Chancin’ it, swearing and running from the money – a good trip home

 

“That’s just rude!” said the boy indignantly, standing at the till at Padraig’s Pound Shop in Tuam, County, Galway, Ireland last week.

“Believe  me, it’s not. Now come on!” said I, as I hustled all three of us out the door on to the main street of the town. His little sister wasn’t objecting, smugly pleased she was, as she’d managed to secure for herself a bag of eyes, pencils and some coloured lollypop sticks, even though we had gone to visit Padraig to ONLY buy a football for the dog.  That’s what happens to you in Padraig’s, it’s never a single product affair.

My mother used to say, “If you have the name of getting up early, you can stay in bed all day”, never truer than about Padraig. His shop stopped being a pound shop a long time ago (for starters, Ireland’s had the euro since 2002) but the name and bargain reputation held. These days, it’s a discount store not a pound shop but what’s a euro or five when you can buy a whole shelf storage system for only eight of them.

Anyway, on that particular day, we had just met my cousin in Padraig’s and stopped for a chat. I hadn’t seen her in years and it was a lovely encounter. She was delighted to meet the kids and in a really Irish fashion, reached for her wallet to give them a little something to buy sweets. The kids LOVE this particular Irish custom and have long since stopped asking why people they may never have met before suddenly give them money. My cousin had some change and gave the youngest a handful of coins to share with her brother. Lovely. At the end of the chat, she apologised for not having more money to hand to give them and said she would see us at the till afterwards when she managed to break a bigger note. We said our goodbyes and she went off down one of the many floor-to-ceiling alleyways that is Padraig’s.

The funny part came when I hurried the kids to the till at breakneck speed (the bag of eyes was added by the six year old in a drive-by, she knew by the pace that she was probably on a winner). You see, I knew that it was vital for us to have left the till area by the time my cousin got there. She had been so nice to give the kids a gift, I didn’t want the embarrassment of her feeling like she needed to give them more. Which she would have with a heart and a half but from my perspective that wouldn’t have been right. At all, at all.

From the kids perspective, this was a bit nuts as she clearly said she wanted to see us at the till in a few minutes. Why were we rushing, did I not like her, trust her, want to meet her again? Yes, I did to all of the above but well, you see kids, in Irish culture, we say things and we mean them but that doesn’t mean that what we say is the way it’s going to be…. Culturally, it would have been a massive No No to stand at the till and wait for her. I mean, seriously… oh God, no. She was being nice but we have to be careful never to abuse niceness.

The kids and I talked about it all the way home in the car, how and when people should know that what others are saying is to be ignored, or not, in Ireland. They bolted out the door for freedom when we got home; at least the dog was simpler than the people around here, he only wanted to play ball and then burst it, first chance he got.

Cultural understanding is a funny one. The kids are Irish citizens but they, of course, understand and ‘feel’ Norwegian culture more intuitively than any other, having lived here for for most of their young lives. A trip to Ireland like we just had brings out the Norwegian in them as they try to figure out rules there in relation to what’s intuitive to them, using of course, Norwegian intuition. And for me, their reactions and questions force me to confront some gems of Irish culture that I never even think about normally.

The art of ‘chancing it’ is ingrained in Irish culture, where we like to take a chance on something and hope for the best, more often than not breaking some rule or other in the process. In fairness, ‘twould usually be a rule that didn’t make a lot of sense, to our minds anyway.

Like the day last week when I found a parking space on the side of a busy street, got out, couldn’t find a parking meter and decided to ‘chance it’ with regard to the parking ticket. I knew it was a quick stop and would probably get away with it. It wasn’t about the one euro at all, I honestly didn’t feel like going on the hunt for a parking meter and was in that sort of rule-bending mood I suppose.

Well, the boy couldn’t get over this line of thinking. To his Norwegian mind, rules are black and white and I was flooding this one with a grey interpretation he couldn’t fathom. He spent the next ten minutes urging me to hurry up in the pharmacy so we wouldn’t get a ticket. And the pharmacy assistant rolling out the nonsensical saying, ‘God loves a trier but hates a chancer’ didn’t help; he couldn’t believe I would risk the wrath of the man above for a bit of laziness and a bloody euro.

With hindsight, it might have been better parenting to do the right thing but the devil in me wanted to show them the person I am in Ireland. When there’s a chance to confuse the hell out of your offspring, isn’t there an argument for showing them the complicated side of life? Summer holidays are not just peaches and ice cream.

And then there was the swearing. I’ll admit that some members of my family are liberal with it in informal situations, for emphasis really. It’s like a perfectly good English sentence can’t be taken too seriously unless a few swear words are added in to give it some oomph. Then we know it’s coming from the heart and you really mean it.  I don’t even hear it after a half an hour usually but the kids were a bit stunned at the sheer colour of it all. This was locals’ English, nothing that they would ever learn in school, that’s for sure.  Of course, I’ve warned them that they can never ever use such words, I got the glib reply from the boy that he wouldn’t even know how to with many of them, so at least that’s something.

It was a tough trip as my mother is not doing so well with dementia and I never know when the moment will come that she’s totally beyond reach. She’s frail as a small bird but still strong as an ox in spirit, thankfully.

And from a journeying home perspective, I am immersed in Ireland once I go back, always. I don’t flick a switch, it just switches automatically as the plane lands on the runway, as I suspect it does for most immigrants returning home to wherever they come from. Having the kids with me on this longer than usual trip meant I was never far away from Norway or a Norwegian mindset, a way of thinking that I usually leave on the airplane.

This time, I had many laughs throughout the trip as the kids asked me questions about things they were trying to understand in Ireland, or just listed off their observations. It was good fun.

Not doing what you say you will do in Norway would put you on the rude and unreliable side.  In Ireland, the very opposite could be true, like calling in for tea unannounced even though you’ve been asked to ‘drop in’ ten times or more. Cultural differences, go figure.