MEMORY LANE: Peter QUINN is the author of 'Banished Children of Eve," a novel about the Irish in NYC during the Civil War. In his personal life he recalls taking a memorable trip back to Ireland with his widowed mother in the 1970s. "... In 1975, the year after my father died, my mother announced she was planning a trip to Ireland. She wanted to visit the places in County Cork that her parents had emigrated from in the 1880s. To describe my mother's decision as unusual is understated. A steadfast Catholic who wouldn't hesitate to identify herself as Irish, she had never shown the slightest interest in exploring the past. Occasionally she expressed the opposite, going beyond a blanket dismissal of questions her children posed about the family history to the active destruction of birth and death records, diaries, newspaper clippings, and the like. 'Excess baggage' was her unadorned explanation. My parents met in 1928, while my mother was a junior in college and my father was working as a civil engineer and attending law school at night. They carried the stamp of the twenties the rest of their lives, or at least of aspects now considered emblematic of the decade. Urbane and stylish, they were wonderful dancers. They loved going to nightclubs and the theater, where they enjoyed everything from the Marx Brothers to Shakespeare. In a photograph from that time, my father bears a resemblance to Jimmy Walker, dapper in a handsome overcoat, derby cocked at a jaunty angle. Like Walker, my father wanted to be a songwriter but was directed willy-nilly into politics. My mother and father weren't exactly Zelda and Scott. The idea of marrying outside the Catholic fold was a nonstarter. Ivy League schools were beyond the pale. Though they enjoyed an evening's jaunt in the downtown cosmopolitan world, their home was uptown, on the ethnic terra firma of the Bronx, whe! re my father made his political career. But they were city people to the bone. Content to rent an apartment rather than own a home, they had an enduring sense that whatever its tensions or temptations, New York was the future, a place safe from the ravages of Prohibition, Fundamentalism, and small-town Republicanism. Inevitably, although it was never spoke about, there must have been a gap between my parents and their parents, tensions, disagreements, disparate expectations. Three of my grandparents were from rural Ireland and had never set foot in a city until they traveled through Cork or Liverpool on their way to America. Even my father's mother, who was American born -- the daughter of immigrants who arrived during the Famine -- spent her early years on the farm where her father worked, on the outskirts of NYC. Yet whatever their arguments involved, they weren't over the relative merits of cities and farms. If there was the slightest nostalgia on my grandparents' part for the land or for the life they knew as tenant farmers, it was neither passed down or not mentioned.... When my mother made her trip to Ireland, she brought along her sister, a granddaughter, and myself. We found the village her father came from, a small forlorn crossroads outside Macroom, in what had been an Irish-speaking area until the early 20th century. 'Greatly shrunk in size and spirit from what it must have been a century ago' is how the parish priest described it to us. The old church had burned fifty years before, and with it the parish records. There wasn't even a faded scrawl on a moldering baptismal registry to connect us to these empty, mist-shrouded fields. My mother and I left the others on the church steps and walked together a short distance down an unpaved road. Nearby was a crumbling concrete barn with a rusted iron roof. There was a radio on. I looked at my mother. I knew she was still deeply grieved by my father's death, and I was afraid the utter absence of any trace of her own father, of a past gone and forever beyond reach, might bring her to tears. The mist was quickly changing to rain. 'We should go back, ' I said. 'Listen,' she said. I heard the quick fluctuations of fiddles coming from the radio, Irish sounds. 'My father sang that tune.' She smiled and lifted her coat above her thin ankles and did a small, graceful jig, the soles of her American shoes gently slapping the ground. It was a step I'd never seen her do before." -- Excerpts, Peter Qinn, 'Farmers No More: From Rural Ireland to the Teeming City,' in "The Irish in America," Coffey and Golway, NY/1997. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.701 / Virus Database: 458 - Release Date: 6/7/2004