Nothing but me, and a few million other people, that is. But the song with that line by Tom Waits has been going through my head these days:
A younger woman I know asked me why “old people always like Tom Waits.” I’m not sure all of us old people do, but that’s not the point of this post.
Being back in Jersey reminds me how frequently I’ve thought there were few reasons to go back. Austin’s a great place to live. Jersey exists for New York and Philadelphia, at least in my way of living in it. My dad worked for the New York Daily News. I went to school at Juilliard for a little while. Bridges and tunnels. Mercy mercy, Mr. Percy, there ain’t nothing back in Jersey, has resonated for a while.
In a few weeks, or months, it’ll have a more permanent resonance. I’ve got a brother who’ll be here, and some friends. We’ll find ways to be in touch. But the home base will be gone. It’s a sobering thought. I’ve been peripatetic for decades, so it’s not as if I can’t get along in this world without a base in Jersey. But I’ve never had to before now.
I don’t have a handle on it, but I keep coming back to the fact that many Americans feel a need to declare a homeland. We hyphenate ourselves to connect ourselves to an originary place. African-American, Asian-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, etc. Being from the suburbs is like being doubly from an unrooted, unoriginal America. So we go back. To New Jersey now, to Ireland for my dad, me, and many. To many places.
The picture above’s of my dad, back in the late 1950s when he would have been 29 or 30, kissing a tree in Phoenix Park, Dublin. That was his original place. I’ve been to Ireland several times now, searching for that same sort of thing. The last time, two years ago maybe, my cousin Bridget took my kids and me around to some tiny towns around Kilkenny where we actually found a postal clerk who had some sense of our family’s past. He seemed a simultaneously muddled and focused sort of guy: Aspergers Syndrome probably. I’ve taught two, maybe three students with that condition in the past couple of years, amd this man definitely fit theattern.
He acted like he knew the people buried in the cemetery. He talked of some Foleys (my grandmother’s maiden name) who lived in the area when they were building a railroad in the 1880s. He had a vague idea of a Flynn. I hatched the idea that maybe my great grandmother, who ran away from a convent in Ballyragget, and the man from Ireland she married after emigrating had come up with a plan to travel separately and hook up in America. I have no idea if that happened.
I’m happy to report that there’s a townlet, nearby, vaguely visible on the most particular maps, called Maudlin.
And there was no marker in the graveyard to give us a real lead.
So people are all we have left now. They’re more work than places are, but they’ll have to do.
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