Fathers' Day

So, what shall we do today, Old Man?

We could dig worms from the bank and put them in a jam jar and hold old half-broken fishing rods by the deep pools of the river. I could tell stories of how I used to catch fish by hand as a young fella, and how one day an eel caught me by the finger instead.

And what if it's too cold for standing by a river?

We could lift hay bales and feel the coarse, hard twine before it snaps at the touch of a sharp knife. I could throw the hay into the feeder and you could loosen it for the curious muzzles of the bullocks, nosing through the feed with their snaking tongues. I could tramp through the mud of the yard and grumble about landlords, kick the worst of the muck off at the lone tree. We could peer into the hollow in its side together at the robin's nest, empty now, but not long ago filled with hungry beaks that opened like inside-out umbrellas begging for food.

And what if the lone tree has fallen?

We could tug and pull at the cross-cut saw, sweating in flurries of sawdust. You could push too hard and bend the blade and I could worry and swear and we could go to the lane where the coal is left loosely. I'll shovel and you'll drop the bag or hold it open the wrong way looking at birds instead of concentrating.

And what if there's coal and timber enough in the house?

We could sit by the hearth and watch red-hot horsemen dance through the soot of the fireback, twist wire coat hangers into toasting forks and hang bread in front of the cinders. You'll scrape off the worst of the black where it's burned and I'll reach down the jam pot from the cupboard.

And what if the house has fallen?

You'll help me dig rows for potatoes in my new garden and pick colours for the walls of the new house. We'll plant a hedge and hang an iron gate and railings and paint a house number on a plaque and do a thousand other things.

And what if you tire of the new house?

We'll sit on bar stools and drink beers and speak in low voices about things between us. You'll look at me and notice the laughter lines and the roguish glint in my eye and we'll wonder where the time has all gone.

And what if the time has all gone?

You'll look at children and cats and dogs and green hills and purple mountains and all the things seen from your window and you'll remember how I loved them. And in the evening, you'll listen to the birds singing until nightime comes on and you're called to close the door.

Our Dad

I read out the following at Dad's funeral Mass today:

Our Dad, Tom, was 81 years old this June. People who met him often remarked that he seemed a lot younger. This, perhaps, was due to his great spirit and love of life. He felt at his best when he was working on some project, or examining a new gadget he had made or seen in a shop window. He was a believer in the idea of “early to bed and early to rise.” Anyone who heard his grass mower working at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning can testify to that!

Tom loved to collect things and to share his latest discovery with his friends and neighbours. If someone was working on a blocked drain, or having trouble with a garden shrub, he delighted in producing some strange invention or unusual advice to solve the problem.

He loved dressing up in a favourite suit and making an entrance. In recent years he added some fancy waistcoats and a number of hats and caps to his collection and knowing how much he liked them, we, his family, often aided and abetted him by giving him presents of new ones.

We will miss him in his Sunday hat.

To many people, Tom was larger than life. To us, his children, he was that and more. He cared deeply about what was happening in our lives. He was full of pride in our times of joy. He had a quiet wisdom when we shared our woes. A word from Dad would add to our happiness or help solve the problems we found ourselves within.

Tom’s cheerful outlook is the more remarkable in the face of the setbacks that life threw at him over the years. In 2001 he lost his wife, Maureen, after 50 years of marriage, a terrible blow. His own health could sometimes be poorly and he was all-too familiar with clinics and with hospitals both as an in- and out-patient. He bore too the losses of dear brothers and a beloved sister.

In all these times, he took comfort from his religion and his faith in God which gave him the strength to not only survive but overcome his ills. He returned, each time, with renewed optimism to tinkering on some machine, hanging some shelf, fixing some door. Often these were done for other people who remarked on his resilience and (once more) were astonished by his age.

Our Dad was usually wise in his choice of friends and extremely lucky in his wonderful neighbours who looked out for him in his latter years. He joked that if he chose to have a rare lie-in it wouldn’t work out because someone would come knocking on the door to check if he was okay!

Tom’s independent lifestyle always left time for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whom he loved dearly. He met his newest great-grandchild, brought on a visit from England, only a few weeks ago. We know that each of them will sadly miss their “Grandad Tom.”

Dad would have been touched by the support and sympathy offered to us over the past days by everybody. You are too many to mention individually, but we are pleased to use this opportunity to thank you, his extended family, colleagues, clergy, musicians, friends and neighbours at this difficult time.

The family would like to welcome you to attend the crematorium at Newlands following this morning’s Mass. And there shall be refreshments served in the Cuckoo’s Nest afterwards if you would like to come along.

Tom will always be remembered, whether as “Thomas”, “Tommy”, “Tom”, “Big Tom,” “Big Dad”, “Da Walsh”, “Uncle Tom”, “Grandad Tom”, or, simply, “Dad”.

