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| Photo: By Milesoneill - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27775026 |
(Written on Friday, April 14) President Biden is in Ballina, Ireland, where I have an ancestral connection myself. Visited there as a toddler (1981), but my memories of it are about non-existent. Watching the live coverage on Sky News, as I have no interest in how the garbage U.S. media is covering it (if they're even bothering.) While I can only claim partial Irish ancestry (around 20% at the very most), my maternal grandmother was an Irish immigrant to America of Scottish and English ancestry. Born in 1910 in Galway (relocating to County Mayo during the first of two or three marriages), she left a daughter behind in Ireland around the time WWII started and then spent the next decade or so living somewhere in England (possibly Manchester.) Whoever my maternal grandfather was, he was apparently from somewhere in Germany (only making me more Germanic and Anglo-Saxon in blood than my paternal line already made me) …
My mother was given up for adoption around the age of four, and was raised by an older Yankee Protestant couple, and I am thankful for that as that woman was a complete wreck of a person (she died in 1992, which was the second of two unfortunate occasions when ‘Auntie Margaret’ - the aforementioned daughter left behind in Ireland - came to these shores for two extended visits; the woman took over my bedroom, and did nothing but bitterly complain about her distaste for America, and being in a Protestant home the whole time) …
As stated above, my memories of Ballina from 42 years-ago are extremely hazy - apart from one incident that will go unspoken except only to say it left a scar for life. I only vaguely recall it being damp, dreary, and rather poor. We did take a cross-country trip to visit the Dublin Zoo, which I am certain was the best part of the trip. In spite of having visited Ireland, my heart and soul is far more connected to England and Germany than any other lands where I have heritage. Many people I grew up around here in the Boston area were purely Irish, and Irish-Catholic at that. By no means do I have as much of a claim to that land as most Irish-Americans have, my spirit, body, and mind are forever WASP. No matter, though, I am still proud to share an ancestral homeland with President Biden, and I am proud that he is honorably representing a not-so-honorable country as ours abroad. Hells, maybe the president and I are distant cousins, and maybe that is why I relate to him. - A.N.
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