A Key Experience
by Mary Hayes Grieco
"Oh, I hate this!" I cried in exasperation,
as I slogged through the icy puddle looking for my keys.
"Come on, Mom---let's go home now. I'm cold!"
My daughter Tara stood with her shoulders hunched against the wet
March winds.
"But that is my full set of keys with my favorite
key-ring that Fred gave me for Christmas!", I wailed, as I
toed aside another chunk of floating ice to peer into the dark,
sodden grasses.
I straightened up and looked in despair at the sea
of mud and melting snow that spread far and wide around me. Half
an hour ago it seemed wild and daring to prance and splash with
my daughter and my dog among the great old trees of our inner-city
park. Now that my keys lay hidden somewhere in this muck it seemed
like the height of foolishness. The light was failing, so we walked
dejectedly home. I imagined my car looked quizzically at me as we
passed by and left it there by the curb instead of getting in and
driving away.
My keys! I missed their weight in my pocket, and I
thought of the lovely pewter key-ring as my personal logo. It was
a charming little open hand with a heart in the palm of it; it gave
me a peaceful greeting every time I unlocked my door. It was well-crafted
and expensive, as far as key-rings go. It would be embarrassing
to ask Fred to buy me another one, especially since this was the
third set of keys I lost in recent memory. I suspected that my husband
would reach the end of his rope this time with this unfortunate
habit of mine, his sense of security undermined by the fact of loose
sets of our keys abroad in the inner city where we live. As I walked
home with Tara and my disgracefully dirty dog, I had one foot firmly
in shame, and the other foot in the awareness of an absolutely stunning
red sunset...
"Where were you running?" Fred asked.
It was the next day, and the park looked like a different
world from yesterday's wet spring evening. The light glinted broad
and bright on the hard surface of choppy ice that covered the huge
lawn under the trees. The temperature had dropped overnight and
winter's unyielding face had returned.
"From there.... to there.... to way over there...
and up there. It's pretty hopeless, really." My little keys
could be encased anywhere in this opaque mess.
"I'm just going to report the loss at the park
building in case they show up later in the spring."
"I'm going to keep looking.", said Fred.
"If children find them they're likely to keep the key ring
anyway because it's so cute."
I left him there and trudged to the park building,
resigned to the loss. I searched for the day co-ordinator, dodging
basketballs and shouting to be heard above the throb of rap music
and loud voices of a small group of teens. It was the middle of
the school day, but there were always a lot of kids at loose ends
in this neighborhood, looking for a place to be that was not school
or their less-than-stable family location. The community center
constantly created little programs to catch and serve the young
lives that were flying about in chaos. I loved the familiar whirl
of vital energy here.
I found the co-ordinator, a friendly besieged man
with a thumb-sucking eight-year old girl attached to his shirt-tails.
He was moving what looked like a million folding chairs on a long
cart from one place to another. The little girl trailed silently
along with him on his duties. I didn't know him but I knew him:
I had seen co-ordinators change here about every eighteen months
for the last decade. Joe, Lenny, Sarah, Pat... What's this guys
name? John... they all seemed to have an incredible center of gravity
amid this mayhem, and that famous Positive Attitude. I guess the
turnover is so great because they are serving in society's front
lines in the War Against Complete Disintegration. I couldn't help
the love that poured out of my eyes as I told him I'd lost my keys
in the park.
"Lost yer keys? Well I've got some fellows that
don't got nothin' to do---they'll help you find yer keys!
"Uh, no, that's Ok. I could have lost them anywhere.
If you could just take my number and---"
"Pepe! Daniel! Mario! Come here, boys! We've got a
job that needs doing! This lady's lost her keys."
"No, really, I don't think that we'll find them
while the ice is frozen---"
"These guys are great lookers," he said,
"If anyone can find your keys, I bet they can! I'll offer an
award of $1.00 to whoever sees them first!" His voice boomed
with the Positive Attitude, but his eyes said, "Lady, please!
Help me out here."
I looked at the kids. They were all about nine. One
of them was kicking the wall and making martial arts throws at the
air. The other one had a wispy presence, and an unfocused stare
that told me he wasn't quite convinced of his own existence. "Great
lookers indeed," I thought. The third child stood at earnest
attention, staring up at me with liquid brown eyes as he waited
for my answer. The combined intelligence of his face and the insecurity
of his posture pushed me over the edge and I signed up for the Key
Project instead of going home like I planned.
"Great, guys!" I said positively. "I
really appreciate it. Let's go."
We walked out towards the great frozen lawn. Fred
was methodically combing the distant perimeter of the park. He waved
at us and continued his search. The raw wind flowed against us like
ice water, and the boys were chattering with cold by the time we
arrived at the huge general vicinity of my keys. None of them wore
a jacket.
"Man, it's f---ing cold!" said Pepe.
"Where's your jacket, Pepe?", I asked. "Is
it at the park building?"
"Yeah---I mean, no...I don't know! Maybe I didn't
wear one!" He attacked a tree with an awesome kung fu maneuver.