The world already feels a lot emptier without him.

Thank you.

Thomas Walsh 1927-2008

It's with great sadness that I report the sudden death of my dad, Thomas Walsh, at his home in Tallaght, on 12th July, 2008. Funeral arrangements will be posted in the Irish Independent and Evening Herald newspapers, shortly.

Edit: Arrangements as follows: Removal from Tallaght Hospital Mortuary on Thursday 17th July, arriving at St. Aengus's Church, Balrothery, at 5.30pm. Cremation at Newlands Cemetery following 10.00am Mass on Friday 18th July. Visitors and well-wishers welcome at both the church and the crematorium.

None can compare with the cliffs of.... Tallaght?

Tallaght Town Centre and two large gulls appear to have made a home recently on top of one of the pitched rooftops. I can see one of them from my office window, on the north face of the clock tower of County Hall, one sitting in the niche of a louvred ventilator. When its mate appears, the two greet each other with many "Shree! Shree! Shree!" calls that remind one of being at the seaside.

Someone speculates that perhaps the sitter is one of this year's young, still being fed by a dutiful parent.

I don't know enough about them to judge, but it looks to me like they're considering nesting on the rooftop. It is sheltered from the prevailing wind. It overlooks a courtyard that isn't accessible to the public. There are several fast-food restaurants in the area from which an enterprising gull might, conceivably, glean enough discarded food to raise a chick.

The nesting theory gained a little ground yesterday when the sitting gull maintained its position even during the worst of a number of thunderstorms that swept the area.

We are quite a way from the sea, though, and I wonder if nesting is a viable option. I shall bring my binoculars tomorrow. If nothing else, it should worry my colleagues in the opposite side of the building as I peer out the window and focus in one something unseen over their heads.

[Pic by User:Dschwen at Wikipedia Commons. Republished under terms of GNU Free Documentation Licence]

Pass me back the gazebo, missus

Ding dong!

My father and I are discussing the plan for meeting my second cousin from Canada when my neighbour pokes the doorbell this Saturday morning.

"Hello," I say.

"Hello. Your canopy is...." She motions with a finger in a spiral, up-in-the-air kind of shape. "It's gone over."

"Has it?" I say. And idiotically go to the back window to confirm its absense from the back garden. There is definitely a gazebo shaped hole in the scenery.

The neighbour heads out in her car and my father and I trudge next door where the gazebo is in a comical, four-legs-in-the-air kind of position.

"Good job I tied it down, eh?"

"You did?"

"Well, with one rope anyway."

We dismantle and toss tubular bits back over the wall. The one rope and next door's washing line saved it from becoming a Wizard of Oz event. Only just.

Note to self: Tie the buggering thing down PROPERLY next time.

I have a picture in my head of my father and I sitting under the gazebo drinking tea when it takes off. Would have enjoyed that.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

Pass me the Gazebo, missus

A little bit of sunshine has ensued and it hasn't rained much to speak of on the east coast for the past week or so. The Home section of Dunnes Stores is playing a blinder selling garden furniture, barbeques and gazebos. I could see burly husbands marching boxes of them out to parked cars in The Square yesterday. The wives were following up with shopping trolleys laden with bedding plants.

Our B&Q gazebo was unpacked from winter hibernation this morning. My father, who had called to show me his shiny new seven-year-old car, watched as I poked lightweight metal tubes together and made the magic of the summertime appear amidst bags of recycling drinks tins and plastic bottles which is our back garden.

The black cat put in an astonished appearance only briefly. Although he is becoming less wary of visitors if they are in the back garden (more room for him to escape if they should turn on him) he is still unhappy to see old men. The old man next door has had reason enough to chase our cats out of his shed in the past which I think is the source of Black Cat's phobia.

A note left on the counter this morning reads:

"If you have time, could you clean the litter trays?"

My work is cut out for me. At least I shall have a gazabo to relax in later today. I also have a new gas-fired barbeque, so if you hear sirens and see flashing blue lights this afternoon, you'll know what's happened.

No work til Monday.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

A fine, flexi day Friday morning

"Yaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaa-aaaaa-ay!" cry the kids in Scoil Carmel this morning as 11.00 o'clock break lets them out of the classroom for a few minutes.

They're running around the school yard as I step off the 75 bus in the sunshine and I feel like shouting something "Yaaaaah!-like" as well.

Called into my father's house this morning with the intention of maybe spending a morning with him. But no, true to his Lazarus nature he's off to prune a rose bush with his pal, Peter.

He proceeded to tell me how my brother brought him out the other day up to Wicklow and how the pub food wasn't to his liking and how the roads made his bones ache.

