I once asked my father what was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. He said, “The face of your mother.” Good answer.
By the way, my mother was Irish. Even at 86, the year she died, she looked pretty.
So this week we will try to analyze Irish women. Freud once said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis so we have our work cut out for us.
The Irish culture is filled with literary genius. This small island of only 6.5 million has produced four Noble Prize winners, including George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett.
James Joyce is considered by many to be the greatest novelist of the 20th century with “Ulysses” being its greatest novel.
The Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis has already won three Academy Awards and many consider him to by the greatest living film actor. So the Irish have something special indeed and it is our job this week to find out what it is.
I know that I would have to find some Irish women to interview, but I could not find any in town. I asked about the pretty Irish woman who lives in East Williston but no one seemed to know her name. I was about to go down to see Father McDonald at St. Aiden’s to see who he would recommend but then I had a brain storm.
I would try to travel down Willis Avenue to the Irish American Society of Nassau County with the hope that they would be open.
Well let’s just call it the luck of the Irish but this past weekend was the annual Inis Fada Feis. In English that means the annual Irish dancing contest.
America grew familiar with Irish dancing thanks to the Riverdance phenomena that swept the world some years ago. Well, Irish dancing is going strong. There were 400 young Irish girls and boys with their parents sweating their way through the routines in front of a panel of judges.
I managed to meet about 10 Irish women who worked at the Irish-American Society and they all were born in Ireland. Yep, this was the real deal for sure.
Now as a journalist I am used to interviewing groups but this was especially difficult because we had all that fiddling and tapping in the background. I remained undaunted throughout and asked them to try to describe Irish women for me.
They used words like witty, practical, welcoming, hardworking, warm and family oriented. I could see they were all that.
They all gathered around me and were happy to share their thoughts with me. They certainly did not seem as cunning or stolid or standoffish as Freud’s comment’s led me to believe.
I took my photo of the 10 women but I realized that I had not come close to cracking the mystery of Irish women. Before I left I stopped to watch some of the young Irish girls do their hard shoe and soft shoe routines.
As I watched it suddenly became clear to me what their true character was. Here were all these pretty little girls who looked like dolls. They held their arms stiffly to their sides and kept jumping straight up to heaven. These were celestial creatures. These were not like the other women I have written about in this series who serve up earthly delights from the kitchen or with their style and fashion and beauty.
These Irish women were more heavenly and cerebral and filled with mysterious feelings. Their bodies were tightly controlled but their spirituality was up in the heavens.
James Joyce captured the essence of Irish women in the last 50 lines of “Ulysses.” The lines were spoken by Molly Bloom in her famous soliloquy as she reminisced about the day her lover proposed to her 15 years before.
On that day they were laying in a meadow overlooking the sea. As she thought back this is how she remembered it, “Then I called him with my eyes to ask again yes and he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and I drew him down to me and he could feel my breasts yes all perfumed and his heart was going like mad yes I said yes I will yes.”
The secret of Irish women is found in the depth of their feelings and memories and hearts.
The Irish live in the world of thought. They are other earthly. This is how they produce such profound literature and what makes the Irish women so beautiful.
