Family photo of my grandparents somewhere in upstate New York taken sometime before 1926.

It’s something I think a relative said, but unfortunately I don’t know who it was or when she said it. She was from my mother’s side of the family, I think, and she’s gone now. Both are as is the opportunity to find out. Even if my mother were still alive and I could ask her, she always had what I think of (rightly or wrongly) as a very Irish attitude towards conversation. Particularly her attitude towards questions that were answered not so much with information but with half stories and observations. I vaguely remember my mother telling me about “a man and a tailor-made suit”. The resigned disappointment the statement conveyed was just something to be understood without explanation—an Irish inheritance. So the exact context, background or people involved in the incident weren’t passed on. Not important in my mother’s mind because it’s all about the story and the humor; that’s what matters not the details. A relative or perhaps a friend of a relative who was trying on a new suit which of course didn’t fit (that’s life) threw the suit down on a bed in disgust uttering that line. Further questions wouldn’t have yielded any clues as to who she was just more of the same, “Well let’s see she must have been Mama’s...” It just becomes too much story and too much time to sort through it all. Consequently, all I remember is the line. And it’s a great line: “the two dreams of my life; a man and a tailor-made suit.”

Mama, my mother’s mother and pronounced by her and her sisters with a short “a” as in damn, was Irish as was their father. They were from the north from Portadown and Belfast, and had come to this country sometime after the First World War. I don’t know how they met once over here and my mother never mentioned it. I don’t think she knew. They were distant cousins but I’ve never been able to trace it all through some confusing family trees which my grandfather had compiled. Too many Ralphs, Archies, Cathleens and Annies to reckon with; as if there were a finite number of names to choose from when naming a baby. My mother and her two twin sisters were all born here in Brooklyn. And if there’s one thing that can be said about this country, it’s that it takes hold of a family quickly. All three were fully American while their parents retained the old world accent and attitudes. In Depression era Brooklyn and Queens, seemingly everyone was an immigrant. Just like today, I guess, only back then the dominant groups were from western Europe, Russia and of course the United Kingdom. To the other residents in the neighborhood, my grandparents were “the Irish” ones.

So while I’m not sure who the “two dreams of my life...” line came from, I do know she was an unmarried woman, a spinster, an old maid as they used to be called back then and whether she was here or still over there I’m not sure. But, I do know that she was trying on a new suit being made for her possibly by my grandfather’s sister who was a seamstress at one time and had worked as one on the Queen Mary ocean-going liner (my God how times have changed). So the woman seeing that it didn’t fit and perhaps wasn’t even getting closer to fitting exclaimed in despair and exasperation “the two dreams of my life, a man and a tailor-made suit” and threw the suit down on a bed. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was as close as she ever got to complaining about her life and how it had turned out. And, I guess what I’m really saying is that kind of acceptance (resignation?) was typical not just of the old world but of that generation.

So many of the old world ways have vanished at this point even in the old world. My grandfather used to wear his old suits—vest and all—to clip the hedge; a reminder that today’s world of casual clothing and work wear just didn’t exist before the 1960’s. Perhaps this stood out even back then in the forties because unbelievably when my father was in the army (Korean War) he was talking about home or his in-laws something along those lines to another soldier, a fellow resident of Queens. And the man recognized my grandfather, we called him Pop Pop, from my father’s description of him. He realized that he had seen my grandfather doing the hedge clipping in his three piece suit—tattered but all three pieces still in service. “For Chrissakes Miller..that’s your father-in-law?” he had said to my father. Back in Ireland the outfit wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow or warranted remembrance. But here in the states, it definitely had a touch of the old country to it.

My grandfather would read the New York Times or in many cases save them to read later; the pace of change being so different back then—saving a newspaper to read later? Wouldn’t the news be old news? In any case, my father called him “the man behind the times” because he (my grandfather) would always be sitting in a chair with the newspaper fully spread covering his face probably napping not reading, and because well, you get the picture.

At some point we acquired a small ashtray with an illustration of Finn McCool on it from my grandparents’ house back in Queens. It isn’t worth anything but I still have it. It’s the kind of “artifact” that can recreate in a flash of recognition a small part of someone’s life like a book of matches or a concert ticket. I love it for the simple reason that it belonged to my grandparents and that my mother might have occasionally noticed it wherever they kept it as she passed by it when she was growing up.

I have a hard time connecting my grandparents to the land of Finn McCool, the Irish folk hero of legend. Finn with the powerful thighs, Finn who bounded across the Giants Causeway, Finn who hunted with his hounds. The McCool of lore. My mother’s father the only grandparent who lived long enough for me to get to know, came from a deeply unathletic people. I remember once he demonstrated how he would do his morning exercises while still lying in bed. He was staying with us in Pennsylvania in the room where we had the TV and an extra bed. He kicked his still pajamaed legs out from under the covers and proceeded to operate an imaginary bicycle. His pajama pant legs slipped down as he peddled revealing his thin, pale legs—no muscles to be seen. Not a bit like Finn McCool. I remember that I smiled as he did this not knowing what to do or say.

The Irish of that generation born at the end of the nineteenth century at the dawn of the twentieth are impossible to imagine naked—at least for me. They are in my mind a clothed people. My mother claimed that she never remembered seeing her own mother’s bare feet or her mother’s bare anything for that matter. I have a wonderful photograph of my grandparents standing on a lakeside dock somewhere in upstate New York. They were, according to my mother on their honeymoon. The word honeymoon is just wrong for the Irish back then—trust me, but I’ll use it for lack of a better one. They were wearing bathing suits, and I think I can make out some sort of swimming shoe on my grandfather’s feet. There they stood having their picture taken (by whom?) as if to say “here now—you see; you see this” as a testament to just what could happen in crazy, unpredictable America. Who needs to invoke the legend of Finn McCool when ordinary people can get up to such stuff as this.

