Merzy Doats and Tom Toms

Merzy Doats and Tom Toms

I have been admonished by faithful blog reader Lonnie to dispense with the blogging while on a family vacation and focus instead on my family. I take all blog comments to heart and always try to be a better man, but on this one I must disagree. Do you remember that scene in A Few Good Men when Tom Cruise has Colonel Jack Nicholson of Guantanamo Bay on the witness stand and Jack says, “You can’t handle the truth!” Well, my retort to Lonnie is something like, “They can’t handle full-bore Dad!”

Yesterday we drove to Killarney and I drove the sweeper van with two grandgerms Charlie and Evie strapped into six-point restraint systems that would have made the NASA Apollo Program proud. And we can’t understand why they get prone to car-sickness? Maybe its the long and winding road along the Ring of Kerry, as we headed towards the Kennedy Pet Farm. In order to avert another demonic chanting session of “Petting Zoo, Petting Zoo, Petting Zoo…” sung to the tune of “Attica, Attica, Attica…” (from Dog Day Afternoon as voiced by Al Pacino), I chose to teach the girls that old ditty, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey, A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?” I find that kids (in this case children-type kids) do best with repetition. It’s an old Army thing, tell them once, tell them twice and then tell them a third time.

I chose to break it down intermittently with a song they knew as well as any set of little girls around the world, the The Sound of Music refrain, Do-Re-Mi. After all, while there are no mares involved, there are does and dees. So, “Mares eat oats” and “Does eat oats” turns into “Little lambs eat ivy.” The ending refrain of “A kid will eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?” is all blended into the sing-songy “Merzy Doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey, A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?”. Now say that and sing that 100 times in part and in whole and make the entire car go nutty over the song. And what do you get? A pretty cranky carful of kids and adults with a silly tune stuck in their head sideways. That, my friends, is what an over-focused Dad will do when forced by dint of travel arrangements to be stuck in a car with no radio and a long and winding road.

Normally this Dad would be on these sorts of roads on a BMW motorcycle. That way, should the Merzy Doats come to mind, it stays rattling around in the helmet until the rider himself goes a bit nutty over it. It never has to leave the helmet at all if you keep the Bluetooth devices disconnected.

It’s amazing what 90 minutes at a petting zoo with gerbils, rabbits, goats, sheep, calves, puppies, chickens, baby chicks and even a few small ponies can do to the disposition of little girls. Four cups of generic food (Purina All-Breed Chow?) that is strangely blended to appeal to all species (even Dads), is just enough to get through such a session and with a chaser of Purell, all is once again well with the world. While the shopaholics are off in Killarney getting their fix and the Athlete’s are off walking the lake trails in every direction (mostly the wrong direction it seems), we have fixed the petting zoo fixation and are ready for our next adventure. The Muckross House and Gardens are the sort of place families of all ages come to while away a rare sunny day in County Kerry. The cafeteria is upscale and the selection abundant enough to satisfy all, including giving Sister Candice her daily ration of lamb stew, bless the Lord.

My one true Irish accoutrement is my son, Thomas Stuart. He lived his entire life as a begosh and bygolly Thomas from the Emerald Isles. His mother’s maiden name of O’Connor left her to contend with the confusion of being thought a star of All in the Family with Carroll O’Connor, but she was nothing if not of Celtic origin. He has been known to the family as Thomas from the earliest age. The family imprinted on that name given all the cries of “Thomas, stop that!” which arose form his early days antics as a hell-raiser of a child, whose preferences tended towards green or yellow spiked hair and a sleeveless, toughy tee shirt in his attempts to emulate his country mouse cousins Pete and Anthony. The Celtic blood flowed through his veins and could be seen in his fiery eyes.

In most young lads, the coming of puberty is a moment when the testosterone rises and the hellishness increases proportionately. But being his mother’s son meant somehow that the introduction of male hormones soothed the wild beast within him. He went through high school attending the Uber-liberal West Village Elizabeth Erwin School, the affiliated high school to his own Little Red Schoolhouse on Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street. I’m not certain, but I think the U.S. headquarters of the Irish Republican Army is located not too far from those schools. He attended school with such notables as Harry, son of Arrowsmith lead guitarist, Atlas, son of Wegman of Weimaraner fame, and Gabe, son of My Left Foot’s Daniel Day Lewis (Last of the Mohicans and There Will Be Blood being his other, less-Irish works). He played the drums in a band with the perfect adolescent venues of The Bitter End and 54 Below. At that stage, he alternated between Thomas at home and Tom about town.

By the time college rolled around, Thomas was left behind at Little Red and Tom proceeded into the world at large. The family still calls him Thomas by habit, but as he joins on family trips with his fair lass, Jenna, he turns into more of a Tom, which is the only name she knows for him. I imagine that as time goes by and he misbehaves (those spiked hair Celtic genes are still in there somewhere, one must surmise). Tom is genteel and polite, soft-spoken to a fault. But with country mice cousins Pete and Anthony in the mix, how far behind can Thomas and his toughy shirt really be? We can already see him climbing rocks behind the more athletic Pete and Anthony (as he was always want to do), so the Tom Toms beat loudly for Thomas’s temporary return.

We exit Killarney by way of Molls Gap, past Torc Waterfall and on the Muckross Trail out of the ass-end of Killarney. Between the chanting of “Petting Zoo, petting zoo” and the Tom Toms in the air, I predict great things for the rest of the week.