[ Irish KC ]
Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

I never go past it any more.

Because it isn’t there any more. Yet it looks like it is.

Twice last week I cycled through the Park. Through the acres. Past the cross. Deerfield. The Phoenix Monument. Áras an Uachtaráin. Ashtown Castle. Cabra Gate.

It would have been nothing to turn the bike and have a peek. A peek at what isn’t there.

They still call it a racecourse. An authentic name for hundreds of houses and apartments.

When I was very young I used to walk alone, the mile down to chapelizod and its stile and then up through the deer and through Oldtown Wood, past the ponds, until I got to Ashtown gate, and I’d look across at the lodge before walking the miles home.

That way, if I was asked, I had only gone to the Park, a trip far enough to raise eyebrows. It wouldn’t occur to people that I had walked to the far side of the park.

To friends it was the place I disappeared into that time U2 played in the racecourse. In the front door, out the back door, and I could watch the boys for free. And Simple Minds, Big Country and the Eurythmics. And more.

But to me it was a gateway to a different world. Like anybody’s grandparents. A world of trees transformed into houses, of Victorian stands littered with exotic betting cards, of a million bottle tops that all became badges.

With the wisdom of age the lodge becomes like the tardis. How did so many of us sit in front of the fire, and drink tea and eat sandwiches? In one room?

Race days were my favourite. Because so many of us worked all over the racecourse, and at the end of the day an impossible number of us retreated to the lodge.

My friends who didn’t really know the Phoenix Park used to tell me the lodge was in the Park, but I knew you walked out a park gate and crossed a road to get to it. It was the same road road I’d grown up standing in the dark by the fence of railway sleepers waiting for the bus home as Nana stood with us holding the bus timetable. She was the only person I knew who believed in the timetable.

And it was the same road that our cars all stopped on, outside the lodge and its blooming roses, on our way to lay Nana to rest. She always loved the roses. That night I slept in the bed she passed in, so Grandad wouldn’t be alone in the lodge. Nana & Grandad had over 3 dozen grandchildren; I felt very special.

The next year Grandad followed and I painted this 2 years later. In 4 days that blurred into one. Not stopping for sleep much does that. It was one of those paintings that just poured out.

A few years later my mother took The Lodge from my collection and said it was now my parents’. It’s the only painting I’ve ever let be taken from me.

The night before I moved to America was the next time I saw it. It had been framed, and was hanging over the fireplace in my childhood home.

2 years later, at the moment my son’s newest cousin was being born, I got a phone call that told me the lodge had been bulldozed. There was a tradition in Ireland, not gone yet, to bulldoze buildings that were legally protected and then claim it’s a fait accompli.

Those responsible for the bulldozing were made to re-erect it. And like imperfect memories what they put up wasn’t quite in the right place. And the windows were wrong.

It looked like a pretend house. I only ever looked at it once. Because you can’t re-erect memories. But then you can’t bulldoze them either.

And I’ll always have the sound of feet on gravel.

This painting is now available for purchase as a print - from a far superior photograph than that pictured here.

More Irish Nostalgia:
   • Traveling by Train in Ireland
   • Songs They Taught us in School
   • Watching Ireland Play Maradona in 1979
   • Radio in Dublin, January 1993
   • U2: Dublin 1979 and 1987

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under 1-eolai, Art, Nostalgia. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.