I’ve been sick for ten days with what seems to be the head cold that’s going around. I chose to rest. I’m a lot better, back at work on both my day job and my creative projects. I look forward to sending you all some content for the paywalled folks. Today’s my father’s birthday, so please enjoy this free post that is this year’s birthday present to a truly remarkable person. (I also sent a book you might like, Dad, but it will be there later in the week.)
At 85, my venerable sire is well into 25 years of living beyond a 1996 cancer diagnosis with a dire prognosis of six months to two years. Piss and vinegar make a great preservative, it seems. To celebrate our family’s vigorous, intelligent, generous, cantankerous, rambunctiously friendly, hard working patriarch, I offer some of my favorite views from my vantage point as his second daughter, born when he was just 28 years old.
Peter Mulvaney waited tables for decades, ascending to dining room captain on Saturday nights at a fancy restaurant in Rochester, the big city to our small town. He started out working alongside my mother, though they had to keep their marriage a secret, since it was house policy to not hire married couples. Since it was a seafood place, every plate required a cocktail fork stuck with a lemon wedge before it could leave the kitchen, a garnish for which waitstaff was responsible. Predictably, there was a chronic shortage of these forks—what my parents called pickle forks—so every single weekend night there was a shortage during the rush; dinner plates clogged the line under the heat lamps, parsley wilting, while servers bribed the dishwasher for clean forks. My mother’s solution was an individual one: directly upon her arrival she went to the dish pit, dug out and washed half a dozen forks and stuck them into her apron to adorn the plates when it was time. At the end of the meal, she plucked the pickle forks off the plates—sometimes with the support of the busboys whom she tipped heavily and lavished with kindness—then washed them and kept herself in forks throughout the brief nightly frenzy.
My father knew this was scarcity was false: a distant storage room held a few cases of forks, enough to keep the entire staff stocked through several seatings, but after bringing it up several times to management with no ease in the nightly stress fest, he concluded that such miserly impulses were unjust and unnecessary, and took matters in hand. One night after chits—when waitstaff enjoys a free after-work drink and toasts the shift among comrades—he waited until the dishwasher went home, crept back into the dark kitchen and stole every single pickle fork he could find. He threw them all into a dumpster on the way home, far from the restaurant. The next day, there were pickle forks galore.
Galore, by the way, is the anglicization of the Irish phrase go leor, which means ‘enough.’
He took us to Mexico when we were all pretty young; my older sister was nine, my youngest sister turned five. I once found a letter he wrote to his mother describing how important it was to him that we experience another country’s language, culture, other ways of doing things, while we were still young, to give us a global human perspective, lest we harden into myopic America Firsters. We drove down from Haudenosaunee lands of western New York in a Ford van, towing a camper, stayed for a month or more in a working class RV park in Guadalajara. My older sister and I went to school half the day; our younger sisters stayed with my mom and did chores like shopping every day at the open-air market. (I think my dad went to school too, but I can’t remember the details.) The modest resort was basically a large urban campsite with a pool, a rec room, laundry facilities, and lots of other families with kids. We made friends with a bilingual family who taught us with whom we exchanged letters for years. On weekends we took trips, exploring the countryside.
My parents had a routine, on the drive down. We pulled into a hotel and my mom would herd us all into the first available bathroom to shepherd us through the nighttime ritual of changing into pjs, brushing teeth, and washing off all traces left by a day of car travel. My dad then sauntered up to the counter to chat with the night clerk about rates, things to do in the area, how they ended up as a motel clerk, what books they were reading, where they were from, light jokes—anything at all—until he saw the five of us troop back out to the van, scrubbed and sleepy. He then thanked the clerk with a cheerful “Maybe next time,” before he waved goodbye and we drove off.
My dad is a master of what in Ireland is called ‘the craic’—the ability to create a good time out of nothing, to while away hours over a pint or four, to share a laugh and trade stories and act like you belong everywhere, especially when it’s something like being broken down at the side of the road. Craic is ’s pronounced ‘crack;’ to American ears tarnished still by the deep wounds of the war on drugs and ensuing crack epidemic of Reagan’s U.S. it’s hard to get the idea across, to say, ‘where’s the craic, then?’ But it’s a concept of his Irish forbears, and comes as easily to him as laughing, and wherever it is, he will find it.
