Souls Passing Through
Souls Passing Through
Billy Glidden
On Death, Parties and the Power of a Lasting Legacy
The first time my dad told me about Honker Dowd, we were riding together in the car, headed somewhere I can’t remember—probably wearing matching Notre Dame hats. Dad and I were always headed somewhere, whether it was the half-hour trek to my fancy private middle school every morning, or else running various errands across western Massachusetts.
As the story goes, my dad met Honker Dowd on the way to elementary school at age seven. They were both students at St. Jerome’s in Holyoke, Massachusetts—one of several Catholic schools in the town, the one where the Irish kids went. My young dad emerged from the apartment block where he lived with his five siblings and spotted an especially dapper young boy, dressed in immaculate suit and tie, making his way down the street, in my dad’s direction.
“Hello!” the boy said. “I’m Henry P. Dowd. What’s your name?”
Thus began one of the most important friendships of my father’s life. I can still remember how my dad sounded when, there in the car, he imitated his friend’s boyhood greeting: “I’m Henry P. Dowd!” His eyes shone, his voice brimming with love. I was just a kid then, but I’ve been thinking about Honker Dowd ever since.
*
I never thought to ask my dad where the nickname “Honker” came from. But that’s still the name he’s known by. He died on August 1, 1981, at the age of forty-five, eleven years before I was born. But you had to hear my dad talk about his friends, especially his closest friends, the ones from childhood. They were the whole world. Their stories were the stories of the universe, echoing through eternity.
The more time passes, the more these stories recede. My dad’s been gone for over a decade now. Almost every day, I think of something I want to ask him. I want to walk up the stairs of my childhood home and find him in bed, clicker in hand, a John Wayne movie on the TV. I want to sit on the bed’s edge and ask him about his old gang, the guys who played ball on Avery Field and the girls who watched.
And I want to hear again about Honker: how he was both the toughest and the kindest man who ever walked the earth, possessed of an otherworldly ability to put my temperamental father at ease; how he never had a drink in his life, having taken a Catholic pledge in childhood; how he had to bury three of his children before they grew; how his lifelong dream was to visit Ireland, from whence his ancestors had come.
Honker was descended from some of the millions of Irish who fled a famine and started new lives in the United States. In Holyoke, even today, Ireland is a big deal. Every St. Patrick’s Day, thousands of friends and family come to town, and we listen to Irish folk ballads with tears in our eyes. Perhaps Honker wanted to see Ireland so badly because he wanted to see for himself where all this – and his own story – began. Perhaps he felt drawn back to the source of things, hoping to recover the beauty of the past and to know he was at home in the world. “We must fly to our beloved homeland,” wrote St. Augustine. “There the Father is, and there is everything.”
*
In middle age, my dad co-owned a Holyoke establishment called The Locker Room, where Honker tended bar part-time. My mom remembers Honker, too, from before she knew my dad all that well. She’d just returned from studying abroad in Ireland, and she’d sit at the bar with Honker as he flipped through the latest copy of Ireland magazine. On any given night, that’s where you’d see Honker, and that’s what he’d be doing. And there would be Irish music in the air, too, sometimes live – local heroes, Butch and Maeve, performed there frequently – and sometimes on tapes of Paddy Reilly or The Chieftains. Honker’s favorite song was “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland.”
For Honker’s birthday one year, my dad got some friends together to throw him a surprise party. They had a plan: At the end of the party, my dad would present Honker with two plane tickets to Ireland – one for Honker and one for his mother.
The party was held on what attendees still remember as a blistering summer night, and The Locker Room was packed. Honker’s mother and wife and sisters were all there. Honker carried his little girl around, beaming.
When the big moment arrived, Butch and Maeve stopped playing, and my dad stepped onto the stage. He took the microphone in his hand and called on Honker to come get his birthday present. The year was 1981, and the Troubles were raging in Ireland. Several members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army had already died that year of hunger strikes while imprisoned. Ireland, as Auden had written years before, still had her madness. It was where Honker dreamed of going, and now, at last, he would go. He took the tickets in his hand and looked out at all the friends who’d gathered to witness this exact moment. Then he collapsed at my father’s feet, where he died.
A headline in the Holyoke Transcript Telegram that week read: “Henry P. Dowd; 45; stricken at party.” The family requested that donations be made to the Northern Irish Aid. At his funeral, Honker’s friends, many of whom had been at the birthday party, wore buttons that read, in caps: HIS SOUL PASSED THROUGH IRELAND. The letters were all green, except for the H, P, and the D, which were orange: HPD, for Henry Patrick Dowd. At the end, someone sang his song, about a soul passing through old Ireland.
