The Colors of Donegal
Respite from Memory
Before the pandemic, poison oak, prednisone, noodles, research vessels, Substack even, there was this trip to Ireland in 2015 after American Pharoh captured the triple crown.
I was the away team, in a fifteen-year operation, since concluded. Few people know even yet Marconi’s mom was Irish. Working under duress was what the Irish did best. The English had made sure of that. Could be it was the Irish that saved Catholicism, but not the version that I was familiar with up until then.
Mare, Marie, Maria, Marine; what impressed me most about the Irish version was the subtle but certain feminine dominance of the spiritual realm. Things were not exactly as they seemed. Indeed, Marconi’s mom was Irish, a Jameson, no less, who came back home to secure her son’s patent for the wireless.
Well, not quite home, as the Irish did not have a patent system. Marconi had to patent in England.
I was a historian by then, living in California, still working at things I had begun in New Jersey, in the very same township that Marconi had established his US headquarters. I had taken college courses at what was Camp Evans, the former site of Marconi’s campus.
Thus, I digress. And I do so without shame, as the Colors of Donegal came to me again. Colors of Donegal is a poem I had written about a football jersey a boy was wearing on one those narrow Irish roads. I was surprised to see them.
