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J.P. Devine 11/23/2008

On Thanksgiving in 1940, at the end of the hard dirt road of the 1930s, Americans paid as much as 25 cents to see a new movie about people who had it a lot harder then they did. It was John Ford’s “The Grapes Of Wrath.”
Stick with me here; this is not a review.

“Grapes” was a big Henry Fonda movie all about the Joad family, hardscrabble American farmers in Oklahoma, who had just had their lives blown away in a great dust storm. So they all took off chasing a dream in California, being starved and beaten on the way. These were Americans at the bottom of the barrel. These were truly hard times..

Then there was Aunt Rosie, who wasn’t really my aunt. My father had sponsored her over from Ireland. Rosie built herself a little confectionery business down on Davis Street in St. Louis, where she raised money from immigrants and sent it to Ireland for the IRA. That was surely illegal, but this was Rosie who fed Irish whiskey to the First Precinct cops on Sunday mornings after Mass. Rosie and the cops are all dead, so that story is dead, too..

Rosie was a firebrand. I imagine if she had lived, she would have become a Weatherman, and maybe palled around with Bill Ayers. .

On that long-ago Thanksgiving, Rosie was at our table. A big argument about Franklin Roosevelt got started. Then two of my five brothers got into a fistfight about a girl named Carmen, whose father ran a cigar factory over on Michigan Avenue. My mother started crying because the ground had not even hardened on my father’s grave. So Rosie picked me up, and down to the Michigan movie house we went and saw “Grapes of Wrath.” .

All the way down, Rosie told me stories about how in Ireland during the great famine, the potatoes went bad, and people were eating grass without a turkey in sight and how, thanks to FDR, things here were going to get better..

Back at the house, things had gotten much better. My brothers had made up and were all kicking a soccer ball around in the alley with Emmett Finnegan and the Hagany brothers. My mother had stopped crying and was doing the dishes with my sisters. Peace..

When the boys all took off up the alley, they left the soccer ball in the corner of the yard. That night it snowed and covered the ball until spring..

But this was the Thanksgiving of 1941. Pearl Harbor came a couple of weeks later, and all of my brothers, my cousins, Emmett Finnegan and the Hagany brothers disappeared into the South Pacific, and not even the lights of a million trees could pierce the darkness..

When spring came, that ball was still out there by the alley. My mother said to leave it alone in case my brothers didn’t die and came back for it. She was a dark woman, my mother. I think I inherited that trait..

This Thanksgiving I think of Rosie and the grass eaters of County Cavan. I think of all the soccer balls in all the yards of America being left alone in case the boys and girls don’t die and they come home for them. I pray they will. Happy Thanksgiving, God bless President-elect Barack Obama, and God bless America. And to you Rosie, wherever you are. Up the rebels..


J.P. Devine is a freelance writer living in Waterville.

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