Daniel stood vacantly nearby with his nose running. Mario clasped
himself with his thin arms and said softly, "What do your keys
look like?"
I described my keys to them. Pepe looked at me shrewdly.
"Lady, is that little hand made out of real silver?" I
told him that I thought it was pewter.
"Man, if that was real silver, I'd just keep
them if I found them, and get some money for it." He whirled
off like a little dust devil out of season, looking here and there.
Mario kept pace with me, looking carefully, his eyebrows
making a line of concentration. Daniel continued to stand among
the trees like a statue.
"I sure hope we find them," I said to Mario.
"It had all of my important keys on them, and the key ring
was a special gift from my husband.'
"How much did that key ring cost, lady?"
said a voice behind me. I was startled to find Pepe so close again.
I told him about fifteen dollars.
"Then your husband should give us fifteen dollars
if we find it instead of one dollar like the guy at the park."
I checked my irritation, remembering that I was now
the director of the Key Project, and responsible for my words and
actions.
"Well you know, Pepe, that kind of hurts my feelings
when you say that."
Mario looked at me curiously, and Pepe paused in mid-whirl
to ask "Why?" That's what it cost!"
"Sure, I said. "But I thought you were here
to help me, not steal from me or expect a high fee. I'm upset about
losing my keys---I need them. If you were upset about losing something
special, I wouldn't take it from you if I found it. If I said I
was going to help you, I really would."
Pepe gave Daniel a little shove as he ran off. "I'll
look over here..."
Mario and I continued our methodical side-by-side
search til it was too cold for me, even in my warm jacket. We called
in the troops. Between the five of us, if you count Daniel, we had
searched every inch of the great lawn.
"Thank you, boys. We gave a good try."
"Maybe we need to dig under the ice," said
Pepe, kicking into the ground with his sneaker. He was finally making
eye contact with me and trying to be helpful.
"I think we looked pretty thoroughly. I guess
I'll just have to get along without them. Mario..." I shook
his hand, and he looked back at me shyly.
"Pepe"... he slapped at my hand and resumed
his attack on the enemies in the wind.
"Dan---"...he was already gone, slouching
silently back towards the park building.
"It was nice to meet you, Mario. Thanks for looking
so carefully."
He nodded shyly, and turned to go. My keys were on
the ground in front of his feet. Impossibly, the shiny little hand
greeted him with its open heart.
"I found them!" he cried joyfully, pouncing
on them and waving them over his head.
"MARIO!! MARIO!! MARIO FOUND MY KEYS!! HOORAY!!"
I shouted the good news to the bitter white sky, hopping up and
down.
"Here you go," he said proudly, his eyes
sparkling with the self-esteem of one who has saved the day. He
was a hero. He ran off, catching up with Pepe and Daniel, and the
three of them ran back to the park building to report to John. Victory
united them. Fred and I made our way home, my keys resting heavily
in my pocket. I was glad that I had lost them so Mario could find
them. "Honey", I said, "We do not know what purposes
we serve."
What’s so lucky about being Irish?
by Mary Hayes Grieco
I used to be both proud and selfish on St. Patrick’s
day—proud to claim 100% Irish ancestry and a name that can
be traced there back to the 11th Century--- and selfish because
I resented the non-Irish people who also take this day as an opportunity
to wear green and claim a stake in the treasures of the Irish. I’m
as guilty as any of them, of course, because I’m not even
truly Irish—I’m a second generation Irish American.
Nobody in Ireland pays as much attention to St. Patrick’s
day as we do. But I want to be Irish, and so I allowed myself to
be guided by the deepest values of my ancient family: generosity,
kinship, and the liberal expression of imagination. I changed my
ways and I decided that other people can be Irish on March 17th
too.
Whether it is based in myth or fact, the quality of
being "Irish" is apparently a human archetype of mythic proportions
that is valuable to lots of folks. If it weren’t we’d
never have gotten away with making all this noise and spectacle.
In Chicago, where I’m from, the Irish community has had the
nerve to dye the Chicago River bright green on this day every year.
What is it that we Americans are giving homage to when we wear green
on March 17th and celebrate the Irish spirit? Here’s my humble
attempt to identify the individual cultural stars that form the
celebrated constellation of qualities in the Irish character.
The Contented Peasant. I don’t
know how many films I’ve seen in recent years out of Ireland
where 3/4 of the movie’s effect was accomplished by frequent
shots of a humble white-washed cottage nestled on a green hillside
at different times of day. Somehow that picture goes right past
the defenses of the urban mind and burrows into the soul to say,
"home." Most of us have ancestors who were peasants living in relationship
to a piece of land, intimate with the movement of clouds and the
shifting angles of daylight. On some level we all need that and
we miss it.
The Charming Fellow Among His Kin.
