THE ITALIAN JOB

The lady with the photographs has made contact.

Years ago, when I was a young lad struggling with Latin and Algebra at a local secondary school back home in Ireland, this girl, even younger than I, was having her picture taken on the doorstep of the very house where I now sit typing. She was the parish May Queen and had lots of other beautifully dressed girls (and some boys) in attendance. It was a highlight in her young life and was dutifully recorded in the family photo album. But like all days, "Crowning Day" finished, the photos were carefully tucked away in a safe place and the years began to pass. The young lady married and moved away.

Now suddenly, without any warning, out of Italy comes her voice, and the pictures. And with the pictures of those far-off days, comes an image of me which I struggle to recognise, every bit as much as others struggle to name the faces in the pictures of a parish which was then but is not now.

"That looks like old Betty who lived across the street from us when we were young, but I think she had died before you came". Another voice ventures that the youngish lady standing at the back might just be someone they vaguely recall, but in the end they decide otherwise. Soon the struggle to recognise and remember proves too much. The pictures are laid aside and the chat returns to "today" things, the sort no one bothers to photograph.

And now I am here alone, the pictures before me, just a few feet but many years from the place of their taking. I am not however entirely alone, for I have become aware of an image of myself that comes not "out of Italy" but out of the photographs before me.

He is there in many of the pictures, a central figure, not always smiling for the camera, but clearly "looking pleasant." He is one of my predecessors as Parish Priest in this place and his coming to me from the pictures before me asks questions even as it comforts and entertains.

I find myself wondering if I sometimes take life a little too seriously. But then again, who can blame me; so many things these days have an urgent ring about them, even alarm. The easy-going confidence of his day seems far away tonight. Now the prevailing background beat is "something must be done, this can't go on".

And yet if the easy-going confidence which I imagine was his, came only from conceit, I do not envy him. But if his pleasant style and manner were rooted not in himself but in how he identified himself in his calling, then indeed I have an image I should hope some may yet come to recognise in me.