The Green, Green Grass of Home

This way to home.

The statement was as innocuous as you could imagine, but it was still a kind gesture coming from an airport customs agent.

“Welcome home,” the agent said.

The greeting didn’t come at O’Hare or Newark or Dulles or any U.S. international airport through which I have cleared customs over the years. The welcome home came from a customs agent in Dublin, Ireland.

Indeed, I was home. My name kind of gives it away, but not entirely. Years later, I still smile to think of the warm, almost personal, welcome I got returning to the homeland.

Strangely, it’s not my only “homeland.” Like most Americans, I’m not one thing, I’m a mutt. I’m probably more German than Irish, and even a bit more Norwegian than Irish. Yet it’s not just St. Patrick’s Day that makes me and my family celebrate our Irish-ness.

Still, I’m not sure what it is.

Maybe it’s the name, which isn’t even officially our name. A great-great grandfather was born in Galway a Byrnes and was buried in Wisconsin a Burns. Over the years, people have told me when they see the Scottish/English spelling of my name that I am not Irish.

“Well, maybe my ancestors were actually English and Protestant but they claimed to be Irish Catholic to make their lives easier here in the 19^th century,” I respond. That usually shuts people up, if they have the slightest notion of human history.

My family is fortunate. We remain in the place our immigrant ancestors came to more than a century ago from Ireland, Germany and Norway.

Yet we cling to the Irish.

Maybe it’s the religion. We grew up Catholic and that was the core of who we were, too. But we’re also Catholic on the German side, although my mom moved away from her family and they are about two hours away. The Norwegians? Let’s just say those are the Lutherans who are buried in that other cemetery in the town of my paternal relatives' birth.

Maybe it’s the stories. We tell them with great abandon. A few years ago, I was at a conference and gave some remarks. Afterwards, an African woman I had met there said to me, “You’re Irish, aren’t you?” I said yes, but it was nothing recent, that my family had been here about 150 years.

“No matter,” she said. “Your people. They can tell stories.”

Strangely, we don’t know our own story. I often thought it odd that in a family of storytellers, in a family that had been here for so long, we only have stories that go back to about the 1920s.

But I found my answer on a visit about 15 years ago to the cemetery outside Hollandale, Wis., where generations of my father’s family are buried. I visited the graves of relatives I knew, and checked out graves I had probably been shown as a kid belonging to relatives I never knew.

The latter graves all had something in common: 1918. The influenza epidemic took out a generation of my family, leaving my grandpa orphaned at a young age and the rest of us with not one story about the generations that came before.

On my same trip to Ireland, I spun that sad tale to an Irishman I had just met. He listened, looked at me and said, “So do you get the shots every year then?”

Maybe it’s the humor. In the blackest of times my family has been able to laugh. We’re the kind of people who have fun at funerals because yes, it’s a drag somebody died but oh, we love each other’s company.

Before I knew my family was from Galway, I got lost there. If you’ve ever been to Galway City, you’d realize that’s not a difficult thing to do. But I like to think now that it was a cosmic event, as if fate were making me spend more time in a place that we were just trying to drive through on our way to somewhere else.

My family isn’t the type to pass through a place. We left various countries and have tended to stay put in the places where we settled so many generations ago. Now I want to go to Galway again and instead of cursing the unspecifically marked intersections and roundabouts to nowhere, I want to just stop a moment and take it all in.

Because I’d be home. And maybe I’d even be welcome.