Who doesn’t want to be charming? Who doesn’t secretly
desire to be the kind of person who effortlessly lights up a room
and is declared a darlin’ by 300 of his closest friends and
relations? Irish people expect this of themselves and each other,
as naturally as breathing. When I was in Ireland a few years ago,
I was touched by how readily most people I met took me in as if
I was a long-lost cousin. The first moments of conversation with
anyone there contained cues that said, "It’s all right, love.
You and I now, we’re cut from the same cloth."
The Pub What’s in a pub? The
opportunity to disappear into the mist of smoke and music and conversation
for a time-out from the ordinary despair of daily life. The pub
gives you permission to seek an altered state for a while and share
wit and whimsy with your fellows. In Ireland, the pub is one outlet
for the expression of the Irish people’s outrageous generosity.
Drinks are bought all around, cigarettes are spilled out onto the
table for community consumption, and it’s considered impolite
not to share a song if you’re asked to. Irish people suffer
more than their share from alcoholism ,"the good man’s weakness",
but that doesn’t serve to detract from the perennial community
rejuvenation that flows through this pub culture.
Language and literacy. It’s
no longer any secret that most of our great English writers were
Irish transplants to British soil. The Irish people, though poor,
have long been one of the most literate people on the face of the
earth, and in the old days, the poet bard was second only to the
king. Even today the Irish give the bard a nod by allowing writers
to be the only group that is exempt from paying taxes. I once heard
an Irish philosopher claim that the Irish people have accomplished
an odd form of revenge against the British oppressors who forced
them to repress their native Gaelic and speak only English: they
lifted the English language into a higher poetic art form than the
British could ever hope to touch. Hurrah for words!
Political Savvy The Irish people
are political creatures down to their bone marrow. They have a long
memory for history and they have passionate ideals. Being Irish,
then and now, means having an opinion and knowing where you stand
on an issue. Moreover, it means saying what you think about it---
wading vigorously into community discourse on justice and the uses
of power, and other things that matter.(And to an Irishman, most
things matter.)
Courageous Defiance of Oppression
"The Fighting Irish" is an archetype that is alive for us in many
more ways than a mere football team can express. We respect the
persistent courage of a native people attempting to say no to the
last vestiges of British colonialism. In a way, their struggle is
the class struggle that all of us visit from time to time in the
tiered social worlds we move about in. As diplomat Andrew Young
once put it to a British dignitary without any unnecessary tact,
"Well, the British practically invented racism." The Irish have
a lot to teach the rest of the world if they as a nation can resolve
their internal racism and national bitterness and establish a new
era of peace and health. Ireland, we’re watching you.
Fairies Irish people, like other
peasant races with long roots, are still in relationship with beings
from the spirit world. In Ireland if someone mentions a ghost or
an angel or a fairy in casual conversation nobody blinks. They all
carry on talking about it as an ordinary thing, and then go on to
the next topic. One of the reasons we want to be Irish is that we
secretly love fairies, and we never wanted to give them up. We know
that fairies are necessary because they sprinkle joy and silliness
around and they help the plants grow. Once a year our green clothes
magically grant us permission to believe in fairies and anything
else we want to.
The luck of the Irish What’s
so lucky about being from Ireland? The Irish people are about as
"lucky" as the Native Americans: they are both conquered nations
that have endured famine, genocide, and the tragic migration of
their younger generations to other cities and other cultures since
the mid 1800's. Ireland is still torn today by partisan terrorism,
the current expression of a war that is many hundreds of years old..
Until only recently Ireland has shared the same subsistence-living
woes shared by the third-world countries but we haven’t thought
of it as part of the Third World because it’s inhabited by
intellectual white people. Ireland still has the highest rates of
mental illness and child abuse in all of Europe, and even second-generation
Irish Americans carry shame and emotional damage from our extended
family’s struggle with alcoholism, the dark side of our Irish
legacy. What’s lucky about all of that?
Dreams Our luck comes from the fact
that we can always believe that it will soon be otherwise. One of
the hallmarks of the Irish psyche is the deftness with which it
rises again and travels in realms of hopeful imagination. Psychological
studies show that the Irish, more than any other westerners, find
ready restoration for the psyche in positive fantasy and dreaming,
both waking and sleeping. They are as ready to believe in a lovely
vision of tomorrow as they are in a real cow in a real barn. They
straddle the world of dreams and reality with cheer and acceptance
of the validity of both. And we all know that the best things is
this world come from the dreamers.
So, all the best to you, cousin—let’s
be Irish this week, if only for a day. We’ll wear green because
green is for the hills of the Emerald Isle, and it has a place in
the psyche of anyone who wants it to have one. If you go to the
pub on St. Patty’s Day and listen to Irish music, let your
imagination dance on the bridges that link earth and spirit, past
and present, what is and what will be. Raise your glass and sing
a song with your fellows for that little island that is so heartbreakingly
beautiful. Ireland retains in its rocks and waters a place for the
wild soul to roam and dream.
"But I who am poor have only my dreams.
I have spread my dreams under your feet. Walk softly, for you tread
on my dreams." - Yeats.
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