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 |   Tales from real life |
In 2021 I wrote a poem, Lost on Route 66, about the loss of the old ways by Irish immigrants who were assimilated and melted into a larger American culture. I presented Highway 66 as a more modern example of quaint old ways being replaced by the relentless march of progress. I never drove on Route 66, but I have seen the 1960's television show and heard the song by Bobby Troup: Get Your Kicks on Route 66. My maternal grandfather, born in 1892, was at least third generation Pennsylvania Irish. I can trace the family name to census records from the early 1800's. They clearly emigrated before the potato famine and long before Ellis Island. Grampa Montgomery moved further west as a teen and became an itinerant laborer in Montana. He retained just a hint of Irish brogue, but he'd lost contact with even his Pennsylvania roots by the time I was growing up. I got all my information about Irish culture from books and movies. I also have Norwegian, English, German, and Scots ancestry, but Ireland fired my imagination. I always felt a vague desire for 'real' Irish roots. It may seem odd that I feel the loss of something I never actually had, but that's what I tried to put into the poem. Nixieš¦  found the poem last week and gave it a shout out on the news feed. That generated a couple of additional reviews by Averren  and Lyn's a Witchy Woman  . This new interest stirred me to revisit the poem. I reworked it over the past few days and realized what I actually miss is the sharing of stories. I grew up with network television that was shared by the entire country and one TV set that was shared by the whole family. Our sharing was different from that depicted in accounts of the 'old country', but it was a family activity that seems to have gone by the wayside.I have fond memories of dad and I playing cribbage while the television droned in the background. He'd tell stories of growing up with horse drawn farm equipment, serving in the Navy, or working as a carpenter to for the Seattle World's Fair. For decades I thought of television as the 'boob tube' with little real value. Now, I see that it served much the same function as the fireplace did when my grandfather was a child in the days before radio. It wasn't the content of the stories or the setting that made it special, but rather the personal contact.
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