SNIPPET: September 1930. Age 16, my mother, Kathleen SLOYAN, the second of eight children, leaves her home in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo. She will marry, raise three children and die in Brooklyn, NY, at age 53, without ever returning home. We have no photos of her as a child. With my first wage as a paper boy, I bought her a 78 rpm record that had "Mayo" in the title. Her hug was a full world. Her eyes filled, and for years I bought her anything that had Mayo in the title. I still love the sound of the word Mayo. March 1924. Age 20, my father, Patrick Joseph MURPHY, the fifth of 13 children, leaves his home in Cloone, Co. Leitrim. He will return years later, a year after the death of my mother, many years after the deaths of his own mother and father. We have no photos of him as a child. This is the story of his journey home. I went with him and met myself. In the Brooklyn world of my childhood, Ireland was always there on my mental horizon in the rhythms of speech and turns of phrase of Irish people about the house; in the ballads about the old country and a moonlight in Mayo that could bring my mother to tears; in the Friday night card games in which a priest visiting from Ireland might occasionally loosen his collar and mutter a sort of curse when the Lord failed to fill his inside straight. Our was a world of aunts, uncles, cousins; the calendar had its comforting rhythm of gatherings for holidays, baptisms, communions, graduations. And, the funerals. Always uncles - John, Michael, Frank - each death strange in its own way, each one driving my father deeper into himself. I was eight when Uncle John fell over the banister on his way up to his apartment, dropped three stories, and broke his neck. I didn't really know him, but I can still see him falling. Then, I was nine when Uncle Michael fell under the wheels of the IRT subway, the family said it was the heart that gave way, dead before he hit the tracks; others whispered that he had jumped. My dad said his brothers had bad luck... Then my godfather, Uncle Frank, the bachelor, a large man with gruff manners whose hand swallowed mine when he shook it, his breath spoke of cigarettes, whiskey, and anger. I felt bonded to him as my godfather and a bit afraid of him at the same time. He drank himself to death!. I was 13 when he died, my father was 50 and was burying his third brother in America. Years later, I would begin to understand his loss and the pain that he kept inside as the funerals kept coming. But then, I was young and my father's losses were distant. I went to my uncles' wakes and funerals and then came home, tired after a day of play with all the cousins. In Aughakiltrubred, parish of Cloone, Co. Leitrim, what could my grandparents, John MURPHY and Bridget MAGUIRE, possibly have thought when formal studio wedding pictures from the USA had arrived in the mail - the grooms looking awkward in their rented tuxedos. Immigrants to a new world, just starting out, so far from their homes. I now realize that it was sending word home that all was well, that they were prospering in the new world. The photos sent home say, "Not to worry, all's well." Grooms dressed in tuxedos for marriage, a formal occasion at which parents should be honoured and basking in the glow of the moment, but there are no parents in these wedding photos. These parents are an ocean away and will not be seen again by their children, and will know many of their grandchildren only in the stream of photographs that will try to shrink the distance. The distance between these two worlds of our family came to me one day when I came home from school and my Dad was there, home earlier from work than normal -- News from Ireland, my grandmother had died. Naive, I don't think I had ever thought of my parents as having parents. I really couldn't grasp the whole idea of it - father had a mother but she lived far away in this mysterious place we talked and sang about, I had a grandmother, she had died, my dad would never see her again. He sits there, silence fills the room, and I try to understand this mystery. My Dad was a warm, loving man, full of sharp humour, always humming tunes he composed as he went along, but at the same time he was a man of few words, at least in terms of his personal feelings and experiences. I suspect that is, at least in part, an Irish trait, especially on the male side of the fence, but in planning a trip home energized him in a special way. He began to speak more about Ireland as the trip approached, he had lots of questions. He wanted to look good, so off we went to Sears and Roebuck on Bedford Avenue, our idea of high fashion. He was clearly nervous about the whole thing. Ours was to be a five-week trip, visiting Ireland and England. In each place, he had both of his own and my mother's family to visit. Only as we talked on the plane did I realize that much of his nervousness came from worry that he might not like all these people. There he would be five long weeks, "at home," but in a world of strangers. What would he have to say to his brother, Eddie, and to his sister, Ellen? After all, they wouldn't be interested in baseball, one of his passions, that was a sure indicator he had become a Yank. After a few days visiting with my mother's brothers and sisters in Mayo, it was off to Leitrim, the real goal of the whole trip. As we neared his home turf, he began to recognize landmarks, houses, churches. No, we didn't need the maps I had been studying so carefully since Shannon Airport. He became the guide. We were closing distances - "Turn here, make the next right. If you turn here, you'll see REYNOLDS' place. The next house should be John LEE's..." Much had surely changed in more than 40 years, but he knew this place; its houses and turns of the road had histories that he was remembering, this world of rough, marginal farmland, clearly not prosperous, was the place of their beginnings of all the MURPHY boys and girls who wound up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Canada, Rhode Island, California, England, in jobs and worlds far removed from their parents who had worked the stubborn Leitrim land to feed them. He said there would be a place a bit up the road where we could buy some beer and stout to take up with us. Partly, he was testing his memory; partly, he was stalling. There was indeed a place that was not really a pub in today's terms; rather, it was a sort of general store that also served as the post office and pub, BRADY's. He had gotten the place right in his memory; he had found it after all those years, but will this place know him? One of the men looks up and says, "Is it Packy MURPHY?" There he is, Patrick Joseph MURPHY, looking all too American in his Sears and Roebuck best, but he is surely close to home. "John Francis?" Obviously, Daddy had recognized John Francis MULVEY, or at least suspected that he did. No dramatic hugs, a quiet handshake, and MULVEY, "We knew you were coming home. Eddie's expecting you." Perhaps this moment is more in my own memory than in reality. Nonetheless, I remember it as a great release for Daddy. If he was OK with John Francis MULVEY, surely he would be OK with his brother and sister. Great distance were closed in that meeting of two brothers who hadn't seen each other in over 40 years. Their greeting itself was not dramatic in any gesture or outward emotional demonstration. Brothers in more than looks, they deflected emotions, keeping their inner worlds to themselves. For all anyone could tell, they might have seen each other last week. A handshake, no hugs. "You're welcome home, sit by the fire." Whiskey all around, the only public acknowledgement of a special occasion. Aunt Maggie gave us a bit of tea. Daddy gradually settled into a rhythm of memory and laughter as old friends came by and nostalgia filled this small, warm, secure place. He was home, a circle had been closed. He had lived his life far removed from this starting place, and now he was back 40 years later. Hearing the laughter about some forgotten wildness when they were all young bucks, watching him walk the fields with his brother, seeing the easy way he had with cattle, I realised that I had always known instinctively about this other world. Without my realising it, Ireland had been one of my parents' gifts to me; perhaps without their even intending it as a gift, but here it was -- a whitewashed cottage in Leitrim, no running water, three rooms, a central fire -- in this place, my Dad and the aunts and uncles of my growing up were all born. All along that trip, I had thought I was taking my Dad home. Now, I know he was showing me my own starting place. He had taken me home. -- Excerpts, Jim MURPHY -- Yearly "Leitrim Guardian" 2001