the rix mix

I've said many times that although I have good deal of Irish in me, from Ireland & probably some via Liverpool, I was raised with no deliberate inculcation of Irish-American culture. For that I am mostly grateful. My first contact with Irish/Celtic culture was through "Darby O'Gill & the Little People." When I got older, I tried to step back &  see what actually was particularly (& peculiarly) "Irish" about my father, my grandmother, & that side of family. My sister also went through this process around the same time, & named her daughter Kathleen Brady (Brady our grandmother's family name), which pleased me very much. Our dad even began trying to recapture some of what he had thrown away as a young man. Our grandmother, though  physically resembling a larger version of an Irish fairy folk "little person," didn't have much of an Irish cultural consciousness. She just was. She had nothing to prove.

As a literary-minded person, I moved on to Irish literature. W.B. Yeats' "The Celtic Twilight" & a selection of early poems were doors to that, in   a well-worn Signet Classics paperback I still have.

In Celtic myth, another world co-exists with this one, the border between the two is mostly illusory,  & on this border the strange & the miraculous are commonplace. Some  people are "gifted" to see what exists simultaneously in both worlds because they are descended from the creatures in that other world.

Labels: holidays