Mayo thoughts on marking a 79th birthday
by Fr. Padraig Standún
SEVENTY-NINE years ago this week I was found under a head of cabbage in the village of Ballydavock, halfway between Belcarra and Clogher, about half a mile from Doonamona Castle.
That is what I was told anyway, and I have often been told since not to change the legend.
Strangely enough, the cabbage connection was renewed recently as I embarked on the cabbage-soup diet.
This is much favoured, I’m told, by the celebrity classes at the moment. In fact, everybody who is anybody among the rich and famous is digesting cabbage as if it was in danger of going out of fashion.
It may be the first time in the history of the world that cabbage is in fashion.
All of the A-list celebreties are ladling it into themselves to help them get over the excesses of Christmas and the new year. Then there are slimline dresses and tuxedos to be fitted into for the Oscars.
My birthday candle this year will not be on an iced cake but on a head of cabbage, suitably stewed.
This I will proceed to eat over a period of three days – which, allied to the few days I have endured already, will add up to my diet for this year. If I find that it has increased my brain power I will consider taking it up again for Lent.
The birthday I remember most was the most painful and it literally gives me the shivers when I think about it.
I still remember standing outside Clogher National School at lunchtime as I shivered with cold I have never experienced before or since.
I must have warmed up on the two-mile walk home after classes finished as I have no recollection of getting pneumonia or any similar illness. I must just have had my birthday cake and eaten it that evening without complaint.
My late mother’s cakes on such occasions were as good as any Christmas cake and they carried me through many lonesome school and college days in St. Jarlath’s,
Tuam, as well as St. Patrick’s seminary in Maynooth. Now that I have reached second childhood, I can rejoice in the taste of the currents, red cherries, almond and sweet icing. Perhaps I should not overdo the cabbage after all.
The present I most remember from my father in those years was a pair of brown corduroy short pants he brought home from a fair in Ballinrobe.
They were a bit too big even for my ample behind, but it was different in the sense that it was the first item of clothing I had worn that had not come in a box from Chicago.
Such big brown parcels arrived every couple of months from relatives that had left Ireland 60 or 70 years earlier who had never forgotten their roots and continued to lend us a helping hand from across the Atlantic.
One shirt I still remember from such parcels looked more like a blouse to me until I was told it was an Italian style. I was always easily fooled.