Beech Tree News Network

Wednesday night, Garey and I went with our daughter, Natalie, and granddaughter, Sabria, and Sabria’s friend, Laela, to the Summer Solstice concert at the Capital Arts Theater in Bowling Green.  The concert featured Irish music performed by two local musicians, Skip Cleavanger and his wife, Rebecca Bombach, as well as two guest musicians, one from Lexington, the other from Chicago.  Rebecca Bombach is Sabria’s and Laela’s violin teacher through the Warren County school system.  Her husband plays bagpipes and Uillean pipes. One of the guest musicians played a Bouzouki, which looks like a guitar or lute, but has either 3 pairs of strings or 4 pairs of strings, depending on the instrument. 

 The Bouzouki player also sang songs from the Irish archives, old songs about love lost, hardship and misfortune, themes that are often connected to the Irish people.  (I read once that the Irish people have the comfort of knowing no matter how good things are right now, disaster lurks just around the corner.)  

One of the songs the Bouzouki player sang, “Building Up and Tearing England Down,” was written after the emigration of the Irish to London, England, after WWII.  England had been nearly destroyed by German bombing during the war.  The Irish immigrants were instrumental in supplying the manual labor it took to rebuild English roads, buildings and even dams.  The song is about hard work, unfair wages and dangerous working conditions.  

A few of the lyrics are as follows:

I remember Carrier Jack, he wore a hod upon his back

And he swore one day he’s set the world on fire

His face we’ve never seen since his shovel it cut clean

Through the middle of a big high-tension wire.

And I saw auld Balls McCaul, from the flyover fall

Into a concrete mixer spinning round

Though it was not his intent, he got a fine head of cement

When he was building up and tearing England down.

(genius.com/the Mary Wallopers)

You get the picture.

Since that night, I’ve thought a lot about that song, and what it means to me personally.  According to the ancestry websites, my DNA is a mix of both British and Irish genes.  I’ve always been grateful to my grandmothers on both sides of my family for staying the course and doing whatever it took to get their children through.  Neither had an easy life, but my Grandmother Mattingly got the worst of it.  She was hired out to a neighboring family when she was just seven years old in order to bring in income for her family, who were sharecroppers.  She never really had a childhood.  I have always felt the weight of what I owe her, just for keeping me alive.  Because I was taken away from my mother and her side of the family when I was very young, I know little about my grandmother’s parents or her grandparents.  I do know, however, that I am standing on their shoulders, and the shoulders of all those before them, who came to this country seeking a better life. 

There is a song by Steve Green called, “Find Us Faithful.”  The second verse goes as follows:

After all our hopes and dreams have come and gone

And our children sift through all we’ve left behind

May the clues that they discover and the memories they uncover

Become the light that leads them to the road we each must find.

(genius.com/Steve Green)

This life I’m now living doesn’t belong to just me.  It belongs to those who came before me.  It belongs to those who come after me.  It is my responsibility to remember that and to make sure the connection remains unbroken.

(I will not be submitting any columns for the month of July.  Adventures await, and I will tell you all about them in August!)