A Fierce Local: Memoirs of My Love Affair with Ireland

by Harvey Gould

Overview

After a twelve-year courtship, author Harvey Gould, a nice Jewish boy from Chicago, marries Karen Duffy, a beautiful, Irish-Catholic lass from Manhattan. Karen instills in Harvey her love of horses, family history, and Ireland itself, and the two embark on twenty years of adventures in the Old Sod.

In this memoir, Gould offers a vivid picture of what it’s like to travel and live in Ireland. From riding in foxhunts to Irish step-dancing on a pub’s dirt floor to drinking Guinness directly from the tap, A Fierce Local presents a firsthand look into Irish history, its social customs, and its culture. He also writes of returning to the tiny village of Adare, where they became so integrated into the local life the residents accept them as two of their own and bestow on them the honored moniker of “fierce locals.”

A Fierce Local also narrates Gould’s personal story as he’s diagnosed with a terminal disease and given five years to live. His battle teaches him universal lessons and deepens his ardor for life, his wife, and for Ireland. With humor and pathos, this account shares tales about the country’s people and places—the site of a never-ending love affair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462033690
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324
File size:	2 MB

Read an Excerpt

A Fierce Local

Memoirs of My Love Affair with Ireland

---

By harvey gould

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Harvey Gould
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-3367-6

---

Chapter One

The Unlikely Couple

Highland Park is a northern suburb of Chicago that stretches along five miles of Lake Michigan. When my family moved there in the fifties during my Wonder Bread years, it was already an affluent town. Unlike many other suburbs on the North Shore, it had a sizable Jewish population. I grew up in a kosher home. Our family observed the Sabbath (Shabbat) from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday, which meant my mother recited the blessings over the candles, my dad chanted prayers over the wine and the challah in his beautiful voice, and my sister Carol and I didn't get to go to Friday night high school basketball games.

My mother was steeped in Judaism; she believed in it down to her bones. And when she was raising my sister and me, she passed on to us her love of the religion and its traditions.

My sister and I went to Hebrew school every day after public school, and we went to Sunday school for immersion in Jewish history and tradition. Our family attended shul (synagogue) for some Shabbat services, various holidays, and certainly never missed attending Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services (the High Holy Days), fasting on Yom Kippur being something of a rite of passage into Jewish adulthood.

Our friends and those we hung around with were all Jews. What I knew about Catholicism wouldn't fill a thimble. I'd never been to a church. I was taught that though Christians believed Jesus was the Christ or Messiah, Jews believed the Messiah hadn't arrived yet. I heard that over time, Christians had done some terrible things to Jews, and some of them thought we'd killed this Christ guy. I always thought if anyone asked, I could explain that our family had nothing to do with it.

At the same time I was growing up, surrounded by Judaism and its customs and traditions, Karen was growing up a nice Irish-Catholic girl in Washington Heights in Manhattan. All four of her grandparents had emigrated from Ireland. Some of Karen's earliest memories are of Irish rebel songs and the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Karen had all the sacraments possible for a young Catholic: baptism, confession, communion, confirmation, and later, marriage. Her dad was a cop on the NYPD. She attended parish schools, went to Mass regularly, and through her teenage years, went to confession weekly. Though the Duffy family lived in an all-Irish neighborhood, it was bordered by an all-Jewish neighborhood. It's easier in a suburban environment to live a more insular life, as I did. When you grow up in a city, as Karen did, in a neighborhood filled with apartments in which people of different ethnicities live virtually next to one another, it's more likely that you'll have more interaction. So while the only "host" I knew growing up was someone who threw a party, Karen grew up eating bagels, lox, and cream cheese, knew the Hirsch's—Holocaust survivors, who owned the local grocery store where she bought candy—and that on Saturdays, not Sundays, the Jews celebrated their Sabbath.

Even in Karen's more ethnic-mixing neighborhood, however, the dividing line was puberty. When it came time to start dating, the Irish-Catholic and Jewish kids who'd played in the same playgrounds, retreated to their respective corners, dating only among their own. Karen was supposed to marry a nice Catholic boy and she did. She had no children. I was supposed to marry a nice Jewish girl and I did. We had three daughters. Karen's marriage lasted four years; mine lasted eight.

As a young married woman, Karen moved to San Francisco. She took a job, essentially as a Girl Friday, with a small company that was gearing up to sell products to copper mines in the Philippines. As it turned out, the company became successful, and she ended up a partner in a business that consumed much of her time for the next three decades.

