Tag Archives: roots

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: Part 3

Such search for identity–identity being code for how we belong to the world–contravenes the logical matriculations of our conscious days. Virginia Woolf writes of time’s superficial “orderly and military progress” and how deep below resonates “a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.” My leprechaun tree in the backyard, my “half-finished sight,” kept me running between garden and house to announce new life–to proclaim that I was part of something larger than myself, something mysterious and beautiful.

These first images of childhood reveal themselves as soulful harbingers within thin spaces. These thin spaces–a Celtic notion that denotes the place of connection between the local material world and the liminal, eternal one–represent a pivot in how we belong to the world, in how the ground of the world opens to us, starting in childhood. The philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, calls psyche’s early landscape the first time wherein the revelation of images hold for us–in eternal fashion–intense, psychological values. Such images return us to a “cosmic memory” which is our earliest memory of belonging to the world. We don’t outgrow the connection to this fecund place that seems outside of time. It weaves the fabric of our being.

As I came of age, I sensed at a deeper level that my Irish inheritance had everything to do with that leprechaun tree, and of how I belonged to the world.  (More on the audio.)

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 3

 

My Irish-Born Grandmother, Molly, with my father, Joe (seated), my Uncle Jack and Aunt Irene. My father would never speak of his childhood. And the same goes with my grandmother. 

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 2

That faraway and even dreamier place called Ireland was iconified within the lush surroundings of our local church, St. Hedwigs, in Los Alamitos. The parish lawns were textured like moist linen and lined by endless rows of roses…Sister Mary Ita, my fourth grade teacher, told me about her niece named Mary O’Connor, who lived in County Limavady in Northern Ireland. She arranged for Mary and me to become pen pals. I prized Mary’s letters filled with lovely Irish penmanship that arrived in the blue, tissue-thin envelopes marked aero mail. We were Irish girls living on opposite sides of the world! Such are the early images of an Irish-American childhood–and the rumblings of a quest for identity–as launched in suburban Southern California…I pictured Mary in a wet country perhaps not far from all the bombs in Belfast. (This was the late 1960s.) How do I tell her about our trips to Disneyland or our backyard pool parties complete with piñata…Prosperous California tipped to the future. We could settle upon nothing for nothing could settle for long. (More by listening in!)

Ireland, 2014

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Under the Shade of the “Leprechaun” Tree

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