I guess it’s part of the nature of photographs—the static moment; I can never quite imagine them before or after the shutter opened and closed on this scene. I can’t imagine them actually in the water getting wet with arms and legs moving about. It’s a moment frozen in time with no antecedent or afterthought, and so I take it for what it is.

Back when my grandparents were born at the end of the nineteenth century, the expectations that people had about what their lives could be or should be was so different from now. It’s an idea that’s almost impossible to explain to an American let alone a young American. To become anyone you want to be or to do anything you want to do is considered a birth-right to Americans of the Generations X, Millennials and the unknowable Gen Z’ers and Alphas. Even my own generation of Boomers to a great extent felt and feel this. But to people from the Depression era and especially people from the Old World, life had limitations and it was just accepted.

My maternal grandparents grew up in large families. Yes, even Protestant Irish families were often large. In my grandfather’s family, one of his sisters was born with some kind of ailment, or weakness—I don’t know what it was because neither did my mother. So much for oral family history. In any case, she was infirm and sickly and didn’t go to school regularly—the kind of Victorian era condition that afflicts characters in a Dickens’ story. A condition of the sort you just have to accept and not question with a twentieth century mindset. All my mother knew of this sibling was that she would stay at home while the others went to school and she would swing on an outside fence gait waiting for them to return. Whaat? Sorry, my own rule: don’t question. For most people life had limits because our understanding of life was so limited. Or perhaps it’s better to say that they never felt entitled to anything. Life didn’t owe them a thing. And just to be clear, these were people of a generation who picked themselves up and emigrated into the unknown with nothing but the clothes on their backs. So it wasn’t a lack of courage, effort and determination—just humility.

So now that science, medicine and technology have given us so much towards understanding life—our lives—should we keep this expectation that anything is possible just because right now at this moment in human history it really does seem possible? The human genome has been mapped, medicine is growing replacement “parts” to combat disease, there are spacecrafts orbiting and exploring the universe, and communication is instantaneous. Should we keep our expectations that anything is possible; that our lives have no limits? Or could maybe that old world perspective with lower expectations be more useful now?

My maternal grandmother when she left Ireland went first to Canada. My own mother didn’t as usual have many details just one “story”. My grandmother, Kitty, was trained as a nurse. She was born into a fairly well-to-do family in Portadown because her father practiced as a doctor, Doctor Heron, and it’s her maiden name that was first given to my mother as a middle name and then to me. Kitty trained as a nurse in Leeds England, and I have a wonderful postcard sent by her from that time back home to family showing a photograph of the school laboratory with the female students and vaguely scientific instruments on lab tables. So, my grandmother with her late Victorian era education in Northern Ireland went to England to be trained as a nurse. She was somehow able to parlay this into a job opportunity in Canada after the first World War. Again, it’s all amazing to me because I can’t get a job and I’m already here!

The story my mother told me was that when Kitty, her mother, arrived in Canada her job as a nurse involved some sort of care-taking of people who apparently had the means for care but weren’t of sound mind because as my mother related to me one instruction her mother, Nurse Heron, was given was to “grab a piece of the patient’s nightshirt” if they ever tried to jump out of the window. Hhmm, ok. Having a piece of the nightshirt could be used as proof that she, Nurse Heron, had done her best to stop the patient from jumping. Was that the logic? Confusing as it is the story does, however, go a long way in relieving my feelings of occupational inadequacy. I certainly couldn’t train and qualify for being a nurse now, but back then maybe.

Two activities I’ve engaged in lately have made me think about generations, the pace of change, the pace of technological change, of life itself and of growing old in general. The first activity is cleaning and culling through possessions and the stacks of stuff that have accumulated over the years. My advice on this is don’t do it. Let the piles sit or grow, and if in another ten years there’s been no reason to search through them then you can with confidence throw the whole damn mess out. This will save you the discouraging (very) re-discovery of past projects, hopes, dreams etc. that you never completed. Or maybe that’s just me.

The other activity is not so easy to avoid, and that activity is looking for work. Looking for a job is bad enough at any age, but it’s in a different category of despair all its own when you’re an experienced individual—ahem—a senior. And that’s why it got me thinking about change. Change used to happen on a more human timescale. We all know, understand and can feel this. I know that the eighteenth century industrial revolution was an enormous and relatively sudden upheaval, and I’m not dismissing that. But now we’re in a different period altogether it seems like to me. Now, people can hardly make it through their thirties before facing a new workplace requiring different technological skills and different modes of working to go with it. And now we’re all scared out of our skins because of artificial intelligence. The pace of change has quickened so much since the dawn of the twentieth century that one generation after the next is challenged with a different world. And now the world is changing radically even within the space of a single lifetime.

I can close the thematic loop with the old maid whoever she was who spoke the line I love so much. As technology pushes us into new realms, it seems to me that it’s the same human stories that remain and define our lives. All she was asking for was a husband and a nice suit of clothes. Not unreasonable. I appreciate the simple humility in her remark. Our desires haven’t changed so much it seems to me even as the times have. We all just want a sense of belonging, fulfillment and accomplishment. Will civilization loop around and create a parallel track to technology to run on and save us? Or will it be up to ourselves as individuals to find and create meaning in our lives? The two dreams of my life—a man and a tailor-made suit.