘arriba, arriba, andale, andale’, at customers, thinking it meant ‘thank you’, when in actual fact, I was earning a reputation for myself as something of an ignorant racist with no manners. I am fairly ignorant, and my manners are atrocious, so I can’t argue with that, but I’m no racist. Sure once I went out with a girl from Belfast, and I even have a few Shakira songs on my iPod, and I think she’s black. Because of all that though, the tips were shite, and I ended up living in a tent just off the Brooklyn-Queens expressway for nearly a year. It was freezin’ and the squirrels kept getting in. I can’t wait to go back to Kildare”. – Oliver (27), Brooklyn, formerly Kildare.
“I was into surfing from a young age. I used to listen to The Beach Boys, and watch surfing films like ‘Point Break’ and ‘Lassie Come Home’, all the time. My experiences actually surfing was limited though, living, as we did, in County Carlow. We were a fair bit from the oceans, but there was a little pond near our house, and we’d get oul’ boards, or broken-off doors, and pretend they were surfboards, but, the water was only 18 inches deep. There was no wind or waves or nothin’ either, so normally you’d just be standing there in the water lookin’ like an oul’ eejit. The pond, seemingly, had also been used as a burial ground by a local Pagans group, for their deceased animals. So, you might fall off your pretend surfboard and land on an oul’ drowned pony or something. So, it wasn’t very nice. We moved to Connecticut a few years back, there’s still hardly any surfing, and most of our neighbors give us funny looks when we jump into the lake attached to an oul’ broken door, but f*ck them, they’re only bastards anyway”. – Dorothy (32), formerly Carlow, now Connecticut.
Left to Right: Meerkats, bloke.
“I was kicked out of home when I was 43, as both my parents were allergic to my pets. I’d eleven meerkats and an otter, and they didn’t really get along too well. Plus, I’d christened them all ‘mammy’, except the otter, her name was Graham, so, there was some confusion at times. The smell was disgusting too, before I even got the pets, I think that’s why the meerkats all ran off. When I emigrated to Miami, I left all that shite behind me, and became a securities trader”. – Jackson (61), Tralee, now Miami.
A turnip-farmer called Stuart, probably.
“We were turnip-farmers by trade. My grandfather once told me that our family had been since the 18th century, providing the south Limerick and north Kerry area with turnips for generations. Kids would always beg their parents to let them come to our house for wondrous turnip treats. So, when we moved from our 120 acre turnip farm to a small flat in Limerick’s inner city, it was quite a change. We had a small window box, which fit three turnip seeds, and, I don’t know if you know the turnip business, but it takes time to nurture, love and develop such a contrary vegetable, so three adult male turnips every four years was not enough to live on. Three weeks ago, we moved to Chicago, all of us. It’s worked out great, my dad, with forty years farming experience changed direction, and now heads up a $4billion a year software company. It’s just as well, as I was allergic to turnips, even the thoughts of them gave me chronic diarrhea. Excuse me, I’ll be back in a few minutes”. – Stuart (49), formerly Limerick, now Chicago.
The lads on their way fishing.
We were all fishermen. Me, my brothers, my uncles, even mam would come out on the boat with us. Not Dad though. He used to think the seagulls were staring at him. Later, he developed an intense fear of being attacked by an octopus, so he stayed home, making jam all day. It was hard work, the fishing, not the jam-making, 14-hour days, six to seven days a week. Where we lived didn’t help. We were from Tullamore, County Offaly, which is in the middle of Ireland, so to get to Donegal, it was a nine-hour round trip every day. After years of this, we moved to the USA. What could go wrong for a fisherman there? The Pacific on one side, the Atlantic on the other, perfect! So, we moved somewhere that would be equally close to both oceans. Nobody told us though, that Kansas was so far from the water that some folks called it ‘The Tullamore of America’. It was a 19-hour drive to either coast. I gave up after a while. A neighbor used to give me a lift the first four miles, but then I had to hitchhike the other 1,573. Now I work in a biscuit factory, it’s alright, they let us keep the broken ones. I f**kin’ hate biscuits though”. – Horace (49) Offaly, now Kansas.
Dermot, possibly.
“We moved from Dublin’s inner city, to a rural part of Wyoming, back in the early ’80s. It was a more innocent time. You could rob someone’s bike without fear of them going to the cops, or smash some oul’ ones windows for the craic, and not worry about getting in trouble for it. Now things are gone to hell. I remember well, me Da, telling us, a few days after we’d gotten settled in Wyoming, that we were going to go and visit the farmer’s market in the town center. I was delighted, but I thought he’d said farmer’s ‘meerkat’, not ‘market’. I’d never seen a meerkat before, and when we got there, it was just some oul’ lad with a stall with loads of potatoes and cabbages on it. I turned around to me Da and said, ‘Da, this is shite’. He’s barely spoken to me since. Here we are, 35 years later, and I’ve still not seen a real meerkat. There was a show about them on TV a while ago, you don’t see potatoes and cabbages having their own shows”. (Dermot – 55, Dublin, now Wyoming).
A child with a hoop and stick, not similar to a Nintendo Gameboy.
“I’d seen all the American movies. ‘E.T.’, ‘Stand By Me’, ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, so I had a good idea about what America was like. But, when we moved to Oklahoma from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, I couldn’t understand how nobody looked like John Travolta or Pamela Anderson, how they rarely wore shoes or socks, and how the adults all seemed to be chewing on pieces of straw all the time. I remember my first birthday party there. I asked for a Nintendo Gameboy, they were all the rage at the time, and some absolute bollocks got me this stupid bloody stick and hoop. Me ma made me play with it for ages out in the front garden, hours after everyone had gone home, even when it was dark. I was 19 for God’s sake. She even put videos of it online. She made me wear a dress too. She could be an awful argumentative oul’ bitch, me ma”.– Jim (27), Wexford, now Oklahoma.
A family, yesterday.
“It was weird for us, being the only Mormon family in Termonfeckin, County Louth. Each Sunday, to go to service, we had an eleven-hour round trip, as the nearest prayer center was on a small island off the coast of Galway, and sometimes, if the weather was particularly harsh, we’d be stranded there for some weeks. So, when Mom suggested we move to Utah, the whole family agreed that it’d be like moving ‘home’, so we upped sticks, literally, as we did have lots of sticks, and moved to Utah, the Mormon capital of the world. Sadly, Mom got chatting to a Jewish couple on the plane, and was so impressed by them, she ended up converting all of us to Judaism. Now we’re the only Jewish family in a Utah town of 86,412. It’s shite, I never thought I’d miss Termonfeckin”. – Caroline (28), Termonfeckin, County Louth, now Utah.
Watchin’ the oul’ telly-box.
“I remember one time, years ago, at home in County Wicklow, we were watching ‘Little House on the Prairie’ on the telly. It was Mam’s favorite show, that, ‘The Waltons’ and ‘Cops’, you know the one, where they do sing ‘Bad Boys, Bad Boys, What You Gonna Do, What You Gonna Do, When They Come For You’, well she did love that too, so it might have been that one. Anyway, she said to Dad that she did love all the lovely scenery on the American telly shows, with the mountains and the rivers and the horses. So we moved to the South Bronx. Lived here 43 years now, but there’s hardly any mountains or rivers here at all, so there isn’t. So every week she writes to the TV people, callin” them a load of lyin’, connivin’ bastards”. – Marian (51), formerly Wicklow, now Bronx, New York.