Leaving. Landing.

Leaving. Landing. A two part look back at my year. This part is the leaving part, the start of the year in Ireland, getting ready to immigrate and finally leaving. I have a busy week ahead. So part two might come next week. Meantime, enjoy.


Leaving.

The end of the year. A time for reflection. I've hardly had time to look back. Since I started my new job I haven't had much time to do anything but work, sleep and watch the kids for a couple of hours in the afternoon. But I had a couple of hours before I start a 6 day week of long night shifts, so I'll try. 

It's been quite a year. Less so creatively, but certainly personally. Two major events happened, my son was born and then we immigrated. So it's hard to squeeze writing and filmmaking around all that. I still managed it somehow. So here's a brief month by month breakdown of the year.

January began the way I like to start the year. I always like to kick the year off with something good, positive, exciting, to set up the rest of the year. So I organised a screening of Derelict in my hometown of Drogheda, at the Droichead Arts Centre, where I've screened all my films. And I can honestly say it was the best screening I've ever had. We almost had a full house and it was a great vibe. Some of the actors came along and we had a nice Q&A after the film, followed by some pints in my local Clarkes, it was a great night. Also, significant in two other ways, it was the 10 year anniversary of my first screening there. I first screened 'Girl in the Window', a no budget, no script, ghost story that never should have been shown in public! It was also, as far as I thought, my last screening there, as we were set to immigrate later in the year. It was a great way to start the year.

Right after the screening I was invited to join a local group called Ablevision to advice them how to make a short film. Ablevision are a group who give people with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make film and television. They partner them up with professionals and allow them to be a contributing member of the team. It was a wonderful experience. I quickly realised my involvement would be more than just advising. I quickly became the writer/director of the project and guided the cast and crew through the script and the making of the film. We only had 8 weeks from start to finish to do the this. It's the quickest film I've ever been involved in. I really don't know how we did it. Considering that in February I also came here to Indianapolis for a week to meet people and start to set things up for moving here. 

I arrived in Indianapolis in the middle an ice storm. During that week I got frozen, stood up, ignored and dog bitten! But I also met a lot of lovely people! So it wasn't all bad. but I went home with mixed feelings about moving. I continued on the amazing process of making this short film, now called 'Joe & Sarah', with Ablevision Ireland. During this time my wife was pregnant with our son and due at the start of April. Which would give me time to finish the film, edit it, and get ready for the birth. Of course our son had other ideas.

My wife got quite sick in the first week of March. All through february she had a cold, which then developed into a bronchial infection, made worse by her pregnancy and the fact she couldn't take any medication to get through it. So it hung on and hung on and got worse and worse until one day in March, around my birthday, she ended up in hospital with severe chest pains. She was really sick, the sickest I've ever seen her, or anyone for that matter. After a day of excruciate pain and various diagnoses from several doctors and consultants they realised she had acute pancreatitis. Which is, apparently, one of the most painful things you can get, and throw full term pregnancy on top of that, she was not in a good way. The decided the best thing to do was to induce labour and deliver the baby early. This decision was made the day before I was supposed to audition actors for parts in 'Joe & Sarah'.

I went ahead with the audition. It was actually the day before the induction. I thought I had a month, I just found out my son was coming tomorrow, I was not in the room that day! Not mentally anyway. Luckily there were some good actors who made the decision easy. The next day Shea was born. It was the craziest, most frightening, experience of my life. There was a point during this week where I feared for the life of my wife and unborn soon. But thanks to the care or the nurses, doctors, consultants and midwives of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, all of whom were professional, personable, caring and reassuring, they both came out the other side in one piece.

The first day of shoot on 'Joe & Sarah' was the first day Maryann and Shea came home! I would have much rather be home, but I couldn't pull out of the film at that late stage. I didn't really want to anyway, didn't want to let the guys down, we'd become a team at that stage. I guess sometimes life just goes that way, sometimes it take everything away and leaves you twisting in the wind, sometimes it piles everything on at once and tests you to your limits. Admittedly, I was enjoying it, as tiring and stressful as it was. I had nothing to be annoyed about, my son was home, my wife was over the worst of her sickness and on the mend and I was making a movie. Life was good.