We drove one weekend that summer to a beach outside Puerto Vallarta, and proceeded to get hopelessly mired in sand. My parents regularly drove through blizzards and shoveled their way out of any situation winter threw at them, but the tropics stumped them. Not too long into the phase of realizing their efforts were only making things worse, a few kind locals ran over and helped out. They spoke no English, our Spanish was limited to what we knew from Sesame Street, what our new friends taught us, and what we needed to shop at the market, but you know, humans help each other. We were soon rescued. Using large arm gestures, my father asked the kind men to wait. He dove into the back of the van and dug two six packs of cold beer out of the cooler. I remember how the faces of the men lit up with smiles and they gave a cheer for the gringo; we got invited to their camp we stayed for several more days, folded into their party. I remember sitting under the stars in my mother’s lap, listening to guitars and gorgeous harmonizing around a fire. It was one of the most beautiful nights of my young life. Much later we learned we had accidentally trespassed onto a beach where tourists were usually not welcome.
By the time we drove home, our cash was gone. Every time we needed to buy something, we were all on Team ‘Bank Americard’ (now Visa) peering everywhere outside of gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants for the magic sticker that would get us home. Not directly home, though: my parents knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and routed us accordingly. When we drove through New Orleans, we stopped for a meal in the entertainment capital, a city famous among waitstaff. I remember walking the streets together looking on the doors for the familiar blue-and-yellow sign, and how at one place women danced up on the bar! Wearing just a few shiny things! I stood in the doorway until someone pulled me away to a more appropriate eatery that took our credit card. Chatting with the staff, my parents identified themselves as veterans of the industry, and were offered jobs on the spot. Could they work that night? The place was short staffed and it was tourist season. My parents were tempted; in the end the logistics were too complicated—what to do with four girls, a van and a camper in a city of dancing ladies and late closing times? But for a few hours, we held the possibility of staying for a while.
I know I drive my loving man crazy, my friends probably too, with all the possibility I like to build, and hold. What if we do this? What about that? I learned early, we can go first, find work along the way, figure out on the way how to get home.
He taught school and was a high school principal for almost forty years. As a high school social studies teacher, he was beloved of his students: he took risks, he challenged them, he paid attention to their lives outside of the classroom, often more like an older brother, and then a slightly obnoxious uncle—the kind who would harass you for missing a catch at the football game and slip you a graduation card with $20. He was a thorn in the side of the administration, always fighting them for programs to help students that back then he had his own names for—like the Sweat Hogs from the old tv show Welcome Back, Kotter—students we now call ‘at risk youth’. He’d harangue a program into existence and then take pride when kids flourished. He’d approach the administrators with another program and have to fight just as hard, despite a track record of wins piling up behind him. Because of this, he clawed his way into administration himself, in his early 40s, and became the brilliant principal for eleven years at Berkshire Farms, receiving a personal commendation from President Clinton and—more importantly—a new building for his students and staff. His cancer diagnosis prematurely truncated a gorgeous career arc. I was around him once in my twenties when a stranger engaging in small talk asked him, “What do you do?”
“I’m a waiter,” he said; I gave him a sharp look but didn’t interfere with his game. Later he shared his tactics: “Tell ‘em you’re a teacher, and they think they know everything about you. Tell ‘em you’re a waiter, and they don’t know what to think.” A good thing I learned from him, keep ‘em guessing.
Not a sharp dresser, in fact not someone who pays much attention to his own appearance at all, though he did have a fine collection of beautiful suits from his days as a principal. Most of my childhood, if you asked him how he kept his hair he would tell you that it was short, like how he had it as a Marine. But the thing was, he only got that cut a few times a year, and the rest of the time it slowly expanded into a wild and wooly bush, wiry reddish hair going everywhere. He has worn a mustache my whole life, an uneven walrus, one side usually longer than the other, decorated with the detritus of food more often than not. He lived so voraciously in those years, at such high speeds, with such ambition that crumbs were beneath his notice. Working two jobs, six days a week, with church, Sunday drives and lawn care on the sabbath—who has time for grooming? Who cares?
A close family friends relates a story from his fifties: how she took a look at him when he walked into work and said, “Peter, you’ve got two ties on.” One tie was on the outside where ties usually go; she could see a second one underneath his crisp dress shirt, creeping across his body and under his arm. “Oh,” he said, nonplussed, “I was wondering where that went.” He’s not bothered! Another time a decade or so later, meeting friends for dinner, a friend looked at him as he got out of the car. “Peter, you’re wearing two different shoes.” I love this about him. When I put my glasses in the fridge, or realize late in the day that I’m wearing things inside out or backwards, I think fondly of my father.
It’s not what you wear or how you look that matters to him—though with his keen waiter’s eye he will assess that, and dive into the craic based on the wealth of information you provide him just by shaking his hand—it’s what you do. He has never forgotten the lack that studded his own life, and always seeks to provide for other people, in a kind and quiet way. On one visit home we walked together to the YMCA, he had an errand, he told me. I watched while he wrote out a check for a neighbor kid to be able to participate in a recreation program her mom couldn’t afford, while he instructed the administrator to create a fake scholarship that the kid won, to save any embarrassment over receiving any charity. It wasn’t charity, it was mutual aid—the kid was besties with my nephews, who were also in the summer program. All the kids could be together without the injurious separation of capitalism that impacts all levels of school age activities today.