*
Sometimes I feel that there’s a sorrow at the heart of things that can never be relieved. We can try to ignore it. We can divert ourselves from it. But it’s still always there, this lurking awareness that our lives will remain unfinished symphonies, our hopes for ourselves left unrealized. What was Ireland for Honker? When he read his magazines and let himself imagine how Ireland’s green fields might look in real life, did he feel his heart expand? Did he feel that once he’d made it there his whole life would cohere, all his striving and suffering made meaningful? Perhaps he felt sorrow, pondering it all.
I recently went up to the attic of my childhood home to look for that HPD button, which my mom assured me was up there somewhere. I brought my phone and Bluetooth speaker with me so I could listen to Honker’s song for the first time. It turns out the song is about an Irish rebel dying in a British prison, and he’s asking a priest if his soul will be permitted to return to Ireland upon his death. “Tell me this, ere I die/Shall my soul pass through Ireland?” In a wardrobe, tucked among funeral cards and yearbooks, I found the button.
Standing there holding it, the song playing on repeat, I thought about my dad and the years he saw that Honker never got to see. As far as I know, my dad harbored no lifelong dreams of visiting Ireland—because, in my dad’s mind, why would anyone want to be anywhere but Holyoke?—but he visited Ireland nonetheless, with my mom and me. He got to see it. And he got to see much more than that: his oldest daughter’s wedding, the birth of grandchildren, presidential elections that left him in varying states of rage and elation. He saw other friends die, too. One by one they started dropping. And then he got sick, diagnosed with an incurable lung disease that suffocated him.
As my dad’s health deteriorated, his friends decided that it was his turn for a big party—one to recognize his years of friendship and service to his hometown, and particularly, to the local Boys and Girls Club. As the day of his party approached, hundreds of people bought tickets, a fact that touched my dad deeply. The night before the party, he was in the hospital, in Boston, with plans of returning the next morning. He was working on a speech. I was back home in Holyoke, eighteen years old, and I was working on my own speech: what I hoped would be a soaring tribute to my old man. Around midnight, I awoke to the touch of my uncle’s hand in my hair. He handed me a phone, and in my half-asleep state I heard my mom’s voice say, “Bill, we lost the battle.” So my old man missed his party.
*
Once in a while, I think of the Bob Dylan line— “I am hanging in the balance/Of a perfect finished plan” – and know it’s true. Other times, I’m less sure. I do know that the day after my dad died, I was admitted to Williams College. I do know that had I not gone to Williams, there’s a lot I would’ve missed. For one, I wouldn’t have met Henry Patrick Megley (known as “Pat”), who lived across the hall from me during freshman year, and whom I lived with in each succeeding year of college. (How my dad would’ve loved that I, too, had a beloved Henry P. in my life.) I was at Pat’s wedding this past summer, and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed. Picture a collection of your favorite people all outdoors, surrounded by Vermont hills, shimmying to “Dancing in the Dark” as the sun goes down. Had I not gone to Williams, I would’ve missed that. I shudder at the thought.
Do such moments of beauty make up for everything that we lose? Can they? Better, I think, not to offer such defenses. I hope, rather, that such moments are a glimpse of the eternal—a glimpse of a reality in which Honker sees Ireland, and my dad enjoys his party, and your best friend never dies, and you never hurt your wife that way, and your dog is still in the yard, and every tear is wiped away, and all is made new. Such a reality would be one that death and evil could not enter. On good days, I know that that’s the source of my hope, the wisdom of resurrection etched across my heart. Like the hymn says, “I don’t want to get adjusted to this world.”
A nun I know, upon hearing some of my complaints about all the sadness on this side of eternity, once said, “I agree that there’s a lot of sh— in this life. But I believe in a God who can turn sh— into flowers.”
The way Honker’s life has reverberated through time to land here with me, on my heart, shaking me out of my miserable routines and my unwillingness to notice the beauty around me—perhaps that’s a flower. The way my dad’s love for him revealed to me the beauty of lifelong, devoted friendship? Perhaps that’s one, too. The fact that I can sit here and write these words and know that it’s a gift that I get to do so? The ability to look back on my life and see how all of it, good and bad, somehow fits? Flowers, flowers. Still, a sense of fairness prevents me from making too much of this. I don’t know.
But I do know that on the last day of my father’s life, he was in the hospital, and he was getting ready for his party. He was seventy-one years old, and he was working on a speech. I wasn’t there. But my mom tells me that he looked across the room, toward the door, and said, “Honker’s here.”
Billy Glidden
Writer
Billy has been published in Cutleaf
Photography by Patrick Metzdorf