The film premiered in April, at the Droichead Arts Centre, back again, and a great experience. It coupled with a mini-festival, a celebration of what Ablevision were trying to do, so many groups from around the area came along. I partook by giving a talk on low-budget filmmaking. Later that night was an award ceremony, where 6 short films were screened by local groups, and then the premiere of 'Joe & Sarah'. The film went down really well and had a hugely positive reaction. The whole day and evening was an incredibly positive event. It was a privilege to be a part of, and the watch these guys, especially Stephen and Anne, who played Joe and Sarah, and to watch how they performed, over came shyness, and enjoyed themselves.

The film was done. Time to get ready for the move. We had bought our tickets, were leaving in September. It was now June. We had three months to get ready. To save some money. We had none. To pack and ship what we could. To pack and store the things we could not part with. And then to sell everything else. June began with one sunny day in Laytown when my brother Noel and I parked up for the day at a car boot sale. I spent the day haggling pennies over many a treasured and long held possession. I spent the day saying goodbye to memories while my customers spent the day holding back smiles over easy gotten bargains.

Then began the long and annoying process of flogging everything we own of facebook! Sorry facebook friends! Thank to Lisa Redmond, who bought most of my furniture!!! My best customer. As the house emptied sadness set in. The home we had built was being stripped. It began to feel like less of a home. But the memories there began to fight for their foothold and became unforgiving. It was hard. Perhaps harder for me as I had grown up in that house. It was my Grandparents house you see. They had moved into it in the early seventies, my mother lived there before she got married. I spent a great deal of my childhood there. My grandfather died when I was very young, so I have very little, if any, memory of him, but I remember my grandmother in vibrant and colourful detail. I remember warmth, toast, good dinners, butter, TV, a soft couch, a scratching kitten, a sharp tongue if ever I stepped out of line, and the soft glow of lamps cushioned in floral couch covers and curtain of an evening when I would pop around for tea and chat and cake. 

The room, the walls, the air in that house was pungent with those memories. I have scars from falls I took there. To say goodbye to that was incredibly difficult. But what I found hardest of all was saying goodbye to my children's first home. Remembering that this was were I brought my daughter home during Christmas of 2009. And laid her down beside the fire, while 'It's a Wonderful Life' played on TV. And watching her grow in that room, how that house was her haven. How relaxed and comfortable she felt there. All she learn there. How she grew and became the bright, funny, special girl in between those walls. 

I think what helped me get through it in the end was realising that the memories I was hanging onto were related to the people, and not the bricks and mortar. I will always be sad about the people who aren't there anymore, but I carry their memory with me. And as for the kids, they're here with me, their faces remind me, not the empty room they once stood in. And we're building memories all the time. Life is in the present.

July and August went the same way. Largely about making money, packing up and preparing for the move. It turned out to be a beautiful Summer in Ireland. It was sunny and warm. And for the first time in years there was a real sense of community in our neighbourhood, the warm weather brought people out, they were fixing up their homes, cutting their grass, chatting with each other in open front doors and the kids were out on the street playing and in and out of each other's house. It reminded me of what it was like when I was growing up. It reminded me of what I was missing over the years and part of the reason we were moving. And so, doubt set in and I really began to wonder if moving was the right thing to do. If leaving a life long community was right, if taking our kids away from the home they knew, the friends they were making and the family and grandparents they loved, was the right thing to do.

September rolled around pretty quickly. We were living surrounded by boxes. It was truly time to go. On our last week we moved into my parents house. Which was crowded. But it was nice to spend it with my parents. I went back and forth to our house to clean it out. The house was actually a council house, or a city house, even though it had been in the family for 4 generations it still belonged to someone else. Someone who could care less about us, our family, or our history there. Over the years the house required maintenance, much of which I did myself, a lot of which was down to our landlord, who did very little. 40 years of tenancy and we were largely ignored. The week after we moved out, the house was gutted and modernised, made like new, for strangers. I guess that's how it goes. The loyal customer get shafted, while the new customers get all the deals and discounts. 