While Karen was developing her business career, I was a student at Berkeley and then at Northwestern Law School in Chicago. While still at Northwestern, I married my first wife whom I'd met while both of us had been students at Berkeley. Born and raised in San Francisco, she wanted to live in the Bay Area, so within a year of graduating from law school, we moved to a town just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I started my career as a lawyer after joining a San Francisco law firm. Karen knew one of the attorneys there and called, looking for someone to be in touch with her partner who had a legal matter to discuss. As destiny played out its hand, I was the one given the assignment, but even after I'd met her partner it took some time before Karen and I first met. Life's chances are thin. There are so many ifs to our most critical connections.

Karen and her partner were at a basketball game one night. She spotted a man in the crowd whom she'd never seen before. Years later she still holds in her mind the image of his face, what he was wearing, how his hair was combed, and the sudden sensation that she was looking at the man with whom she'd want to spend the rest of her life, a sensation that she brushed off as quixotic and childish, but she looked at him again. As the game ended her partner also spotted the man and waved hello. Amazed that her partner knew the man about whom she'd just had a fanciful delusion, Karen asked who it was. "That's Harvey Gould, the attorney who I just met through your contact." Eerie.

After my wife and I separated in 1976 and divorced a year later, I was busy adapting to living alone for the first time, working hard as a young trial lawyer, being a single father, and doubling up on work during the week to keep my weekends free for my children.

Separately, Karen was likewise busy, which meant working full and hard weeks, often including weekends and taking up to four business trips to the Far East annually for three weeks or so per trip. When she was home, her niece and nephew occasionally stayed with her for a weekend, and sometimes the three of them joined my children and me at a park, and then at a restaurant.

I started seeing Karen in a different light. My kids adored being with her, and stripped of her executive surroundings, I was falling madly in love with her. She was successful, bright, driven, beautiful, and had impeccable taste. She's the best judge of character I've ever known. And, of course, she was the forbidden fruit, a blonde shiksa, every nice Jewish boy's secret dream.

Years after my divorce, I started to use all my wiles to get Karen to marry me, but she flatly refused. Having made her choices, she wasn't about to slip into a role with someone else's children that she'd avoided for herself. She didn't want to compete with my former wife. She wanted to be "Karen" to my children, not a stepmom. She was ready, willing, and able to guide them, but not to raise them. Try as I might, and I tried mightily, Karen remained resolute. She was a catch well worth the wait, so it wasn't until sixteen years after we met and twelve years after my divorce, that Karen and I married.

Though I knew I'd found my soul mate, living together should have been rough. Each of us had lived alone for many years, and we were set in our ways. Still, adjusting to married life with Karen was a piece of cake. Without ever discussing them, we simply made numerous compromises. What other couples found to be stresses of living together, or "working at marriage," we handled seamlessly. Marrying Karen is the single happiest and smartest thing I've ever done. Falling in love with the land of my new wife's ancestors and making Ireland our home away from home was a close second.

Chapter Two

Dipping a Toe into Ireland

Karen was a Duffy whose father was always going on about being descended from Brian Boru. In the sixties when she was nineteen, she first visited Ireland, tracing the trip in reverse that her grandparents had taken to the United States. She knew her grandmother had come from Derrinacartha, a tiny village in Mayo, and her grandfather had come from Cloontia, a small village in Roscommon, a mile or so from Derrinacartha. Mayo and Roscommon were two of the hardscrabble counties where, as in many parts of Ireland, it was tough to scratch out a living.

When Karen got to Cloontia, she asked if anyone knew Bernard Duffy, her father's first cousin. (Her dad's name was John B. Duffy, the B for Bernard.) A villager said, "Jest go down this road till it tarns to dirt. Then ask the first person ye see."

The first person she saw was a young girl. Karen asked her if she knew the Bernard Duffy family. The child said, "Yes, Bernard Duffy is me da."

The young girl took Karen into the family cottage and introduced her to her mother Margaret, who was probably in her midthirties, certainly no more than forty. The main room of the cottage had a dirt floor. A pot of food was cooking over the fireplace. There was no indoor plumbing. Margaret was proud that they'd just "changed roofs," which Karen took to mean that they'd gone from thatch to shingles. Bernard and Margaret had three children—Ned, John, and Margaret. They also had one cow and a donkey. Mother Margaret sent daughter Margaret into town by bicycle to get some bread. When she returned, the bread was served with jam and tea.

