My Dad passed away 24 year's ago tomorrow, the 16th of October. I knelt in mass this morning at 9am looking around me for calm and inspiration. Knelt in the same pew with my brother as my Dad would have.
I tried to get into my father's head, wondering what he would have been wondering at early mass long before that blondie-haired Joe arrived. Was he like me? Thinking of the race ahead? Thinking of what he had to do? Would his bag be packed up in Cross Lane, ready for the great escape? Wondering was he too, constantly worried as I am these days? Did a darkened church clear his head occasionally but not always too?
I know he worked himself into a box. From the poor diet of the war years through long, wet and cold incessant days on the buildings, stress, and never the pay he deserved for the hardship endured. I know I don't share his work ethic or morals but I did inherit his ready smile and compunction to see the good in others. I surely don't share his engine either. Maybe I have his need to exceed and compete but only in sporting terms. He, like me, couldn't sit still much.
And in that pew this morning I looked up to see the gilt-edged frames of yesteryear containing the stations of the cross. Right beside my seat was 'Jesus is stripped of his garments'. I was instantly snapped back seventy years to the corner of a sloppy field in Kilinieran in north Wexford. My Dad, then a pigeon-chested young athlete was stripping off his cross-country kit in exchange for dry gear in order to take on the long cycle home. No cars, no cash, no regrets. And he was smiling and joking with my uncle Mick and the gang. And I was sucked back into mass and he was gone again.
Until I pulled on my skinsuit 45 minutes later in a parking lot in Oylegate.
I'm not pigeon-chested or ever been Leinster champion but I still smiled and shook hands with all those I care for. I belonged. I didn't shed a tear at the coincidence until I was warming up on the road towards Wexford. I cycled. I looked at the ploughed furrows in countless fields and felt, definitely felt the season and the reason and tick-tick-ticked to the make-shift start-line and laughed with the time-keeper.
And for the first time in a very long time...I time-trialled fast and well. I didn't win. Not close. But I became my old self for the ten minutes it took me to cover five miles. I didn't panic. I started easy and opened the taps one kilometre in. Never changed position and rarely changed gear. I was alone and switched on. My heart was free and functioning, my blood warm and flowing but in someway stone cold, for I felt like bending the bike under me. My grimace was a smile when I glimpsed my gold chain, a beautiful blur.
I know how my Dad must have felt when he won alone [and that was often]. Kill it, drive it, push, push, push until you are away from all the pain and stress and carnage that life hurls. You cast open your vestments and bare your chest to life and God and the elements and know you are free...absolved from it all.
If only for a moment in time.
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