On the last day in the house I was so close to tears it hurt. Every empty room I went into screamed a thousand memories at me. I took a break to go and do a radio interview at LMFM it was nice to be able to say goodbye to the town too. Which has been so kind to me over the years. A town that has stepped out and supported my films since I began. And as I walked out of the radio station I passed the school where I shot my first film, Emily's Song. I stepped onto the street that rises above the town and could to look down over it. It felt fitting. Felt like I was saying goodbye to it. Saying goodbye to a friend, a family member, my town, my hometown. Drogheda. A scruffy little town with an attitude and fowl mouth you can't help but love.

I packed up the house. Sold off the last of the furniture. Gave the rest to a local charity. My parents, Maryann and the kids called around and we all said goodbye to the house. In many ways, for me at least, it was like a finally farewell to my Grandmother too, who I still felt was with me in someway while we were there. I brought Evelyn, my daughter, into each room, "Goodbye Daddy's office," we said, "Goodbye Mammy and Daddy's room, I enjoyed bouncing on the bed. Goodbye bathroom and tubby, thanks you for all my fun tubby's. Goodbye my room, and pictures on the wall," there she found a deflated ball that Georgie (our dog) had burst. She grabbed and clung to it, "This is my ball," she said, "It is, you keep it," I said.

We said goodbye to upstairs. As we walked downstairs and she stepped so confidently, I was reminded of how she learned to climb them. Then downstairs, we said goodbye to the lving room and kitchen, memories of tv shows, baking, dinners and games. Then out to the garden, probably Evelyn's favourite place. We said goodbye to the blackberry bush that we picked berries together for Daddy's blackberry crumble. We said goodbye to the spiders who lived under the leafs, every time Evelyn would pick a berry she would say "Sorry Mr. Spider, sorry to disturb you." We said goodbye to the nieghbours cats, the "tigers in the jungle," as she called them, all 20 of them. In the garden Evelyn would play the day away, and talk over the fences to the neighbours, she had her own special friendships with them. Deirdre, who owned the cats, Marie, an elderly lady who watch her and giggle and especially Ann, who would hang her washing on the line, and talk to her. But Ann broke her ankle, and wasn't in the garden at the end.

Then we left. We closed the doors and locked them. Everyone went home and I went to the council office. Who were shirty with me because I was an hour late. I said I just locked up the house where four generations of my family have lived, give me a break. That lady went away, unsympathetic, with her piece of paper. But I got to hand my keys back to Bosco, my old rent collector, my grandmother's old rent collector, a kind and generous man, always with a friendly smile and a funny story. I wrote Slán agus Beannacht based on him, but you can see the real Bosco here on RTE's Nationwide. He gave me a smile and uttered his famous phrase, "Slán agus beannacht" (which means, goodbye and blessings) and it felt like a chapter had been closed, in the right way. I was able to walk away with a smile, ready for the future.

The next day we said our godbyes at the house and pilled into a taxi, driven by my cousin Thomas, who had promised the lift a year earlier, true to his word he was at the house at 6:30am. The drive to the airport was filled with polite small talk and over wrought emotion. As always, you think you have time to say everything you want, you think you have hours, but time enters a different realm in airports, it slides through your hands as if covered in grease.

I had to organise Georgie's flight, she was in her cage, afraid and unaware of what was going on. Evelyn was excited, nervous, and completely unaware of the gravity of the situation. Eventually we got our bags and dog away. And made it to security. Saying goodbye to my mother was all too quick. She hugged and kissed Evelyn. Her little granddaughter. They pulled apart, Evelyn wanted to get on the plane, to start her adventure. My mother wanted to get to the bus. Away from this goodbye, that was all to big. Their own special bond, stronger than anything I've ever seen, being severed in front of my eyes because I wanted to build a better life. But would it really be better? That doubt again. And a raw and ragged emotion clawing at my throat to get out that was desperately trying to keep contained. Immigration is hard. It's different. It's not going on holiday. It's not "I'll see you soon," it's leaving. And leaving is hard.

The flight was OK actually. Emotions were high. There were a couple of tantrums. But they were short and the kids did pretty well. We landed in a hot Chicago on September 10th in the afternoon and as I stepped off the plane the woman in front of me fainted.

While I helped her to the ground and fanned her with a paper while she lay there, everyone walked by, hurrying to catch their connecting flights. I thought about home and my life from now one. My home, where if I fell I could be sure there would be someone there to catch me. But in this new place, where I knew no one, if I fall, will there be someone there to catch me? Of will they hurry by?