Second Section (Mother and Father) Flashcards
PART 1. “Innis is Gaelic for island” I told Alana. “I wanted to…
“Innis is Gaelic for island” I told Alana. “I wanted to connect you and your sisters to a chain of tradition that linked back to my homeland of Cape Breton. It was my way of retaining the custom of having someone associated with the sea, similarly to my mother’s people”.
Was that my real reason for calling the girls ‘Innis’ I wondered? Maybe. My brothers and sisters were all born at Cape Breton but my three girls Ellie, Alana and Alex were born at Harwich Port Massachusetts.
PART 2.. Looking over the Atlantic Coast, Harwich Port is almost a ….
Looking over the Atlantic Coast, Harwich Port is almost a thousand miles from the bitter windswept island of Cape Breton. No one at Harwich Port had to carve out their existence as a fisherman or give up their dreams to sustain a family of such large proportions.
Not like my father who yearned for a life both physically and spiritually, taken from the imaginative stories in his books away from the sea
PART 3. As children, we called our father by the Gaelic ‘Dadai’, which was the…
As children, we called our father by the Gaelic translation ‘Dadai’, which was the informal way of speaking to him while he was in his room, lying on his bed, and smoking handmade cigarettes that made the house smell like a overheated car engine.
No one called our mother anything but the more formal ‘Mathair’ because we were all scared of her as she would look at us with her dark and fearless eyes.
PART 4. I remember clearly when she slapped my sister so hard ….
I remember clearly when she slapped my sister so hard that she had left the glowing red hand print upon her cheek for days simply because she was reading one of ‘Dadai’s’ poems. We all knew it was difficult to defy our ‘Mathair’ but the call of reading books outweighed our restlessness.
