Last month, we went to Ireland.

Most of us McQuittys were able to get ourselves over to the motherland for a couple of weeks to reconnect with the OG McQuittys who still live in Portrush and Carrickfergus on the northern coast. We also traveled south to see Galway, Dingle, Killarney, Dublin, and to kiss the Blarney Stone. There were eleven of us in our merry traveling band. (This band was also sometimes hangry).

In 1948, my grandfather Papa Eric immigrated to the States with his parents, his two brothers Jimmy and Andy, and his sister Margaret. They came across on the Queen Mary with big suitcases, I guess, and not much else. After a difficult time in Rochester, the family returned. There were many issues. It was hard to find work, my great-grandmother was extremely homesick, and my Uncle Jimmy missed his beloved Pearlie back in Ireland and wanted to marry her. So, they all sailed home, except for Papa Eric, who wanted to stay. He had come to a personal faith in Jesus, and family lore has it he felt called to stay, though I can imagine all kinds of other adventurous reasons an 18-year-old kid might want to launch out in a new life and country of his own.

Papa Eric put himself through college, where he met my American grandmother, Dottie. He went to seminary and spent the rest of his life as a Presbyterian minister, even into his final years when only four little old ladies would come to their home for his preaching on Sunday mornings. Well into their seventies, Grandma Dottie typed up his sermons, and Papa Eric would read them just as fulsomely from his dining room table as he did when he had a big pulpit. He died never having lived in Ireland again.

Papa Eric grew up in Carrickfergus, an ancient Irish coastal town that has its very own castle built by a Norman king in 1177. The castle overlooks the bay where Papa Eric almost died in the current as a boy. When we arrived, I parked our rental Kia right next to its grey stone wall. It struck me that many assailants had met terrible deaths here centuries ago. Sometimes it’s clear to me that I am an orchid and would have never survived in other times and places.

Across the street and down a few blocks is St. Nicholas’ Church. It was built by the same showoffy king who built the castle, and my grandfather was christened there. You can still see the sword marks in the doorway where bored soldiers would sharpen their weapons. A knight never knew when Viking marauders might land ashore during communion. A hop, skip and a jump ahead a few hundred years, and my great-grandparents are saying their vows under the same arched ceiling. Fast-forward again and the great-grand-McQuittys are now christening their boy Eric in the stone baptismal. Speed ahead from that scene multiple decades, and my own teenagers are now taking turns sitting in the 17th century rector chairs that flank the altar and taking selfies with their iPhones.

I wrote in June about my other grandparents — Homer and Caroleen – and how their home was always been a place of beauty, welcome and belonging, and continues to be (strangely), even though it’s been dismantled and sold. The legacy of my McQuitty grandparents — Eric and Dottie — holds a similar emotional weight, except the home they represented was more of a homeland, a historical place, where you can locate your lineage and know you’re a product of it. And the effect of this is knowing you are also part of real history in general, a solid pebble sitting there as the current of time washes over you and moves beyond you. You’re there in a traceable continuum. You hold a real place like those before you.

I don’t know why this is so grounding for me. It’s both affirming and yet belittling, in the best sense of that word. I look up at stone walls that have existed for almost a millennium and it occurs to me this wall will outlive me just as it outlived twenty generations of my family before. It seems our natural American impulse is to see our youthful history as mostly just a lead-up to our own entrance stage right. We adopt this myopia on a personal level too, fretting mostly about how I, the heroine, will achieve my happily ever after in this world that is my stage.

But if you’re aware of your people in longtime history — and know some of their stories — you are hit in the face with your small, pebble nature. Those generations endured war, famine, plagues, and lost children. They fell into terrible trouble, pettiness, and misbehavior. Horror of horrors, some even ended up completely ordinary and anonymous. But some of them had many victories and quiet heroisms: the long lives, the good marriages, the harrowing births, the generosity and faithfulness through charity or vocation, the delicious recipes handed down. Old places and the people who lived there convey complicated, anchoring stories. When we know them, we realize we ourselves have as much of a chance of becoming a villain as a hero in our own, or something in the knotty middle. Ultimately, we realize the whole drama isn’t about us at all. This is an inheritance of humility, and I think that’s how I would characterize what my McQuitty grandparents bequeathed to us — if we have the courage to be instructed by it.

The truth is, Papa Eric and Grandma Dottie’s house in Shreveport, LA was nothing to write home about. They never had a lot of money or worldly prestige. Their home was dark and a bit small, and as kids we felt like there was nothing to do. The sunroom porch smelled like the German Shepherd and the damp mounds of pine needles in the yard were hard to run around on. But the aroma of Grandma Dottie’s turkey soup wafting through it all was consolation, and so were Papa Eric’s stories. He painted such lucid pictures of midnight dance halls in Carrickfergus, where he’d smoke cigarettes outside and pick fights with other guys. Sometimes when you saw a flash of his eyes, you somehow knew he was at one time a wonderful dancer and terrible flirt. All this led to bloody noses. Even as a minister and preacher of the gospel, he maintained an odd, dignified pride in his rather sketchy past. “I’d punch him and he’d bleed like a stuck pig,” he’d preen in his Irish brogue, recounting a memorable fist fight. We laughed and asked him to tell the story again. A golden cross always dangled from the chain around his neck.

When you’re rolling into Carrickfergus in your rental car with hungry kids in the back, and your nerves are frayed from driving on the wrong side of the road and you’re stuffing down outsize anger at your spouse for eating the last potato chip, you can still feel a pure surge of delight. I promise this is true. The sudden change in emotional elevation doesn’t feel incongruous at all. It feels very human, quantum-leaping from embarrassing rage to sudden joy. What a welcome sight, that castle, rising in the distance! Do you see it? Look, there it is!

I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last person to see its walls.

Drew and Maddie in front of Carrickfergus Castle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie K. Rhodes the author of the newest book, Chronic Grace, lives in Fort Worth, TX, with her husband Gordon and two teenage kids Drew and Maddie, plus pug Eloise ("The Eyeballs."). She performs regularly on stages all over Dallas-Fort Worth area and has multiple film and commercial credits.

You may also contact Julie at Leadership Speakers Bureau to schedule her for speaking or leadership engagements.