Not Growing Up Irish

I’m not Irish.

I want to make that clear.

In fact, people tell me I look Italian or French, but in reality I’m not sure I look like anything. I’m a classic American mutt with a handy name for a hurleymaker.

I'd say, on a good day I'm 10-15%

At Indiana University I majored in bike racing. Honestly, that’s what I did. I rode my bike as much as I could and read in my spare time to earn an English degree. My love of the bicycle stems from watching a film called Breaking Away, a movie about bicycle racing set at the same University at which I attended. As a freshman I shaved my legs, took Italian, and put an Italy tricolor on the back of my car window. I listened to Puccini and Verdi—just like the kid in the movie. I loved everything about the bike, the dynamics of a race, rider against rider, rider against the elements, rider against the landscape. I loved training. I loved watching races on videos traded by riders in on the local scene. More than anything I loved the discipline and sacrifices of the rider. Cycling is very simple when it comes down to it. The one who can suffer the most will win.

At Indiana University, I was accepted to the Cultural Studies Program, where it was arranged that I would conduct my student teaching in Ireland. I’m not sure why I picked Ireland as I had no affinity to the place. I guess, more than anything I was lured to the island as it was home of my favorite cyclist, Sean Kelly. I had read a story about Kelly which had painted him as the workingman’s cyclist. A man who would drive half the night from race to race fully aware that he would be doing the same amount of driving if his lot in life would have found him a deliveryman rather than a professional cyclist. I was planning on taking the bike over and prayed that my job would be as close to Carrick on Sur as possible as I had heard Kelly enjoyed training alongside the locals on the hills around his town. But as the date for departure approached, I was dissuaded from hauling over a bike by someone who argued the weather would be too rough as I would be teaching in Ireland during the fall term.

To complete my cultural program at Indiana I studied with other students who were also assigned to teach in Ireland. We wrote reports on various aspects of Irish culture, from population to religion and wrote reports on our findings about economics and even wildlife. Additionally, I enrolled in the only Irish History course available, where we memorized the counties and provinces of Ireland, learned about Celtic religion and culture, Irish myths, the Celtic migration, the troubles and everything in between that the professor could truncate. During this course, I remember watching a video on Irish Sport and being dumbfounded by a man running forever down a pitch while balancing a ball on a stick. I wondered what that could be. 

  Nobody was more excited for me to go to Ireland than my friend Patrick McDonald. I met Patrick my senior year, just before I went off to Ireland. Patrick was a prankster, perennially in trouble for throwing things off the roof of his dorm, tying roadkill deer to the top of his friend’s car and driving it around campus, and general disorderly conduct. His grandparents were from County Donnegal and his parents had just built a house on the family’s property. He couldn’t get over the fact that I was preparing to do my student teaching in Ireland. He was genuinely more excited about my prospects there than I was. And I think he did more to set the tone for my travels than anyone else. It was more than drinking Guinness to Patrick, which was the one thing everyone said when I mentioned I was going to teach over there. Nobody ever said you’re going to love the kids. Just the beer.

 –You’re going to love going back there.

I scowled at him. Back there?

 –You know, back to Ireland.

--But  I’ve never been out of the country.

He shook his head. --But your name is Stephen Quigley. You’re Irish.

Perhaps it derived from the same romanticism that led me to shave my legs and sing arias on the bicycle, but this was the moment when I first realized that some part of me was Irish more than my name, and that I had an opportunity to go to Ireland for a prolonged period and figure out what that part was.