The Irish American

The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” the writer William Faulkner said.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” the writer William Faulkner said.

I was peeling potatoes for dinner when blindly reaching into the plastic bag my fingers felt something soft, and then the smell hit me. I upended the bag and there was the rotten potato. No big deal really, in the scheme of things, but as I looked at the offending lumper, already infecting the other potatoes around it, I was filled with a kind of despair far beyond what the situation warranted.

I’ve always felt that there is such a thing as historic memory, that we can be affected by things unknown to us but that were experienced by someone of an earlier generation, so perhaps I was experiencing something of what my great-grandmother who lived through the Famine must have felt that summer of 1845 when the blight was first discovered.