Margaret told Karen that Bernard worked in Liverpool for six months at a time. Obviously, the farm alone didn't earn enough to support the family.

On the mantel of the fireplace was a picture of Karen's grandfather. This was her heritage. The hard-luck life in Cloontia in the 1960s, let alone what it must have been like when her grandparents left Ireland sixty years earlier, is why, when her grandmother finally made it to the States and was asked if she wanted to return to visit Ireland, she scowled and said, "No. Why do ye think I left?"

Karen was transfixed by the serendipitous nature of it all, how each of us is a product of luck, pluck, and circumstance. It could just as easily have been her cooking dinner over that fireplace, except that her father's father chose to leave Ireland two generations earlier, knowing that he'd never again return and never again see the land and people he was leaving, whereas Bernard's father had stayed. It was a connecting moment, but it also was chilling.

Margaret knew the family of Karen's grandmother and directed her to her grandmother's house. There Karen found the remnant of an old cottage, left to go to seed, and a new cottage built next to it. The woman who answered the door was married to a descendant of Karen's grandmother, but she wasn't welcoming. She didn't invite Karen in, saying, "You don't look like any of them." She announced that she was from Tipperary as if to say, I'm better than those born here.

Even with the unpleasant end of her search for her roots in Ireland, Karen's attachment to the land of her ancestors remained deep and warm. She'd landed in Dublin on that trip and traveled across the country to get to the family homesteads. It was a beautiful trip, and her first exposure to the forty shades of green that dot the countryside and surrounding hills. Her entire childhood had been wrapped up in stories and myths about Ireland, and she was not just a Catholic, she was an Irish-Catholic. She felt deeply the centuries-old plight the Irish had suffered at the hands of the British. The potato famine, about which I knew nothing until Karen came into my life, tied her even closer to the Irish, because she grew up feeling the pain of it. She knew that during the famine, of three and a half million Irish, nearly a million died of starvation and disease caused by the blight that destroyed the potato crops, and another million emigrated in a desperate effort to escape its ravages, during a time when Ireland was exporting food to England. Even then, though, she knew instinctively what many years later a BBC survey would confirm: Ireland was the most content country in Europe. She knew that even with its suffering, it was a land of laughter, beauty, myth, art, culture, dance, and an unbendable spirit—and that a love of all this was in her blood.

As Karen grew closer to agreeing to marry me, she wanted more and more to introduce me to the land of her heritage. Since Ireland and horses go together like love and marriage, going to Ireland on a horseback riding trip seemed the perfect introduction.

* * *

In the early eighties, Karen and I took up horseback riding as our primary form of relaxation. In 1988, we took a horseback riding trip to the Old Sod with our riding instructor, Jann, her future husband, Michael, and Bernadette, a friend and another riding student of Jann's. The trip was spectacular, and though it was strictly limited to the horse world, my first experience of dipping a toe into Ireland was so grand I wanted to return.

The five of us flew to Dublin, the largest city in Ireland, near the midpoint of the country's east coast. What's hard for many Americans to wrap their heads around is the age of so much of Europe, and of course, other parts of the world. To us, old means a town that ten years earlier didn't have a Walmart, some other big box store, or a multiplex movie theater. But the year we arrived, in 1988, the city was celebrating its birthday. Not its one hundredth birthday. Not its five hundredth, but its one thousandth.

The city is deemed to have been founded in 988 by the Vikings. Being no dummies, they built their settlement by Dubh (Black) Linn (Pool) (later the River Liffey), the name Black Pool deriving from its dark waters. It was also deep enough for harboring ships. After the Norman invasion, the high king, acting as the head of Norman land acquisitions, did what in more contemporary times would be known as heavy-handed rezoning. He annexed a nearby settlement. By the combination, Dublin became the capital of Ireland and a key center of military and judicial authority.

Anglo-Norman rule dates from the twelfth century and from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, Dublin and its surrounding area was known as the Pale, the only area then genuinely under the authority of English law and from which the phrase "beyond the pale" emanates.

