Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Author:Michael Patrick MacDonald [MacDonald, Michael Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Cultural, History, Ireland, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780618918638
Amazon: 0618918639
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2008-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

“FORGET ABOUT IT NOW,” Grandpa kept repeating, even though I wasn’t the one bringing it up. “Forget it ever happened at all.” That’s what he’d been saying every time I visited with him in the City Point condo he’d been living in alone since Nana died. He said I should get on with my life, tell no one about Frankie getting killed in a bank heist. He said to forget that I was from the projects, even though I still lived there. “Nobody’ll want nothing to do with you ’tall if you tell them anything about yourself. Sure they’ll only be ashamed to know ye.” I was trying to laugh, even though it was hard to do that now. But I was thinking too about the kind of world Grandpa must have come from to think like that.

I’d been trying to forget about it all, long before Grandpa’s advice—but not for the reasons he was talking about. Some days I was doing a pretty good job of forgetting Frankie and how he was killed, until I went to Grandpa’s and had to listen to him recount the bank robbery over and over again. “I told Frankie, ‘Watch out who you shake hands with,’” he said, looking down at his toast like he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it. “Sure the bums he was chummin’ with were a quare bunch altogether. I knew they was no good from the time I first seen them.” Grandpa said Frankie just laughed whenever he warned him about gangsters.

I had spent years trying to find a life beyond Old Colony, and now, after Frankie died, I felt guilty for not having been close to my family. I was trying to stay closer to home, and to hang around the apartment more. If I needed to get away from the project, which seemed to me like a darkened catacomb, with so many street lights broken and hallways left dark, I’d go to Grandpa’s on the nicer side of Southie. But I didn’t know how much longer I could wake up to Grandpa walking around in his sagging long johns, deaf to the screaming kettle, muttering about Frankie and how I should “forget about it altogether.”

“And don’t tell no one where you come from!”

Grandpa didn’t have to tell me about being ashamed of where I’d come from; I’d spent the previous few years doing a pretty good job of that already.

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