Meeting with influencers who will never appear on Tik Tok

Let the Busy World be Hushed

Fr Jason Murphy

‘Arragh Father, it’s well I met you, is there any chance you might be able to have a word with that young lad of ours to get him to go to Mass, he’s the best in the world and he’d do anything you’d ask him but it’d be an odious ease to me if he’d only go to Mass.

‘It’s not that he doesn’t believe, he’ll bless himself leaving the house, he’ll ask me to light a candle but he’s always too busy; driving tractors and diggers and the divil knows what and if he’s not at that he’s below with Mel Brady in the Stores and God knows it’s not his prayers that yon lad is teaching him’.

And as we stood there in the queue to sympathise outside the wake house in Mullahoran, I couldn’t help but smile as I assured Mrs McCabe as I had done before that I’d have a word in the ear of her grandson knowing all too well that he’d smile and say ‘Ah that’ll do, she has me heart broke about going to Mass, sure didn’t I do me bit digging up the floor for Fr. Gabriel at the doing up of the chapel and sure didn’t me mother get the toilet bowl sponsored for them within in Tractamotors’.

In fact he went on to tell that his Granny had stopped talking to him for the whole of a fortnight when he’d come in to take the tea in the morning but he passed no remarks and sat there recounting the news of the day he had heard over the counter to give her something to tell a neighbour woman that came a ceili of a Tuesday as he ate the scrambled egg without any response before heading back to meet the needs of his customers. He began working part time in Carrigan stores when he was just a 6th class pupil in Bruskey national school.

He had gone down to Mel to ask him if he had any jobs that needed doing during Lockdown when the schools were closed for weeks on end and there began a love affair with this country store and the characters that entered therein as he swept the yard and gathered up fertilizer bags after emptying them into the spreader.

For the years that were to come, the antics that took place on the stage that was the shop floor fornent the counter, regaled his mates and the secretaries at school as he leaned against the office window in his passing and told of the ordinary men and women that entered in.

For as in the few country stores and co-ops across the county that remain open, Carrigan Stores is one of those last remaining bastions of ordinary life where everyday people can enter in just as they are, no need for makeup or rouge, the fashion of the day being a string of baling twine around your waist and a jacket shredded from ducking time and time again under barbed wire, running after sheep. The eau de toilette is the track of cow dung on your boots that sends its sweet aroma wafting through the air that meets you as you enter through the door.

Men who still ask for a hundred of calf nuts to confuse a young lad who can see only 20kg bags stacked around, who pull up outside with the engine still running and the elbow out the window and the hand resting on the steering wheel who shout at the top of their voice ‘to come on quick with some of that ‘tit dip’ as I’m hurrying to do the milking’.

It’s here where old men, in for a Cully’s batch loaf and three packets of vegetable soup, can stop and talk over the news of the day, perhaps not seeing another living soul until they call on their way tomorrow or likewise the bachelor who calls for one fence post and five euros of diesel so that he has an excuse to call for a chat the next day and the days of the week that follow. Here beneath its galvanised roof countrymen can meet in the midst of mowing for a 99 when they can no longer gather above in Buddy’s for a rum and black at the end of the day to follow with a medium of Guinness.

Indeed it’s an odious place for a young lad to serve his time meeting with influencers who will never appear on Tik Tok or Instagram. Mixing with men who say that only the best beef nuts will do, stacked without in the yard, for the best beef cattle in the Parish or the man who looks for a different brand of nuts each time he calls ‘for you wouldn’t put up with the same thing yourself each day when it comes to eat your dinner’, so fond he is of his cattle.

There are lessons learned here in the midst of men that won’t be learned in college, lessons in living and listening to yarns that are told that will shape the life of this young lad forever.

So I don’t worry now that he doesn’t go to Mass for I’m sure he will in the future, for I know he’s learned from the best of the best on the shop floor of Carrigan Stores below in the heart of Bruskey.