I often refer to the place where I grew up—a beautiful resort town in the Finger Lakes—as a ‘racist little town,’ and one of its expressions was that it was the only municipality of its size that had no formal recognition or celebration of civil rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After illness forced him into early retirement, he dialed his prodigious focus onto correcting that: he inaugurated a contest where kids in the school district from each grade starting in fourth grade up through high school, could win a sizable sum—that he initially provided—for the best essay about Dr. King. He also made sure that the annual summer Fourth of July parade always had a car from the MLK Committee plastered with signs remembering the great man.
I could go on, but it’s a work day and, like my parents I have many jobs. I’ll leave you with this, and then get to work picking supplies to take up to the emergency department.
When I was in my second year of college, my grandmother Mary Devine died of cancer at the age of 84. I often write, ‘my mean ole Irish grandma,’ to differentiate her from my Oma, my mother’s Mama, who knew how to laugh and accepted my dad. My grandma hated my mother, and didn’t care to hide it. Every August my parents scraped together scraps of carefully hoarded time and money, and hauled us out to Quincy to see our grandma. We would sit with her in awkward silence around a bucket of fried chicken while my uncle urged her to eat and slung sub rosa insults at my dad. “Ma. Eat, Ma. Just a little. Come on.” She smoked, didn’t look much at anyone, talked to us kids in a baby voice long past it being cute or appropriate, and had no idea who we really were, though I think she did try. Kids can tell when adults don’t really like them—we know it’s not personal, and being a kid is temporary. We went in for hugs, dodging the cigarette ash, and went to play with the neighbors. After she died, my dad called up each of us daughters and apologized to us for not having a proper grandma. As the eldest of eight, I’m not sure how much of a childhood she got. One of the few stories we heard about her growing up involved the whole family trying to help her sister Sib avoid a beating from her dad. Her mother, Sarah Walsh, came on the boat from Galway as a young woman—maybe 18, though my dad thinks she might have been younger, and lied about her age. We don’t have many stories of those people, but we have inherited the yearning, the pain of having to leave, the loss of our language, and our place on the earth. The gift of the diaspora heart.
One year in the mid nineties the boat I fished on hit it big early in the season. I called up my dad from the cannery dock pay phone, still covered in salmon scales, and asked him if he wanted to go to Ireland with me. This was during his cancer recovery years, and we didn’t know how long he’d be around. He said yes, and we had a pretty amazing trip in a lot of ways. I learned a lot about him, and myself. It was not easy, but I’m not sorry. I was far less patient then, and carried an irritating confidence that comes in our thirties, before we are knocked back hard enough to gain wisdom. I didn’t know how to communicate with someone a few generations above me who thought they still knew how the world worked and never stopped telling me I didn’t know shit. It was hard to never be listened to, and yet constantly, frantically asked, how does the money work, how does that doorknob work, how do you do work an Irish pay phone?
It was worth it, for the feeling of standing beside him in the lush green of a Galway graveyard—our family’s graveyard—with his mother’s surname repeated in stone after stone. Everywhere we looked were Devines. It was September, a light mist fell perpetually. His second cousin—daughter of his cousin Mary Mahon née Devine—showed us the grave of the patriarch; after a glance I was ready to go, right that’s done, back in the car and out of the weather. When I looked closer at my dad though, he had tears in his eyes. “Just a minute,” he squeezed out, and I stood, stunned. My dad, he never cried. He was known among my sister’s friends as ‘the loud laugher.’ I see him stumbling a little as he turned away from me. My dawning awareness of the depth of feeling in which he swam gave me no compass. So Irish, to turn away when subsumed by feeling. He put his right hand briefly to his brow, there among the ancestors from whom his own family never wanted to be part, who traveled to Boston to become tight-lipped smokers with hearts of ice. I can see him still, standing with his arm up, back to me, before he turned and strode toward the rental car. “Ok. Let’s go.”
Happy Birthday to Peter C. Mulvaney. Many happy returns. May your day be filled with endless calls from the many people whose lives you have touched, and who love you. I know it’s not easy to have me as a daughter, and I count on you to correct every mistake I’ve made in this extremely brief sketch of your life. I would write on, but I have to clock in. You know how it is.
Thank you for coming to Earth.
Love,
#2.
Argh. Supposed to say there at the end “…there among the ancestors from whom his own family never wanted to part…”
this is a wonderful tribute and an absolute delight to read! hoping his birthday was full of joy.