An essay by Steve O’Connor

The dining room table at my mother’s house is covered in a green holiday table cloth. At its center, over a narrow burgundy cloth that my mother calls a runner, are slender white candles in brass candlestick holders, and a crystal bowl of golden ornamental bulbs. The empty table holds for me all the emotion and suggestiveness of a work of art, and if I were to make a museum of my life I might transport it there and leave it standing in an empty room, The Christmas Table.

And what is it that the tenantless table suggests but the faces, the laughter, the voices, and the stories of those who once sat round it, and whom we feel, at this time of year, gathered there once again in spirit. At the head of the table, there was of course, my father, Jim O’Connor. No one loved Christmas more than he. He loved the family gatherings, he loved the tree, he loved the manger, and the lights on the bushes, and the wreath with the big gold bow, and plastic choir boy and girl who sang on our front porch with mouths rounded to the last syllable of in excelsis deo. The plastic choir children, at whom our Boston Terrier Teddy used to bark, was a symbol of what he loved most about Christmas-the music. He was a well known tenor locally, and I have memories of sitting proudly in St. Patrick’s Church while my father sang a solo in the choir loft: Adeste Fideles. Beginning early in December, the big cabinet hi fi would cease to fill the house with the usual fare of big bands, crooners, and theatrical musicals, and would begin to resound with the magical songs of Christmas.

I can still picture my father sitting in his easy chair, eyes closed and the newspaper lying in his lap, listening to The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, The Ames Brothers, or Nat King Cole. Silver bells, silver bells, soon it will be Christmas time. When we went to the beach for a week or two during the summer, he usually continued to work, and would come down at night, after taking a shower and changing at home in Lowell. He mentioned to me that one night in July, when he was alone in the house, he got out all the Christmas records, and relaxed there for a while just enjoying that glorious music. He couldn’t wait until December, and I imagine Mr. Lipinsky walking his Lassie by the house, stopping and listening in surprise as he heard, through the screened door, my father singing along with the hi fi on a humid summer night, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

Oh, he loved Christmas, alright, though as a child I couldn’t quite understand why his memories were so fond. When we asked him what Santa used to bring him for Christmas, he would say, “Well, one year I got a Jew’s Harp and a book of Horatio Algers.” We’d heard stories of the lean days of the Great Depression, but it was difficult for us to imagine any child twanging away contentedly on Christmas morning on such a Christmas gift, or excitedly clutching a story of Horatio Algers. I’m sure we doubted his insistence that Christmas was not about toys, and that the material things were not what we would remember. But he was right about that, as about most other things.

There are others around the Christmas table of my memory. There is Nora, my grandfather’s sister, whose County Cork brogue was so thick that to tell the truth I never understood much of what she said. She stressed every other syllable, whether most people put an accent there or not. “Ah the rheumatism is a curse at this time o’ year, and there’s not a thing you can take for it.” After dinner, she would retire to the comfortable chair by the bookcase, put her feet up on the stool, and soon, we children would be giggling as we listened to her snoring like Curley of the Three Stooges.

There was old Eddie O’Connor, the retired musician, who could never decide between mince, apple, and squash pie, and would always say, “I’ll have a little piece of each.”

I learned some important lessons from my paternal grandparents, John and Delia O’Connor, who were known to us as Nana and Papa. I remember Nana patiently explaining to me that not ALL the English were bad. “Before Pa came to America, he went to England where an Englishman gave him a job grooming the horses, and treated with him very fairly.”

John was a romantic at heart. He loved a ballad, and spoke in poetic terms: “I have eight children and 28 grandchildren, and I’m as welcome as the flowers in May in any one of their houses.” He reminded us on more than one occasion that he had won an oratorical contest back in Limerick for his recitation of “Bengan on the Rhine,” and he often expressed deep disgust at the decline of learning in the world. Since he lived on Bertha Street, he used to walk near what is today South Campus, especially on his way down to Cuckoo O’Connell’s. “The other day,” he said indignantly, “I met three students from the college, and they didn’t know where Tierra del Fuego was. Now how could you be matriculated in the college and not know where Tierra del Fugo is!” What I always wondered was how my grandfather managed to stop three students on Broadway and bring the conversation around to Tierra del Fuego.

