My Dad was Mattie, the youngest boy in a family of five siblings, he left school at 12 years of age, so had little education but he was (and hence we were) one of those fortunate ones who picked up more than his fair share of “country smarts,” the good doses of common sense.
He was an engaging type, hence built a wide network, and thus picked up dozens and dozens of expressions along the way – and as kids we too came to purloin them, almost by a process of osmosis via everyday usage
- Never fret for the day you’ll never see…
- To hell with poverty – throw another pea in the soup…
- The way you rear your pup is the way you’ll have your dog
- Why feed a dog if you have to bark yourself…
- Keep on saying nothing… and after a while say nothing again…
- It’s not a graveyard – we’ll get out of it…
- A little spot dirties a clean shirt… (very easy to soil a hard-built reputation)
- If you don’t fly with the crows you won’t get shot…
- Call me anything you like – except early in the morning…
- A good man is never late
- Here comes Methuselah… (when he would bump into somebody he hadn’t seen in ages)
His location was rather rural – in the NW corner of County Meath, within a stones-throw of counties Cavan and Westmeath, and not far from Longford – in the old days, and as described in the books that predated the Land Registry records, the bunch of fields in that tight neck-of-the-woods was called Clondervish and was described as being located “in the townland of Milltown in the Barony of Fore”… which is how they were designated back then, but today would more simply be known as Milltown/Oldcastle…no need for a zip code!
My father died on the night of March 27, 1997. Shortly after he passed we went out to the back yard because that was the night that the comet Hale-Bopp was passing over Ireland… and we reckoned he was riding the tail. Hale-Bopp is predicted by the scientists to return in the year 4380 (taking a bit longer than Haley’s Comet which was over Ireland in 1986 and will be back in 2061)…but in either event we will be keeping an eye out for him.