Free Why We Suck by Denis Leary Page B

the fields. He was a farmer. Feeding his eight or ten or whatever number of kids he had. He probably didn't even remember how many kids he had. I can't even remember how many aunts and uncles I have on my mom's side of the family. I'm amazed that she can. They grew up in a world where death, disease and destruction lay in wait around almost every single corner. And they only had about five corners-down in the village. Once you got onto the road out of the tiny town-they didn't even have corners. Just long and winding dirt roads with ditches or turf bogs on either side. Trees? Hah. Trees were for pussies.
        There was nothing except the dark wet sky and the cold hard ground and an assortment of atrocities in between as you headed the seven miles back to the farm. How any of them survived is a mystery to me.
        My mom once brought a box of ancient black-and-white photos from Ireland in the 1930s and '40s-when she was growing up-over to our house in Connecticut and flipped through them in front of my wife Ann and me-telling us what eventually happened to each person pictured. It went something like this:
        
        FLIP: That's Mary Aberdeen from the Aberdeens two farms away. She got kicked in the head by a horse when we were ten. Died right there on the spot.
        FLIP: This is Fiona Something Or Other. She got this fever and was never the same. She became like retarded almost. Then she fell into a fireplace when we were fifteen.
        FLIP: This guy here was lost in the ocean. It just swallowed him up one night. He was walking along the beach just minding his own business and-then he was gone.
        FLIP: This would be my second or third cousin-she was a Burke I think-and she got what they would call multiple sclerosis now or whatever Jerry Lewis is always on about with those kids and she got married and had some kids of her own and then she was in a wheelchair but she could like stand up and walk around a little bit and then one night all the kids were in bed and she had a couple of drinks and she got up out of the wheelchair to throw some more turf onto the fire and then she fell into the fire and that was the end of it.
        FLIP: This was a fourth cousin of your father's who got a pitchfork in the eye.
        FLIP: This was a friend of your Uncle Jerry's who got split into two pieces by lightning.
        FLIP: This lady here was someone's aunt who got some horrible growth on her leg and never told anyone and then when it burst she got run over by a car.
        FLIP: This man was a great friend of your grandfather's who fell out of the hayloft in the barn and got trampled by a horse and then got cancer and then fell into a fire. Do you see how lucky Mary Aberdeen was now?
        FLIP: This man dropped dead.
        FLIP: This lady disappeared.
        FLIP: This man got melted.
        FLIP: This young boy on the bike was like a midget or something and then didn't he grow up to be a great big strapping man until he got hit by lightning out in a field and then he shrank up and was kind of bent over for a long time after until he got the cancer and then he died.
        FLIP: This man had no fingers.
        FLIP: This man had been out in the fields at night and was found in a bog with his head bashed in.
        FLIP: That lady went to bed one evening and woke up dead.
        FLIP: This lady died last year and now her whole family is dead.
        
        And on and on it went. Ann and I sat riveted as the parade of tragedy and manifest destiny unfolded in front of us, wondering just how many Irish people had perished in day-to-day disease diagnoses and accidents and some who apparently had just been smited from above in mysterious circumstances versus those lost during The Great Potato Famine. We could barely keep count of the faces as they flashed by, one old photo after another. It gave me a rush of sense memory from when I was a kid-my mom constantly warning of the