Tag Archives: Irish-American

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 7

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

I recall a conversation with Irish-born journalist and author, Claire Dunne, who tells me how in 17th-century Ireland, when the old Gaelic order began to crumble, that “war on harpists and their instruments peaked when Queen Elizabeth I edicted death on them.” She notes how Cromwell from England destroyed their harps, and how people were forced to hide their musical instruments in the bogs…I realized how hiding one’s harp is synonymous with hiding one’s soul. The great waiting ends when one doesn’t have to hide anymore. In years to come, I would tell my own story, write my memoir (published as “FBI Girl”), where I expose the journey of learning to belong to the world amid all the silence.

I dream that from the ancient Irish bogs emerged an apricot tree on the other side of the world– in Los Alamitos, California, to be specific–beckoning a young girl with an Irish name to prance around its trunk and proclaim the “leprechauns” are coming! The philosopher Bachelard writes of loving things “intimately, for themselves, with the slowness of the feminine, that is what leads us to the labyrinth of the intimate nature of things.” With the slowness of the feminine…that is how I discovered an intimacy with cosmos which is my Irishness. I notice the sky and her belongings, the water and her reflections. I see into a self who dances and have found the mirror of my people.

Maura Conlon McIvor

Maura Conlon-McIvor

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 6

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Ireland, 1987

Taunted by the secrecy and silence within the trauma, I returned to Ireland after I graduated from college and visited my Great Aunt Johanna on the ancestral farm. I decided to surprise her with no advance warning of my arrival. When she answered the door, her shock collapsed into flitting anger: “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were coming, I would have killed a goose?!” We settled in for tea and sandwiches. My great aunt examined the photographs I’d brought from California, inquiring how close our family lived to Hollywood. Then, before I could pull out my notebook with the carefully crafted questions I’d hoped to ask, questions about our ancestors, the farm, and their traditions, Aunt Johanna blurted with visceral concern: “And who do you think it was that killed J.R.?”  Dallas, the wildly popular, 1980s American television show had come to Mullagh, Ireland. And she wanted to know everything. I realized then I’d have to find the buried stories elsewhere. I started reading the Irish authors, James Joyce, WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde…looking for clues into that forlorn condition of “waiting.” Or as Seamus Deane writes, that “specifically Irish form of nostalgia…This nostalgia was consistently directed toward a past that was so deeply buried that it was not recoverable except for sentiment.” Yes, that sentiment. The faraway look in my grandmother’s eyes and in my father’s eyes, that sentiment courting me in the quest for my own identity. (more on the Audio Diary.)

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 5

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Back in the United States, the old conversation remained: “Don’t you dare ask me about that damned country, do you hear?” My Irish grandmother, who’d worked in New York as a seamstress, said this holding a needle, but it may as well have been a knife. I tried to understand the source of her pathos–that she had to leave Ireland or that she had no desire to ever return. Perhaps it was the Irish koan, the double bind–damned if you stay and damned if you go–that led to this waiting station disconnected from story or place. In alchemical terms, the base metals underlying this waiting station remain untouched, the soul’s prima materia not worked, the pain not metabolized. The resulting trauma of exile, of not knowing how one belonged to the world, manifested in the great waiting–but waiting for what? If place has vanished and with it story, what happen’s to one’s narrative? It waits underground, in darkness, praying for re-emergence, for a spot of soil to nudge so life can begin anew…Rebecca Solnit writes, “Trauma is inherited as silence, a silence it may take generations to hear.” It would be the next generation, my generation, who would say enough to the secrecy…enough to the wait. We would dig past the genealogical charts and venture down into psyche’s bogs. We would sniff for the stories long buried, the poems etched on skeletons. We would re-claim the thin spaces. Life would begin anew.

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

The Burren

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 4

My mother’s brother, Fr. Ed Hogan, a Catholic priest, invited me to travel with him to Ireland in the winter of my eighteenth year. He would lead a retreat near Nenagh, County Tipperary, where some of our relations lived, and research further our Hogan family genealogy. On the chilly night when we boarded the plane at JFK, I thought of my father and mother who’d never been before to our ancestral homeland. I thought of our old pastor, Father Quinn and his roses and the Irish nuns and their long-gone wimples. I thought of my thick-brogued grandmother who refused to speak about her native country. I thought of my long-lost pen pal Mary O’Connor from Northern Ireland. All of them I’d packed into my Samsonite suitcase as if we were sailing to the moon. When I landed in Ireland, my relations in firm embrace looked at me and said, “Welcome Home.” I understood “welcome”– but “home?!” Home was 6000 miles away –30 miles from Hollywood, 10 miles from Disneyland, five yards from the old leprechaun tree in my backyard…or was it? (More on the audio diary.)

Reflections and Momentos from My 1970s Ireland Journal 

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

I grew up on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, not far from those celebrated spindles of the collective imagination: Hollywood and Disneyland.  But by the age of six, the center of my imaginal world revolved around another dazzling spectacle–the apricot tree in my backyard and its spring blooms. In April, I’d gaze up to the branches of this beloved tree, waiting for the arrival of the minuscule green buds. Once spotting them, I’d run into our house and yelp: “The leprechauns are coming!” For me, something magical was simmering, a mystical transubstantiation. The budding “leprechauns” were tricksters, evoking my deep connection to the place I knew my ancestors came from, that fabled island called Ireland…..

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County