The Scariest Thing I Did This Halloween
I told a story onstage last night for Seanchoíche at the Dead Rabbit.
The theme was ‘Memory’ and here it is:
I moved to New York two years ago but my younger brother, Sean, had already been living here seven years already. So it was amazing for me, when I arrived, to already have family in the city and it's just been really nice, getting to spend time with him again, casually, you know, in a way that’s just not possible when you’re living an ocean apart.
Seán works in a bar in the city and he occasionally dogsits for one of his regulars that travels a lot for work. She'd offered to pay him for the dogsitting but he’d said absolutely not, no way, it’s just a favour, we’re friends, I wont accept any money. But the same woman is a season ticket holder for the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden and if she ever has any spare tickets going well, he will accept those.
So there was one Tuesday lunchtime last February and I got a text from my brother saying “Do you fancy going to see an ice hockey game at the Garden tonight?” And because I say yes to everything , I said: “Sure! Why not?”
Now, I am not a hockey fan. I’m barely a sports fan and everything I know about ice hockey, is whatever I could remember from seeing the Mighty Ducks when I was 8.
And the thing about non-sports fans (like myself) is that actual sports fans can get very irritated by us. We do sense that you know; you’re not covering that up as well as you think you are. I was picking my kid up from school that afternoon and I got chatting to one of the other moms and I mentioned I was going to the ice hockey that night and IMMEDIATELY, a nearby dad’s head shot up. The mom asked me who was playing, was it the Rangers? And when I said “Eh…yeah. I presume so?”, I sensed that this guy was a little bit annoyed and when she asked me who they were playing and I said “Jesus I haven't a clue!” - yeah, I was definitely getting on his nerves at that stage.
But off I went that evening anyway and yes it was the Rangers and they were playing the Dallas Stars.
Sensory Overload
Now, as I said, I'm not a sports fan but I do LOVE a spectacle and Americans don’t do sports events by halves. This was a Tuesday night game, it was early in the league and still the place was packed.
Everything was BIG and LOUD and EXTRA. Even the cans of beer were gigantic and they cost $17.
For the national anthem, we stood and took off our hats and the singer sang Star-Spangled Banner in a way that sounded like her life was actually depending on it. And it kinda looked like that too because, standing behind her, was a row of soldiers, in dress uniform, all carrying rifles.
If you suffer from sensory overload, I wouldn't recommend a night at the hockey. There was loud music at all times and if there was even the tiniest break in play, entertainment of some sort stepped in to fill the gap. There were cannons firing t-shirts into the crowd. There was a Macarena-cam that blasted anybody doing the Macarena up on the big screen. At one point, a car was even driven onto the ice and a fan got a chance to take a shot at goal to see if he could win it.
It was amazing! And the fans were SO fun.
There was a guy in our row coming back from the bar and he took out his phone to show us a picture and he said: “LOOK WHO I JUST MET”.
I looked at the photo and honestly, I had no idea who I was looking at.
“YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS RIGHT?”. And my brother and I were standing there like… “Nooo?”
“IT'S DANCIN LARRY! HE’LL BE ON THE TV RIGHT NOW!’ And I dunno if this guy was some sort of psychic but, a man I now know to be Dancin Larry, a die hard Rangers fan who has become famous simply for performing dance routines at their games, appeared on the screens and proceeded to give the most energetic and least self-conscious dance performance I have ever seen in my life.
Some things run deep
My brother, that night, happened to mention that he’d been offered a jersey to wear to the game but he’d turned it down because he said he couldn’t bring himself to wear a blue jersey that had ‘Rangers’ across the front.
I was quite surprised by this - generally - but especially after he’d been living in America for nine years.
But some things, I guess, just run deep.
Our grandfather who lived to 93, had suffered from dementia in his last few years. He very gradually remembered less and less, until just three core pieces of knowledge of himself remained:
that he was from Glasgow,
that he was Catholic, and
that he supported Glasgow Celtic.
He had grown up in a tenement in Glasgow in the 1930s, with a Scottish father and an Irish mother and being Irish was always a really important part of his identity. He'd always told us about his earliest memory of feeling “otherness”, because he was Irish. He was about 7 or 8, and a kid called for him to come out and play, but his mother had answered the door first, and said she’d get him. Later on, as they played, the boy asked him if his mother was Irish and our Granda told us he felt something shift and that the boy never called to play with him again.
A few years before he died, I brought my now husband out to his house to meet him. Grandad at that point, didn't know who I was, but his essence hadn’t yet faded away to those last few facts he clung on to. He was still good humoured and good company actually, even if he didn’t recognise us.
One other fact about my grandfather was that he was staunch Fianna Fáiler, and just for my own entertainment - and because it was true - I introduced my boyfriend to him as “This is David, he’s in Fine Gael”. David shook his hand and joked: “Nobody’s perfect” to which my grandfather quickly replied: “Well Fine Gael certainly aren’t perfect”.
The very last time I visited him, I was by myself and he was in a home. And as I was leaving to go, I said “Would you like me to close the window, Granda?”. He sat up in the bed and said “What did you just call me? Am I a grandfather?”. I told him that yes, I was his eldest grandchild and that he had 10 more. He looked absolutely thrilled with himself and with a twinkle in his eye said “My my, I was very busy, wasn't I?”