My younger brother Dermot and I—all of six years old in 1955—watched as our Irish-born Mom drop a single dime into a large empty Skippy peanut butter jar.
“What ya doing?” I asked her.
“I’m saving our dimes for Ireland. ‘Twill take awhile, God knows, but it’s a start.”
She sighed as I peered into her glass container, her lone silver dime laying flat on its bottom.
“Can I go?”
“You can both go, please God.”
She took the jar and placed it up on the pantry’s top shelf, away from the reach of little hands.
Over the months I’d often climb the high chair to see how Mom’s piggy bank was doing. It was filling up slowly at best. Unfortunately, many of her dimes were diverted for other duties. School milk, for instance, cost 15 cents a week when five of us were trooping off to St. Charles School. We’d always find a dime beneath our pillow after losing a tooth, and with Mom’s eventual brood of eight sprouting some 200 milk teeth, a goodly number of dimes were forked over by our tooth fairy. Years later, a dime would accompany each of Mom’s five sons to buy a soda with lunch when we caddied at the Country Club of Pittsfield.
Only when Mom’s dime jar was chock-full did she have us count it. This was a special event, and it always occurred around St. Patrick’s Day. We’d pull up our chairs to the table and spill out the jar’s contents, sifting our hands through Mom’s enormous cache, never having known such richness.
Next, we’d make little stacks of ten that dotted the table like “sheaves of oats,” Mom would say. That done, we’d roll them into blue coin wrappers and line them up like logs upon a mighty river. If memory serves me, the 16-ounce Skippy jar could hold 800 dimes—80 bucks! Task complete, Mom would place the blue rolls in her sewing box for safety.
Through those years, we’d often ask Mom’s permission to play with her Skippy jar. Our brother Jimmy had devised a soccer-like game—Mercury versus Roosevelt—that we played on an old Parcheesi board. Or Dermot and I would pretend to be one-eyed and wooden-legged pirates, using her silver for stolen booty. Remarkably, these dimes always found their way back to Mom’s kitty.
Well, almost.
I suppose it’s difficult for the reader to believe a loving son such as myself would snitch a dime from his mother’s hope chest earmarked for her beloved Emerald Isle, the land for which she constantly pined. Shamefaced, I confess to the occasional theft, but didn’t I show remarkable restraint? After all, in my bygone youth, a sunshiny dime could brighten the cloudiest of days.
With fingers burning in anticipation of hellfire, I’d delve my hand knuckle-deep into Mom’s treasure trove, lift a single dime, and shortly find myself panting in front of a dazzling candy counter. There, I’d gawk longingly at chocolate bars and similar delights—not to mention other temptations like yo-yos or baseball cards—pondering my choice as cautiously as a jeweler with his sparkling stones.
“Good morning, Mrs. Hood. Two Chunkys, please.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Nichols. A bottle of Nehi soda and a bag of Rex potato chips, please.”
“Good evening, Mr. Discoe. Two cent’s worth of malted-milk balls, one Dubble Bubble gum, two Squirrel Nuts...”
But however tasty my spoils, a bellyache would surely follow. Stooped over with the pain of guilt, I’d scour the trash cans and clogged sewers of Wilson Project, finding mud-caked soda bottles I’d cash in for two cents apiece. On Monday, I’d turn down Mom’s milk money—a nickel and a dime—weakly explaining, “There’s tons of extra milk because kids are out with the measles,” then I’d set off for school with pants—and heart—sagging heavily with pennies.
Before the dear nuns could comment on the pile of filthy coppers I’d pour into their pale, soap-scented hands, I’d apologize, “Sorry, Sister, my mom is saving her dimes for Ireland.”
“God help her,” they’d say, pardoning me with a pitying wave.
I’d often look at Ireland on the school globe; a little green island I could cover with the tip of my baby finger. What was its attraction, and why had it cast such a spell on my mom?
One evening, as I was reading my junior version of "The Count of Monte Cristo," I watched Mom drop a few dimes into her Skippy jar after grocery shopping. I fell back to my book and imagined her to be the imprisoned count, digging her way to freedom one thin dime at a time.
Letters from Eireann arrived frequently, their colorful stamps depicting a glorious but melancholic history. It seemed everyone shared the same spiky penmanship, as if the entire country scrawled with a collective hand.
One of my grandmother’s letters informed Mom that a calf had broken its leg atop Slieve Bawn, but watching Mom read it, you’d take it for an earth-shaking tragedy. I was drawn into this correspondence bit by bit, at first trying to grasp Mom’s homesickness, but then captivated by the letters themselves.
“Grannie’s thatched farmhouse is adorned with rambling roses,” explained Mom one morning. “It’s still a rambling house, you know, where people are welcomed in day or night—a holdover from the Famine. Someday I’ll show you her roses and the songbirds that nest in her eaves.”
Mom’s brother—our Uncle Bennie—was not only a thatcher and diviner, but the only villager who knew where Simon Hanley, king of the fairies, was buried—near a hazel grove where he cut his forked-branched divining rods. He assured Mom he’d show one village child the king’s burial site before he passed on, and I found myself longing to be that child.
Oftentimes Mom’s Skippy jar filled very slowly, and it wasn’t my pilfering of dimes that held up progress, or my brothers’ random snitching, either. Mom stipulated from the beginning that she’d never make change, neither break a quarter nor trade for two nickels. Nope, a dime had to fall into her hands as neatly as a gift from above.
But no matter how slowly the dimes in her kitty rose, Mom’s passion for Ireland never diminished; each dime one more silvery stepping stone across the black fathomless sea.
One March afternoon after rolling another 80 dollars to the cause—I was in my mid-teens by then—I asked Mom if we were closing in on our goal.
“We need more than passage, I’m afraid,” she answered. “We’ll need new clothes, passports, and pocket money, too. Nor can we show up at Grannie’s empty-handed, with one arm as long as the other. No, we’ll need gifts, however small.”
All told, it would take 12 years and over 14,000 dimes to see us to Ireland. But, believe me, it was certainly worth the wait.
*This story first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield, MA., on St. Patrick’s Day, 2008. Kevin O’Hara is the author of “Last of the Donkey Pilgrims: A Man’s Journey through Ireland." You can learn more about Kevin O'Hara on his website TheDonkeyman.com.