Poppy

Poppy used to listen to the airwaves on the back porch overlooking the meadow behind his house. When Mike tells me this I wonder if Poppy listened and missed Ireland?

This is the same meadow where his grandchildren, Mike and Karen, ran wild during the summer. The same meadow where Mike pelted rocks at bulldozers flattening the land for ensuing condo units. The same condo units that Mike would eventually live in, his driveway looking out at Poppy’s back porch. Except Poppy doesn’t live there any more. How, terribly sad.

Now, I live with Mike. How lovely.

I wish I could have known Poppy. He was born Patrick Kernaghan in 1942. He came to America from Ireland and worked in a factory. The Catholic Church next to his house told him they needed to demolish it for a new church. They gave him a house aside the church and a job as the custodian. Now there is a hall in the church named Kernaghan Hall. Does he know this?

But, Poppy used to listen to the airwaves. And now we listen, channeling Poppy’s spirit, echoes and memories and words and tunes and stories transmitted through to us. In our kitchen! It sits prominently in the very center of our house, occupying the ledge that separates the kitchen and the living room. Gracefully old, weathered and worn, loved. It defines ritual in the Thornton household - Saturday morning , 10 AM. Coffee (made just the way we like it), orange juice, a variation on Mike’s ever-evolving breakfast eggs, and NPR filtering out over the waves circa this 1950’s masterpiece. Amidst the hustle and the bustle, we sit and sip and listen and sigh together. Quiet moments, the moments that make up "us". Heaven on Earth.

Poppy would have liked this ritual.