I was in a pub recently when a man with a soft felt hat began singing a song about Drumshanbo. He was at the bar with his back to the end wall and a hat slung sideways on his head. His eyes were closed.
It was an old familiar melody with lyrics penned in the 19th century, ripe with ornate compliments and archaic musical embellishments, woven into a hymn of praise for the dainty town in Co Leitrim.
The wounded soul finished his song and bowed his head, as other drinkers fell back into softly murmured intimacies.
“That was awesome,” a young American said. “And to think that we’re actually in Drumshanbo!”
A house visit from a bee in autumn felt like a harbinger of something mystical. And I wasn’t even drinking
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I’ve often wondered what makes the town so endearing. Maybe it’s the summer school when people play music along the streets. Maybe it’s the choir resonating from the church on the hill, or the burning candles on the convent altar on winter mornings. Maybe it’s the horses grazing on the slopes of the mountain, or the boats that moor at jetties on Acres lake. Maybe it’s the hush in the graveyard where sleep the remains of 500 souls who perished during the famine. There are so many reasons for falling in love with any particular place.
I always hoped that eventually I could say I belonged somewhere, but my father’s restlessness nestled in me for a long time and I envied people who belonged anywhere
My father had a sentimental attachment to Cavan but he was from elsewhere. An exile in an armchair, he would wind himself up with nostalgia for the Donnybrook of his childhood at the drop of a hat.
He was fond of hats. He too wore a soft felt fedora and had a choice of three that rested on top of the wardrobe in his bedroom. A man without roots whose shadow haunts me still: I morph into his long-faced double, and I only have to speak a sentence to hear his voice within me.
I always hoped that eventually I could say I belonged somewhere, but my father’s restlessness nestled in me for a long time and I envied people who belonged anywhere.
I remember when Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington won the Eurovision Song Contest and were brought back on stage to sing what was then the winning song, Rock’n’Roll Kids. And in their moment of victory McGettigan proudly mentioned Drumshanbo. He was rooting himself not in the swirl of fame and glory but in a place where he belonged.
I once felt I belonged in Glangevlin, a mythic and beautiful region of west Cavan. I remember one warm May morning long ago when two tractors met on a narrow road in front of me and stopped so that the drivers could greet one another.
Engines off.
They didn’t speak. But they sat in the saddles of their grey Ferguson tractors savouring the exquisite absurdity of a lovely day and lighting two cigarettes from a single match.
My car windscreen was red with the corpses of dead insects, as I waited to get past the tractors, and with the window open I could hear the hoarse croak of a cuckoo, and remembered that I was lucky to be alive.
Even though the cuckoo plunders other nests, I remain on his side. I forgive him and welcome him home
There was a superstition that if you were looking at the ground when you heard the cuckoo for the first time, it could signify that you might be underground before he returned in another year. The superstition was a way of delighting in the now-ness of being.
“I am wondrously alive in this moment,” was the implication of all such piseógs.
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The first call of the cuckoo is mellow and sweet, and I always feel exhilarated in late April when I hear him as he swerves above Lough Allen and across the villages and townlands on the shoreline that make a necklace around the lake: Drumkeerin, Dowra, Ballinagleara and Cormongan. And even though he plunders other nests, I remain on his side. I forgive him and welcome him home.
Because where else could he go? And why would he fly so far to get here, if not for the fact that he too needs to belong somewhere.
The necklace of towns around Lough Allen is completed at the southern tip by Drumshanbo. It sits where the lake ends and the Shannon begins. And I am content there in any shaded pub, like the cuckoo must be content in his homecoming though he cannot claim ownership of anything; not even a nest.
The truth is that we can belong anywhere, if we just give it a chance. And even now in old age, if I could sing, I would sing the praises of beautiful Drumshanbo.