RETROSPECTIVE

In New York City, that venerable Big Apple of my eye, the March 20th Spring Equinox often arrives imperceptibly, falling, as it does, under the shadow of the much-heralded St. Patrick’s Day, flashily celebrated on lush city sidewalks a scant three days earlier. My father, Jim Gallagher, AKA “Irish,” “Broadway Jim,” and divers other self-appointed monikers, created a rationale for a four-day bacchanalia that began at dawn on St. Patrick’s Day and, like a rolling stone, carried on until the wee, small hours of the morning of March 20th, establishing in perpetuity in the mind of this writer, his only child, the notion that one’s birthday should always be preceded by a modicum of advance festivities– in his case, a four-day revelry.

To my father’s way of thinking, St. Patrick’s Day was just a prelude to the main event, a warm-up, as it were, in the run-up to his birthday on March 20th. He saw the entire city, bathed in green bunting as well as green beer, as homage to Irishmen everywhere, and to him in particular. Unlike some birthday revelers who celebrate partially out of a need to be feted, or out of a desire to collect presents, if you were within a handshake of Broadway Jim’s mitts, you were most likely to be treated to a round- or two - or three – of whatever spirits warmed the cockles of your heart. He was the living persona for Will Rogers’ statement, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

Jim Gallagher was, himself, a man universally liked and respected, not because he was a hail-fellow-well-met storyteller in the Gaelic tradition who knew how to throw money around (which he was and did), but because he was a man of honor in a world sadly becoming one devoid of it. As the luck of this Irishman went, however, the saying, “If it weren’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have any,” was eerily apropos. My mother, Jane, the light of his life, died too young at 44, living out the last eight years of her life confined to a hospital bed at home, tethered to an oxygen mask or sequestered under an oxygen tent, attended usually by nurses and often by nuns, 24/7. On another level of the house, his obstructionist mother-in-law, my doting grandmother, battled cancer for three of those years, while the family cocker spaniel, Buttons, her front left leg in a plaster cast - the result of a collision with 2,000 pounds of moving metal –raced, unbridled, up and down the row-house staircases, terrorizing all who entered the house on 79th Street.

Despite the appalling reality, my father soldiered on without complaint, taking on many of the duties of the times normally left to mothers or housekeepers – the traditional female, nurturing roles of society. In an era when “Father Knows Best” was the prevailing attitude as much as television entertainment, he never imposed his views or expectations on me: he led by example, never taking a sick day from work, doing the grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning without complaint. One of my favorite memories involves a life-long addiction to White Castle hamburgers, which he used to bring home by the sack after working late, waking my mother and me to share in this communion of the square bun.

Nor was my father’s decency limited to his family; when a neighbor, a family breadwinner, unexpectedly died, leaving a wife and three children without a roof over their heads, my father asked them to move into our home for as long as they needed, despite the 3-ring medical circus transpiring all around us. An unassuming man who hid his own light under a bushel, he held out his hand to those in trouble in myriad, quiet ways, a fact not always appreciated by my mother. When he brought home some just-met acquaintances for a late-night breakfast, my mother politely asked them to leave, citing the unexpected and ungodly hour of their arrival. Only after they had safely departed did my mother explain to my father that his new “friends” were at the helm of one of the city’s much-feared mob families. Dad didn’t bring home so much as a cold after that.

As I celebrate what would have been his 100th Birthday this Friday, March 20th, I want to end this walk down memory lane with a piece I wrote in his honor. Although his birthday is synonymous with the arrival of Spring, I drew it from an encounter we had in the Autumn, proving Jim Gallagher was really a man for all seasons.



RETROSPECTIVE
(DAUGHTER)
by
Lynn Gallagher

It is in the autumn that I most clearly
hear my father’s voice,
“Daughter! Daughter!”
his affection palpable across
the crisp New York City afternoon,
calling me amidst the street crowd,
catching me in mid-stride at seventeen.

The surprise of his presence –
like finding a forgotten bon-bon
at the bottom of a Whitman Sampler –
is snatched up and devoured with glee.

Rushing to hug him,
I reach up, and brushing the collar
of his herringbone coat,
catch the barest hint of
“Canoe,” which he wears
in reluctant concession to the women in his life,
remaining steadfast in his refusal to pronounce it properly,
much less acknowledge or
call it what it is – cologne.

With the insouciance that is youth
I hurry on my way without so much
as a backward glance,
expecting him to be there all
the thousands of my tomorrows.

Secure in the knowledge every two-year old basks in,
I know,
not by rote, nor by intellect,
but by some ancient instinct imprinted over
a thousand years of ancestors, that
I am his daughter
and his strength runs through my veins.
Becoming mine.

I take “Simon-Says” giant steps
faster and faster across
Fifty-ninth Street
into the Park
until
I have again disappeared into the crowd.
But I have no fear of being lost
for
I know who I am.

