THE FLIGHT OF THE OSPREYS AND A STATE OF UNEASE IN THE COUNTRY

 The ospreys dallied a few weeks longer this year. They’re usually gone by the third week in September. But then, 2025 was a banner year.

One day I counted 9 of them, diving, fishing, then transporting the catch back to the chicks who eagerly await their diet of  live sushi.

 

I’d never seen more than 4 fishing together. 9 was almost overwhelming.

 

With their departure, a familiar sense of foreboding has returned. It will be April before I see them again. I’ve experienced that same feeling every year since the pandemic began.

 

Of course I shake it off as autumn, that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, melds into early winter. If you make a living from the arts you have need of a robust optimism. It’s no business for the weak of heart.

 

It runs in the family. My granny lived with my paternal grandfather on 100 acres of farmland almost within sight of the spires of Wexford town.

 

She had married well but was from sailor stock and always retained a large part of her townie nature, replete with superstitions and nautical lore.

 

She loved birds too, her favorites were swallows, and she was comforted by the mud nests they built in the eaves of her tall house.

 

However, when September drew to a close, so too did her sense of foreboding grow, as swallows from near and far gathered on the telegraph wires that snaked down her avenue towards the road.

 

My grandfather, a somewhat somber man, had learned over the years to remain silent while his wife fretted about the imminent departure of the swallows.

 

She watched through her large kitchen window as October days ached by and Wexford’s biting East winds grew stronger. And then one day at the sound of a great whoosh, she would run outside as her spring and summer companions departed.

 

My grandfather would barely look up from his Daily Independent or Financial Times. Still, he would sigh with relief – the gathering tension would halt now and dissipate over the following weeks, until her only mention of swallows would be, “I wonder will they return early next year.”

 

Isn’t it odd how natures are passed on from generation to generation no matter how far away from the original clan you’ve strayed. I sometimes stop in surprise as I see one of my own sons throw a look across the room, the very image of a long dead uncle that he has never even met.

 

And so it goes with the ospreys. Like my granny I wonder if they’ll return early, they’ve been known to stray up north from Florida or Mexico soon after St. Patrick’s Day.

 

Is it age, or the purposeful instability caused by the current president, that deepens the palpable sense of foreboding that seems to have settled on the land?

 

I have little respect for his policies or general carry-on, but I have to admit that the Trump/Miller/Vought strategy of” flooding the zone” has been highly effective. Even for a political junky like myself who reads the Times and Journal every day, I can’t keep up, and in fact now often leave newspapers unopened and favorite news shows un-watched.

 

It’s too much, the brain can’t take it all in. I meet people every day who are retreating into their shells. This president who must dominate every news cycle is winning.

 

Or is he? I chanced to watch about 5 minutes of his recent speech to the United Nations. It was staggering in its assumptions and conclusions. 

 

“Green energy is a scam, renewable energy is not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great; oil, gas and beautiful clean coal are the answer.”

 

As for the transformation of the planet we see all around us: “Climate change itself is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world!”

 

Thank you, Mr. President, more speeches like that, sir! With elections coming next year, we need such rants to rouse us from our benign somnolence.

 

However, we’ve gone far beyond a battle between two bickering political parties. We have an urgent, even existential, need for a return to some form of national sanity before the ospreys return in 2026.

SOMEWHERE BEYOND "NEITHER HERE NOR THERE."

 

“You and me are neither here nor there, young fellah,” the auld lad said to me one night in The Archway. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

 

He was probably about 50 then and I wasn’t long into my twenties, but he looked years older from the drink and the life in construction.

 

He always sat on his own when he came to see Turner & Kirwan of Wexford. A rarity, he liked that we played original music – so I occasionally joined him for breaks. Four sets made for a long night.

 

I could tell he was lonely, and as Christmas grew closer he seemed to shrink back into himself. 

 

Turner and I were particularly lightheaded that night, for Mr. Barry, the immigration lawyer out in Queens, had said our papers would be arriving any day and we’d definitely be going home for our first Christmas in three years.

 

“We don’t fit over here and come another few years you won’t fit back home either.” The Auld lad persisted.

 

I would have disagreed with him but that would only set him off.

 

In the long run, he was right but that first Christmas back home in the 70’s was only brilliant.

The trip with Aer Lingus was magic in itself. A right old party was thrown for us and my brother Jimmy that afternoon in Tomorrow’s Lounge in Bay Ridge. 

 

We were already at least a sheet to the wind by the time we hit the Kennedy Airport bar, already jammed to the ceiling with Paddies equally shellacked. The party transferred en masse to the plane.

 

Back then, most people smoked and the hostesses delighted in serving Irish beers. The party continued unabated to Shannon, where my father picked us up. We made a couple of stops on the way, as he tried valiantly to keep up with us.

 

The party continued for the full five weeks as we made up for two lost Christmases. The Wexford girls were sweet, and our old friends delighted in the stories we only half-exaggerated about our exploits in CBGB’s and the Lower East Side and how mighty the craic was in The Bronx.

 

Occasionally I’d catch my mother glancing at me, worried but unwilling to say anything. Hadn’t we promised her we’d be home for a couple of weeks in the summer!

 

That rarely happened. There was always some dream to pursue, a record contract to be gained, and later a book to be published or a play to be produced.

 

Around the seventh year in New York and the third Christmas home in Ireland, I began to understand what the auld lad had been talking about – I was neither here nor there. The previous Christmas, instead of going home, I’d taken a Jack Kerouac On The Road trip across America in a car to be delivered to California.

 

We crashed in Pennsylvania but, true to our word, we got that smashed-up Audi in one piece to its owner in Sausalito. 

 

I’d lost track of the auld lad by then; Sean, the bartender up in the Archway, thought he’d gone with the great displacement from The Bronx to Pearl River. 

 

I hope he found some consolation in the greenery of Rockland Country, far from the concrete fields of The Bronx.

 

I thought of him in 2000 when I went home to say goodbye to my mother. Smoking had been banned and the plane felt somewhat civilized, I sat in silence most of the journey and wondered just where had the years gone.

 

My baggage had been misplaced in Kennedy. I wasted a valuable hour searching for it in Dublin Airport, my mother’s hand was still warm when we got to the hospital.

 

I’ve returned home many times since then, and somewhere along the line I realized I’d finally disproved what the auld lad said. I’ve gone way beyond “neither here nor there.” My life is firmly set in New York City.

 

I still visit Wexford, Dublin, Belfast, Donegal, Galway, Dingle, and all the other places I’ve loved in Ireland, but New York is home.

 

I hope the auld lad found similar solace and meaning up in Pearl River, though I have a feeling his ghost still haunts The Archway along with so many other displaced souls.