MY mother was mad for the color green. She carpeted rooms in it, upholstered furniture with it and assembled her wardrobe from it, in all of its shades: Kelly and hunter, pistachio and olive, moss and myrtle. For my sister’s wedding she wore an emerald dress. I thought back then that she was trying to match her eyes. I realized only recently that something bigger and deeper was at work.
You see, I finally visited Ireland. I say “finally” because I should have gone long ago, in tribute to her, in acknowledgment of the Irish in her background, her blood and mine. But that part of our heritage got lost when she married an Italian and was swept into his Italian clan, which was so thoroughly steeped in its ethnicity — and so exuberant about it — that none other had any chance. She learned to make ravioli and frittata with the best of them, and I grew up thinking of myself simply as Italian, in spite of my pale skin and freckles, which mirrored hers. I even went on to learn Italian and to live briefly in Italy, using it as a base to explore much of Europe. Except for Ireland. Somehow, I kept forgetting about it.
I went in mid-September, and I went mostly, truth be told, because it promised spectacular scenery, bountiful seafood and an infinity of pubs, which my traveling partner, Tom, was especially excited about. We covered as much of the country as we could in a week’s time, dipping into Cork as well as Dublin, logging over 700 road miles, lounging beside a lake in the southwest and ambling along a creek in the northwest.
But I also went for a sort of communion with, and investigation of, Mom, who died almost 16 years ago. It was like an adult version of that classic children’s book “Are You My Mother?” except that I wasn’t a lost bird asking a kitten, a dog, a boat. I was a grown man asking a country.
It was on Day 2, on the road between Dublin and Cork, when it hit me that the greens that decorated Mom’s days were the greens that decorate Ireland. You read about them before you come — about their depth, shimmer and variety — but books can’t capture the way the hue of the hillside in front of you, fleeced with sheep, will be markedly different from that of the hillside behind you, flecked with cows. Nor can books convey the sudden shift in these colors with the arrival of a cloud or the onset of rain, which seems to fall four or five times daily and would be infuriating were it not the very agent of this verdant patchwork. Beauty has its price, and in Ireland it’s a soggy one.
I didn’t have relatives to look up or areas of the country to home in on. Mom had never carefully traced her family tree. She knew only that she was a British Isles amalgam and that Ireland was prominent, and maybe predominant, in the mix. Italian-Irish: that’s what she told my three siblings and me we were.
And it was time — long past time — to focus on the far side of the hyphen.
I SHOULD make something clear right away, especially since I’ve already mentioned food several times and, like many travelers, put it at the center of every journey. While Ireland is Italy’s peer in natural beauty, it isn’t on the culinary front. As a visitor you just have to make peace with that. By eating carefully I ate well, and there were also serendipitous delights, most notably a fish-and-chips that I’ll return to in a bit. But certain clichés exist for a reason and hold true over time, which is another way of saying that I had potatoes coming at me everywhere I turned.
In Ireland, “and chips” is a phrase that annotates much more than fish. It’s ever-present and all-purpose. One pub near the Rock of Cashel, a cluster of medieval buildings on a hilltop in County Tipperary, advertised a lunch special of lasagna and chips. A fashionable, relatively new riverfront restaurant in Cork named Electric served chips alongside a steak that was already resting on a bed of mashed potatoes, and Electric was a model of spud restraint in comparison with what was actually my favorite among the restaurants I visited, the Winding Stair, in Dublin. There my stuffed cabbage was filled with mashed potatoes and placed beside what tasted like a thin potato purée, which abutted wedges of roasted potato. The kind word for this would be redundancy. The accurate one would be overkill.
For the rest of this best article from Frank Bruni please follow the link / New York Times/ Travel / October.26/2012 : http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/travel/to-ireland-a-sons-journey-home.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=frankbruni