I am “Daughter.”

~~~~~~~

Obama's Slippery Slope

In any metropolis other than Washington, D.C., small-talk about the weather would be a safe topic, "much-ado-about-nothing," like water off a duck's back. Unfortunately for our newly-installed 44th President, Washington is unlike any other metropolis in the United States when it comes to weather.

This the clueless President learned when, as the first light snow-cum-freeze hit the metropolitan area's Beltway and neighborhoods one week-and-a-day after taking the oath of office, he quipped about his daughters' school having a snow-day, apparently much to his disapproval and their surprise. Opining that Washingtonians are "wimpy" in contrast to Nanook of the North Chicagoans, people from Chantilly to Chevy Chase took umbrage in what they considered to be an insult from their newly-arrived neighbor. Little did he know that he was on the slippery slope from snowstorm to maelstrom. In fact, most of the District's public schools were open, albeit with a late start, but that fact was apparently unknown to the new occupant of the Maison Blanche.

President Obama hit a nerve in remarking on the region's ability - or inability - to competently handle (with apologies to Chief Justice Roberts' life-long aversion to split infinitives) Mother Nature's gift of frozen precipitation...But I think the President owes the people of Washington an apology, and Washingtonians ought to cut him some slack.

Our physically-fit-ready-to-meet-all-comers President would go a long way towards pouring oil on troubled ice if he acknowledged that, since he most recently hailed from Chicago, where that city's snowfall warrants oversight at least six-months of the year, (thus creating an industry of snow-removal rivaled maybe only by Buffalo's) that perhaps his comments were a tad - harsh. To say nothing of the facts that Chicago is largely inundated by a blanket of pure snow (not ice or freezing rain) whose removal is operated under the auspices of just one city's administration; in contrast, Washington's dance with frozen precipitation is frequently a guesswork-in-progress, whose removal is subject to multiple municipalities' mandates.

If either President Obama or any of his family had been trapped in last year's Mixing Bowl's frozen nightmare (Perhaps he was elsewhere campaigning, and unaware of the almost-menacing grip ice had upon that newly-finished engineering wonder?), I doubt that he would have been so glib in his snowfall remarks. But more importantly, I suspect that underneath the bravado and rhetoric of the 44th President abides a desire to close the gap that existed between his predecessor and the press corps. And what better way to do this than by talking "small-talk," preferably something really, really safe - the weather. So, Washingtonians should get over it, and give the President a pass.

After all, President Obama is Commander-in-Chief only of the Armed Forces, not of Mother Nature and her Washington wiles.

DEUS EX MACHINA

If prayer works as promised, then Barack Obama, the twice-vested 44th President of these United States, should be in good shape. In the days immediately surrounding his whirlwind inauguration, President Obama was prayed over in a veritable maelstrom of prayer services, benedictions, invocations, supplications, implorations and entreaties.

The charasmatic president is going to need all the succor he can muster, whether from divine or mundane sources. The litany of crises confronting the planet's de-facto most popular leader has been well- and oft-documented, from Hoboken to Honolulu; Concord to Congress. The collapse of capitalism as we know it, home foreclosures on a scale akin to a sale on five day-old fish, unemployment rates ratcheting skyward, companies declaring bankruptcy in record numbers, 47 million Americans living without health insurance and a national debt climbing to the stratosphere are just a few of the issues jostling for "me-first" attention from the President.

And those are only the domestic concerns. We don't even want to think about national security, the Guantanamo Bay black hole, our trussed-like-a-Thanksgiving-turkey position in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian President (sounds like, according to my impeccably funny source, Whoopi Goldberg) Ahm-a-dinnajacket's determination to "go nuclear," the no-way-out Israeli-Palestinian quagmire and, oh yes, global warming, for good measure!

Prayer circle, anyone? One need only look to media pictures of the estimated
1.8 million who stood for hours in freezing cold temperatures on Inauguration Day, having no chance of catching a glimpse of the actual man, to recognize what has, for many, been rock-star adulation. Perhaps not since the Sermon on the Mount have expectations run so high. But it's not a rock-star the people crave: What they seek is a Deus ex Machina, a God out-of-thin air.

As the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount knew, deification comes with a hefty price tag: feeding the hordes. President Obama, well-schooled in the dangers of living life on a pedestal or in an ivory tower, addresses the multitudes with the papal "we" over the first-person "I" when delineating the mountain of work that lies ahead. All things considered, it might be a good idea, not only to keep on praying, but to step it up. That way, maybe we can be assured of our own miracle, a modern-day equivalent of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.

A BLESSING IN EVERY LANGUAGE...

A blessing - Baraka - be upon the White House of Barack Obama, 44th President of these United States, and all who dwell therein.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009