I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen

My namesake, Kathleen (aka, Grandma Kitty)

My mom is 100% Irish and both her parents had direct ties to Ireland, like property or close relatives, that were still there while she was growing up. There was either a “Kathleen” or a “Michael” on every branch and twig of her family tree—and if your limb was lucky enough to have at least one of each gender, there was both. If you only had boys? No dice on Kathleen. But if you had only girls, a little improvisation was apparently permitted—which is how my mom ended up as “Michele”.

It took roughly 45 months of pregnancy over a period of about 10 years, but my mom was one of the few and proud to check both boxes—with her second child (me) and her fifth, my baby brother. My mom’s mom, my most immediate namesake, was known by us as Grandma Kitty and moved south from New York City to escape the cold and be closer to us during her final years. Before she left the city, I have random memories of visiting her apartment—the criss-cross gate out front, its long, narrow hallway and rusty fire-escapes, and the stool in the kitchen that was upholstered in what appeared to be vinyl tile, with an optional footrest that flipped up and down on a hinge. The abode’s main attraction, for us as kids, was the free-standing bathtub with porcelain feet that Grandma Kitty always warned would carry us away if we misbehaved. I also found the constant din of outside traffic oddly lulling at bedtime, not realizing that those emergency sirens and angry car horns were the not-so-soothing sounds of human peril or misfortune elsewhere in the city--and of average New Yorkers totally losing their shit at each other on the street below.

There was also a room full of books where my grandmother made recordings of my older sister and I reciting fairy tales from memory as we flipped through the pages of books, once accompanied by audio versions on cassette or vinyl ‘45 that we had long since ceased to need. At some point, Grandma Kitty used that same black and silver, early ‘80s tape player to record a message for me as a kind of prologue to a song she wanted to share. “Your name is a beautiful name,” she said. “It’s my name, too, and I’ve always loved it. I hope you do, too.” She explained that the following song was about another girl named Kathleen, who came to America with her husband from Ireland and became so homesick that she no longer smiled and often had tears in her eyes. In the song, "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen", the husband promises to take her back to Ireland “when the fields are fresh and green” so that her “loving heart will cease to yearn” for everything she left behind. When I first heard it, I was like, Cool! My name is in a song! And then probably ran off to do something else, like any other kid with the fleeting attention span of a 3-year-old would do.

Nevertheless, I knew what she'd done for me was very special, and I did listen to that recording often enough to remember it many years later—the sound of my grandmother’s voice on tape, and full verses of the lyrics—which are pretty miserable, if you pay attention to them. The husband watches the roses in Kathleen’s cheeks “fade away and die” and describes a “dark’ning shadow on her brow”… I mean—can we get this girl on a boat? Get her some anti-depressants? Or at least take her out for a jog and jump-start those endorphins? All kidding aside, though—it is a beautiful song. And ironically, its morose nature is very much in keeping with some of the songs I was drawn to later in life—songs I’d find so moving that I’d listen to them over and over, but were so sad that I eventually wore myself out—like when you tear into a bowl of fettucine alfredo until you can’t even bear the smell of it anymore, just physically and emotionally exhausted from the effort of over-consuming it. Songs like “Poor Man’s House” by Patty Griffin, "In My Time Of Need" by Ryan Adams, “She’s A Jar” by Wilco, most songs by Brandi Carlile ("That Year", “I Will”, “Pride and Joy”), and pretty much all of the album Places You Have Come To Fear The Most by Dashboard Confessional.

But the first of these sad, sad songs for me was one called Promises by Randy Travis, of all people. My older sister Marie and her friends randomly discovered some of his happier hits in high school (Deeper Than The Holler, Forever Amen) and I did a deeper dive than expected into one of his cassettes that I came across in her room. In this classic country lament, our wayward Randy is a rotten philanderer, who has come home, crying and repentant, one too many times to a good woman. He knows his days with her are numbered and miserably imagines the morning that he wakes up to finds she’s finally left him. I was in middle school, so it’s not like I had any real life experience to relate that to—but I was really struck by the gravity of having transgressed beyond all hope of redemption and what a sinking feeling that must be. When I brought the song to Marie’s attention, so overwhelmed with how sad it was, Marie’s reaction was basically, Gross.That’s not sad. Sounds like he’s a rat bastard who screwed up and deserved everything he got. With which I can now honestly agree—Amen, sister. F that guy. But I'm still vulnerable to that feeling—or at least that fear--of one day doing something so bad, so often that you’ve squandered the last farthing of a loved one’s forgiveness.

Maybe it’s my Irish heritage, my early exposure to a sad Irish song, or the therapeutic nature of being moved to tears --but I’m still a sucker for a sad song every now and then. Then again, maybe it’s my name. It doesn’t get more Irish than that. So Irish, in fact that, growing up in the South, it seemed that a large portion of the population struggled to spell it or even pronounce it, like it was somehow exotically foreign—inserting an extra syllable (Kath-a-leen) or just ignoring the uber-phonetic spelling altogether and referring to me as “Kathryn” (the way the good Lord apparently intended when south of the Mason-Dixon). In any case, I agree with my grandmother that Kathleen is a beautiful name and I, too, have always loved it. I’ve never seen the homeland and I failed to name either son Michael—but I did marry into a heightened state of Irish cred and like to imagine that Grandma Kitty was proudly looking on from the hereafter the day one of her “Kathleens” tacked “Sullivan” onto her name. Because unless you’re Patty’s Pig, it REALLY doesn’t get more Irish than that!!!