The blessing of the graves at my dad’s final resting place almost always takes place on Father’s Day.
Since he died, I no longer engage in the annual made-up day and the purchase of a pair of Marks & Spencer slippers with a card showing the accoutrements of the sedate pastime of fishing.
However, the cemetery Mass means that it has sometimes been difficult to let the occasion pass unmarked.
Seventeen years into membership of the Dead Dad Club, I feel like he would give me a pass to miss it, even if I have become somewhat sentimental about catching every seventh word from the priest’s crackly microphone and witnessing harassed parents trying to stop toddlers from stomping over graves.
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For several of those cemetery Father’s Days we went to the Johnstown Inn for food afterwards. It’s where we went the day of his funeral too. It’s where we’ve gone for so many family occasions. The Johnstown Inn closed a few years ago and was mentioned in these pages recently along with the news that Johnstown – a village off the N7 between Kill and Naas – is losing its only shop.
[ Emer McLysaght: I’m absolutely furious at my dad for going and dyingOpens in new window ]
If you’ve ever travelled up or down the N7 near Naas you’ll probably know two landmarks: the Perpetual Motion sculpture, aka the “big Naas ball”, and Johnstown Garden Centre. The latter is a mecca of shrubs, seasonal decorations, flowerpots, raincoats, gifts and everything in between. It’s off the N7, separated from the village of Johnstown by six lanes of traffic. Once upon a time, though, the garden centre was on the village side on a much smaller plot.
As a child growing up nearby it was a popular destination for a Saturday afternoon out. One of the big draws was the pet section. The old garden centre had a selection of hamsters, rabbits, maybe the odd puppy or kitten, but the real magic lay in the tropical fish tanks. In my childish memory there was an acre of rectangular tanks, kept in semi-darkness but each with its own ethereal glow. I would go from tank to tank, reading the names of the fish, marvelling at the ones with protuberances or bright colours.
Part of the reason the garden centre moved across the N7 was because of flooding. One particularly bad flood in the 1990s destroyed the fish section. I remember asking my dad if any of the guppies or neon tetras might survive being swept out with the floodwaters and he diplomatically said, “They might”. I knew he was lying to save my worries because he kept a fairly large tank of those very tropical fish in the hall in our own house and I knew they needed water of a certain temperature to survive.
On one of these journeys my socked foot squished down on something
Dad’s own tropical fish also met an untimely end, and I’m sad to say it was at my hand. My parents were out for an afternoon, and I decided to surprise Dad with a clean tank when he got home. He routinely changed out the water, washed the stones, scrubbed the inside of the glass and replaced filters. I had watched him enough times to assume I could do the same. I planned to have the whole enterprise finished by the time they got home. I think I was about 11 at the time.
[ Emer McLysaght: I did a DNA test and guess what? I’m as Irish as a bog bodyOpens in new window ]
What they walked into was nothing short of carnage. I had netted the fish out and placed them in a saucepan full of their old tank water, so they wouldn’t die of shock at a temperature change. I set about removing the stones and plants to wash them and quickly realised that everything my Dad did with these fish and this tank, he made look easy. I was a disaster, sloshing water everywhere as I carried jugs of it back and forth, gagging at the smell of the exposed algae. On one of these journeys my socked foot squished down on something. Horror of horrors, it was a fish. Displeased with their temporary saucepan home, they had started jumping out in a bid for freedom. My parents returned to a sodden tropical fish graveyard but in fairness to my dad, he kept any anger at bay. I had just been trying to help.
If he was still around for this Father’s Day I might gift him a few things to restart his tropical fish collection, and we’d console ourselves with the news that the Johnstown Inn might be reopening by the end of the year. We might even go to the garden centre for a few bits. I might go anyway, for old times’ sake.
