Dear Denis,
We (your eight children) used to make fun of you for remembering WB Yeats’s or James Joyce’s birthdays more easily than ours. But now I am a parent and a writer too, I can sympathise. When I dash off to meet my kids at the school bus stop at the all-too-soon end of my working day, my head is often so full of my fictional creations that I have difficulty focusing on any aspect of real life.
My son and daughter may grow up resenting me for my absentmindedness, the way my eyes slide off towards a page of text while I’m talking to them . . . but they’ll also remember having a deeply fulfilled mother whose work made her leap out of bed every morning, and there’s a lot to be said for that. They don’t have to be the only source of my happiness; I lean on them, but only lightly.
Something else I used to tease you for was your venerability, because you and Frances had me at 42 (the runt of the litter, as I was known). When I studied Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations for my Inter Cert, I took to calling you “Aged Parent”, like the speechless old man by the fire in that book. But from my current perspective of 43, you – still lecturing and writing brilliant books, much the same as ever, at 85 – hardly seem to have changed at all: the gap between us has shrunk.
Father’s Day is something that didn’t exist in the Ireland of my childhood. Yet another American import, I suppose; let’s share a cynical roll of the eye. But happy Father’s Day anyway, and I hope you’re reading something so brilliant it makes you forget what day it is.
Love always,
Emma