From the Irish perspective, the Pale was a boundary from which they were excluded from living. From the British viewpoint, the Pale was not so much to keep the Irish out as to protect themselves from attacks from the Gaels. Why would the Irish possibly want to attack the English invaders? After all, in 1366 all the English did was pass the Statutes of Kilkenny that forbade English settlers from marrying Irish natives, fostering or adopting Irish children, using the Irish language, and Irish modes of dress, and other Irish customs, mandating that English colonists be governed by English common law, not Brehon law, and denying the Irish admission to any English church. Obviously, the Irish just couldn't take a joke, but they'd have centuries to learn English humor. Anyway, by the seventeenth century, Dublin had expanded greatly, for a time becoming the second city of the British Empire, surpassed only by London.

By 1916, in an ill-fated attempt known as The Easter Rising, for the seventh time in three hundred years, the Irish tried to throw off British rule. Based in Dublin, the uprising failed, and the Anglo-Irish War raged for six years. During that war, Michael Collins helped form the modern Irish Republican Army (IRA). He created an assassination squad (the Twelve Apostles) who killed British agents on Irish soil and assassinated high-ranking British operatives in London. The IRA's guerilla tactics, occurring at the end of World War I, took their toll. The British military, politicians, and public were war-weary and started looking for a way out. Eventually, they agreed to treaty negotiations.

Michael Collins led the Irish negotiating team that resulted in a treaty that kept the six northern counties in Ireland under British control, while creating a Free State for the rest of the country. Hence, to this day you have Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Many considered the treaty that Collins brokered as a sellout; others thought it the best solution under the circumstances. This internal dispute led to the Irish Civil War in 1922–1923 during which Michael Collins was assassinated.

I'm not sure whether these terrible periods were given any quasi tongue-in-cheek names, but doing so would have been typical of the Irish. For example, during the British occupation of Ireland in the twentieth century before the Republic was created, the most hated troops were the elite, and often brutal, Black and Tans, getting their name from their black boots and tan slacks.

Today, throughout Ireland, in any pub, you can order a black and tan, and you'll get a mixed pint of two beers, one black, and one tan. Couldn't beat the British militarily? Then, make a beer out of them. Then, too, what the rest of the world called World War II, the Irish dubbed the Emergency.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from A Fierce Local by harvey gould Copyright © 2011 by Harvey Gould. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................1
Chapter 1 The Unlikely Couple....................8
Chapter 2 Dipping a Toe into Ireland....................12
Chapter 3 Saying Kaddish in Dublin?....................20
Chapter 4 Heading Out of Dublin....................30
Chapter 5 Riding at Castle Leslie....................34
Chapter 6 Riding at Sligo....................42
Chapter 7 A Honeymoon in Ireland....................50
Chapter 8 Mary, Adare, O. J., and Clonshire....................57
Chapter 9 Harvey's Claddagh Ring and Declan's Turf....................68
Chapter 10 Foxhunting with the Clare Foxhounds....................73
Chapter 11 The Adare Cottages....................91
Chapter 12 Dan Flaxman, Sarah, Dingle, and Mrs. Murphy....................102
Chapter 13 How Long Can We Stay?....................112
Chapter 14 Thoor Ballylee and a Few Miracles at Knock....................122
Chapter 15 The O'Conor Don and a Muddy Carracastle Grave....................127
Chapter 16 The Stolen Painting Caper....................133
Chapter 17 Muckross House and Ballymaloe....................139
Chapter 18 Donagh and Picasso....................143
Chapter 19 9/11....................147
Chapter 20 Purtill Cottage....................153
Chapter 21 "Where Are The Pretty Pubs?"....................160
Chapter 22 Donal and Patsy....................165
Chapter 23 Margaret....................175
Chapter 24 Oirish Time....................178
Chapter 25 Tony, Martin, and the Good Stuff....................187
Chapter 26 The Treacy Kids....................192
Chapter 27 The Limerick Foxhounds Come Visiting....................201
Chapter 28 President Bush Visits Ireland, Sort of....................209
Chapter 29 Roger the Hammer....................217
Chapter 30 The Purple People Eater....................221
Chapter 31 Hunting with the County Limerick Foxhounds....................227
Chapter 32 "You're a Fierce Local, Harv"....................247
Chapter 33 "We're Going to a Restaurant in Rathkeale?"....................252
Chapter 34 "Say Nothing to Simon"....................256
Chapter 35 The Pleasures of Travel....................261
Chapter 36 What Do Ewes Want?....................271
Chapter 37 Harvey Becomes a Full-Blooded Irishman....................281
Chapter 38 Reverend Harv....................304