Gardner, MA 1990

I am sitting in a teal blue wing chair, a gift from my friend Carol, a chair from her parents’ home, the Cabes, in Baltimore. In my memory, there are boxes packed and I am sitting still for the first time that day. I am moving to Roanoke, Virginia to teach at Virginia Western Community College, a decision that was truly mine, in every sense of those words. I created so many challenges for myself in the position I held, one that could have brought tenure in seven years, and keep me in Massachusetts for my career. Instead, the pain from my past, the alcoholism in my family, my father’s incest, and the agony to untangle past pain from present life, had caused me many challenges in my career. So, I was told, “Your contract will no be renewed.” I got the word in Fall 1989, with plenty of time to look for a job, and so I did. The weekly Chronicle of Higher Education had job postings and I applied to so many, even went on interviews in New York and California, but now I was on my way to Roanoke, Virginia.

Sitting still, I have an awareness from my grandmother, she is telling me I am just following her path. She had to leave her home in Ireland, come to the United States, find her life. Leave Massachusetts, she says. Go live your own life. A ghost? A wish fulfillment? A grasp at certainty in the midst of much inner turmoil and change? Who knows? I am an unreliable narrator, remember? Nonetheless, I take this connection and let it unfold over many decades. Until I have read the scholarly work about Irish immigration, read novels and short stories, visit Ireland in 1995, and now go again in June 2024, but this time as an Irish citizen with an Irish passport, fully claiming my connection to my grandmother.