St. David's Day – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
As Irish as my name is, I’m still very much an American, and a central part of this country and its population is the fact that we are all a mix of different ethnicities and races. There are competing visions of American diversity. There’s the melting pot of assimilation which sees new immigrants enter the pot and get boiled down until they blend in with everyone else to rise from the water newly minted Americans. Then there’s my favorite, the salad bowl which sees us as a healthy mix of different cultures, heritages, and traditions that come together to create something new whose history and roots stretch deep into a variety of different soils from around the human world.
My own salad bowl is made up of English, Swedish, Finnish, Flemish, and Welsh parts as well as an Irish majority. It means that when I think of indigeneity as a universal human concept I’m left wondering where I might be considered indigenous. I’ve been to several of my ancestors’ hometowns in Ireland and Finland and while they were lovely places, I was very much the tourist there, a stranger in a somewhat strange land. I felt even more foreign over these last three years spent living and working in Upstate New York, a place where I couldn’t quite get the pulse of the people and never fit in with their way of living.
I knew little of my Welsh heritage until one Sunday in November 2002 when my Aunt Mary Ruth, who was then doing a teaching exchange in England at Canterbury’s Christ Church University took my parents and I up to Surrey to meet our distant Welsh cousins, my cousin Glenys and her husband Cyril along with their children Carys and Gareth. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole situation at first but quickly found them welcoming and genial. Glenys’s grandfather was a younger brother of one of my 3rd great grandfathers, making us 2nd cousins 3 times removed. By the time I met her she had retired from her work as a science teacher and devoted herself to her family and her beloved garden. We kept in touch after that by mail, she sent me lots of stuff about Wales, its history, and culture, and so I began to think of my Welsh heritage as an integral part of who I am. It takes knowing someone with a common passion for something to really embrace it, and that passion is something Glenys instilled in me.
I didn’t visit the house in Surrey again for another decade, next returning in June 2013 when I was in London for a study abroad session at my graduate alma mater the University of Westminster. Ten years made a huge difference, everyone had grown older, wiser, and in my case I left them a little kid and returned in my early 20s. Glenys told me many stories on that visit about her own life, her connections with her American cousins, some of whom I know and others I’ve yet to meet, and of course about Welsh culture. I even made an effort to learn Welsh at one point, what little I remember has proven useful to my Irish studies.
Glenys always talked with a smile about St. David’s Day, the 1st of March, when Welsh pride is at its height. It reminded me somewhat of the celebrations I grew up with a few weeks later on St. Patrick’s Day but with a different set of memories baked into the celebrations. Each year then, as March arrived, I’d think of her, Cyril, Carys, and Gareth and occasionally even write a letter wishing them well. In the last decade we’ve begun to communicate digitally more, Gareth even is one of my regular readers here on the Wednesday Blog, and with each passing year when I’d think about making a trip over to London one part of it would always be to pay Glenys and family a visit.So, I was saddened to hear how her health was failing over the past few years and then a few weeks ago to receive the news from Gareth that she’d died. Glenys was one of a kind, a true joy of a person to meet. She touched so many lives both among her students, her community, her friends, and those of us in her extended family. With this in mind I thought for this St. David’s Day I’d use my soapbox here to remember her.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 