An Irish Woman – 2-18-13
How can I know about these other people living in Lowell? I don’t go to their churches or schools, and I never get invited to a dinner at their house? Sure, I do run into them – Irish, Greek, Jew and Yankee – when I take the Lilly Avenue bus to shop downtown on Saturday, usually. But, we never talk except, maybe, for Mom’s asking to see another size in a blouse or, perhaps, the same jacket but in a different color. To me, they are only shoppers for and sellers of clothes, sandwiches, frappes and winter oil seasonally pumped into our 55-gallon tank located in the basement of our tenement. These foreigners must also have homes, families and bills to pay, and, yet, they remain complete strangers to us in Little Canada and in Centralville. This is all very strange and a bit bizarre.
Mostly, I learn about these strange others through stories that my parents and relatives have gathered over their lives working in the textile mills or at North End Dairy, but, mostly while doing their weekly shopping and errands downtown at the Bon Marche, Pollard’s and also at the Five-and-Ten-Cent stores on Merrimack Street.
My mother’s voice rings out in my brain as I try to recapture these tales of long ago. Of course, all is in French.
“Une femme irlandaise, ça, c’est souvent une femme qui ne sait pas bien faire la cuisine. C’est souvent très malpropre chez elle. Les irlandaises, elles, sont sales. Elles ne semblent pas savoir faire un bon ménage.”
If I were asked to translate this comment for my non-French-speaking friends, it might come out like this:
“An Irish woman is often a woman, who does not know how to cook well. Often, her place is dirty. Irish women are unclean. It seems that they don’t know how to keep a clean house.”
Since I, myself, don’t know any Irish women, I can only assume that these comments are true, but, sometimes, I wonder how such a tale could be true. Of course, there are other stories overheard at the dinner table and on the side porch along Dana Street that also shock me a little, but these are reserved for later.