This is the brother who took several days off work in London to come over especially to visit him. He tells me:

"I phoned Dad and said I'd be visiting. He said:

""That's great. But try to drop in a couple of times while you're here.""

So I wasn't surprised when the father says to me today:

"You never got me my razor blades."

The generic blades he bought for the you-must-have-this-go-faster-boy-racer-advertised-on-the-telly razor do strange things to his beard, he says. So I got a packet in the pharmacy he won;t go into becaue he had a fight with someone over a penny or something. The girl was very helpful, and went through all the packets because the Super-Dooper razors I was picking out were different from the Super-Dooper-Turbo razors I'd been asked to get.

Next door, the locum doctor looked warily at me in the surgery.

"Just need my presciption renewed," I said. "And as I've not been here in a while, I need my bloodpressure checked."

She peered over the glasses.

"Shall I take off the jumper?" I asked, helpfully.

She hooked me up to an electronic gizmo that huffed and puffed and squeezed the life out of my arm.

"I'll just do that again," she said, as I was obviously about to go blue in the face and this was probably affecting the reading.

"Me again," I said to the girl in the pharmacy.

"Are you the Willie Walsh that's causing the strike in British Airways?" chuckled the pharmacist, handing me the tablets.

"No," I said. "And I'm not the bishop either."

I get asked one or other of those at least once a week.

Fun.

All those points in his Leaving Cert too.

An young African woman on the 77A bus was troubled that it wasn't going to the hospital.

"It goes around," said a man. He helpfully made a large circle in the air, makey-up sign-language stylee.

"Is it... far?" asked the woman.

"Five minutes."

She looked at him blankly. Possibly only in Ireland is distance measured in minutes rather than miles.

"You should have got the 77. This is the 77A. The 77 goes straight..." He made a straight line in the air. "The 77A goes around."

At the 75 stop a girl in too tight tights with legs like a capital X looked at the timetable. A young gay chappie with a twitch in his neck nearly jumped into my arms when an ambulance siren went off on his blindside. I was already halfway up the bus shelter with the fright.

I was the only one not listening to a music player. I wondered how many only had my cheeful non-trendy model in a pocket and were spoofing the outside world with expensive ear phones.

"Tsssh, tsssh, tsssh..." whispered a girl on my left, to the tinny noise overflowing from the sides of her head.

The sky was blue and full of magpies trying to bully each other.

When "You're seriously ill" is the good news

My father, Tom, is 79 years of age and apart from diabetes (which hardly bears a mention given his present situation) has had variously a burst appendix, hepatitis, cataracts, bruised ribs, colon cancer and prostate cancer. The colon cancer arose in the past eight years and the prostate cancer in the past five. He has undergone operations to help cure or manage both these conditions. He also received chemotherapy for the colon cancer. The treatments all appear to have been successful until recently when he lost his appetite and complained of pain in the abdomen. The thoughts of his GP immediately turned to a recurrance of cancer of some kind and so he has spent the past couple of weeks in hospital undergoing treatment and a battery of tests.

The family has been fearing the worst, especially since our minds have been concentrated on the matter of death given the recent loss of our Aunt Nelly from colonic cancer and our most recent loss of her (and my father's) brother, Jim, from lung cancer.

In 2006, Tom was diagnosed with an aneurism in an artery. He is usually compliant when it comes to keeping hospital appointments but in February an administration error in the hospital to which he was to go as an outpatient gave him the perfect excuse to walk away and refuse to go back.

Wikipedia says: "An aneurysm (or aneurism) is a localized dilation or ballooning of a blood vessel by more than 50% of the diameter of the vessel and can lead to instant death. Aneurysms most commonly occur in arteries at the base of the brain (the circle of Willis) and in the aorta (the main artery coming out of the heart) - this is an aortic aneurysm. This bulge in a blood vessel, much like a bulge on an over-inflated innertube, can lead to death at any time. The larger an aneurysm becomes, the more likely it is to burst."

On Friday my sisters and I met Tom and the professor heading the team of doctors handling his case. It transpired that the abdominal pain was caused by a stomach ulcer whose initial tests came back clear of cancerous cells. They plan to do further examinations in this area, but he is being treated for a stomach ulcer and is responding well to treatment. Tom is anemic from blood loss, probably from the ulcer, and they plan to treat him for iron deficiency. Finally, a vascular surgeon is going to examine whether or not it would be feasible to treat the now four anurisms in the arteries of his body.

We were so happy to hear the words "You are still seriously ill" because the conference with the professor appeared to rule out more cancer as a cause. In fact, we were positively beaming afterwards. Tom's morale is much improved and he was planning to change out of his pyjamas and into his everyday clothes for the day.

If you had the choice between a potential catastrophic failure with a quick death and a long, lingering suffering, which news would you be happier to hear?