My sister-in-law is Irish. She came to America, according to my son, “during the Time of the Pay Phone.”
You know. Sometime just after the Great Famine.
His aunt’s experience of leaving her homeland has captured his imagination. He obviously can’t fathom leaving your home behind and moving to a new country – or more accurately, he can imagine it, and he finds it overwhelming.
His emotional reaction has been complicated by his exposure to “The Immigrant Experience” in school. Apparently they didn’t cover modern times, or maybe when they did, they focused on other, more recent immigrant groups, rather than the Irish. At any rate, when he tries to fit his aunt’s story with what he’s learned, he can’t quite make sense of the narrative.
One night while I was tucking him into bed, he’d clearly been thinking about his aunt, because he said, “I overheard her saying that when she first came to this country, she was really fascinated by 1-800 numbers.”
I must admit, the image of an unauthorized 1-800 Dial-A-Mattress arriving on my front porch immediately sprang to mind. All I needed was for him to get interested in the telephone. The possibilities were endless. For my sister-in-law as a young girl, the ability to make a free phone call was astonishing. For my son, it could develop into a new hobby.
So I proceeded with all the practiced caution of an experienced parent: I merely responded with a “Yessss?”
He said, “So that means… that she’s an immigrant?”
I said, “Yes, it does.” (Hello, the brogue? Did he ever hear me speak so charmingly? Erin go not so much.)
I left it at that. I was also hoping that his comment did not indicate an underlying, seal-the-borders attitude he’d picked up somewhere.
He then asked, “Did they check her health when she got here?”
I said, “I don’t know. They might not do that anymore.”
He said, “Well, was she worried the whole time she would have to go back on the boat?”
I suppressed a smile.
“No,” I said, “she came on a plane.”
He stared at me and thought some more.
“Do they check ANYONE’s health anymore?”
At this point I was wondering if he was going to don a face mask to keep him safe from the huddled masses – or whether he was simply empathizing with the fear of being turned away from America after the long journey.
Because he has a kind heart, and also, it must be said, is often somewhat grubby, I decided he could not suddenly have turned into a germaphobe. It had to be the latter.
I tried to reassure him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We can look it up – but she was fine.”
His brow furrowed further.
“When did she first come to these shores?” (Evidently Emma Lazarus is still taught in school.)
He’d either missed my airplane reference – or perhaps the image of his aunt in steerage was simply too vivid for him to let go.
“Well, as I said, she flew into JFK airport, which is, I suppose, technically speaking, by a shore, in the 1980s.”
He pondered all this a little more, still clearly picturing his aunt with a shawl over her head, perhaps clutching a blighted potato in her hand as she descended the stairs of an Aer Lingus jet.
Then he asked, “What’s so interesting about 1-800 numbers?”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