Years later, as a student in Ireland, an old relative told me a story about my grandfather. “He was visiting here in the sixties,” he said. “It was a rainy Sunday, and I went round Minnie’s house to see him. All the women were sitting round the table talking. He had his feet up on the hob, reading a book. I said, ‘John, can I bring ye down to the pub?’ Well he lept up like a cat to milk. And when we were at the bar and he had a pint in his hand, he was in his element you know, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Sean, sure ‘twas God that sent ye!’” That was the grandfather I knew alright.

Jack Leahy and Grammie, my mother’s parents also sat around that table when we were lucky enough to get them away from my aunts and uncles. Jack was a big man with a white crew cut, from Youghl Harbor in County Cork. He would regale us with stories from his nearly forty years on the Lowell Police Department, stories which were peppered with a running commentary from his wife, my grandmother, Liz, who was, according to family legend, was the first woman in Lowell to have a driver’s license.

When Jack told how he held a madman in some deserted mill building in a full nelson for hours, Liz would attest, “His shirt was torn to shreds when he got home. Torn to shreds.” There were no radios to call for back up in the thirties. A fellow Lowellian once told me that Jack Leahy caught him breaking windows, and held him by his ankles over the canal and asked a simple question, “Am I gone to catch you breakin’ windows again, buoy?” Many years later, the culprit remembered hanging above the murky water screaming “Never again! I swear!” He swore he kept that promise, and I believed him.

Jack also told us the story of the horse that died on Wannalancit Street. Several Irish policemen stood around while one tried to fill out the report, but they found that none of them could agree how to spell Wannalancit, so they each grabbed one of the horse’s legs and hauled him down to School Street.

My mother’s Aunt Mildred was often with us. She was the first person in the country to be a health food fanatic, and sure enough, she lived to be one hundred. She used one tea bag five or six times, but usually drank warm water. She believed in honey, and told me that coffee was poison. She thought nothing of walking from Cupples Square all the way downtown when she was pushing eighty.

Aunt Mildred was brought up in Vermont among, God forgive us, Protestants. To make matters worse, she attested openly that there were many things she admired about the Protestants, and one got the distinct impression that she might have wished that she had been born into that heretical faith. This sort of palaver did not sit well with my grandfather John O’Connor of Rathkeale, County Limerick. Indeed, it was more that he could take. She once shocked everyone at the table by questioning the infallibility of the Pope. John O’Connor dropped his knife and fork and said, “If you don’t believe that, you’re not a Catholic at all,” to which Mildred responded, “Well then maybe I’m not a Catholic.”

Things got a lot worse when Aunt Mildred made the seemingly innocuous comment, “When the English settled this country…” Old John fixed her with a hard gaze and said, “Excuse me, Mildred, but the English didn’t settle this country. The French, and the Spanish, and the Irish settled this country.”
“Oh, I’m afraid you’re wrong about that, John.”

There ensued a heated historical debate. The discussion was finally broken up by my parents after my grandfather told Mildred that she was “a disgrace to the family.” Mildred was well able for him; she laughed and said that she would say what she liked whether it pleased him or not, while my poor mother scrambled to change the subject.

There are very few pictures of Mildred extant, because she did not believe in photography, and would always say with a commanding air, “Don’t take my picture. I won’t have it.”

Around the Christmas table, or by the dazzling tree, or in whatever gatherings we find ourselves, the old friends and relatives are never far. In memory, we hear their voices, remember their stories, their laughter, and even their outlandish disputes. Drain a glass for them, and enjoy the love and the company of those who are with us, for as the old song says, We may or might never all meet here again.