"I WILL ARISE AND GO NOW AND GO TO INISHFREE......" My head is full of poetry these days. Yeats, Milton, Khayam, Raftery......all my old favorites! Lines jumbled--English, Gaelic--even the "Spail~in Fanach." Oh, the onomatopoeia of that poem--guttural Gaelic. The nuns would love me. What did they do to me to cause my mind to become an intellectual gutter of poetic muck when I'm stressed! "Say it so be heart now 'til yis know it!" Off by heart. Over and over. Was that a form of brainwashing! Can you say it wasn't learning if you remember it forty years later! But do I really remember! After all, these muse attacks' only occur during stress. In a secondhand bookshop in Dublin a few years ago I came across a tattered copy of Danta Mean Teastais. Oh the joy! I still carry that little publication of poems with me. One can go demented knowing only oneliners. Now I can get all the lines of the Irish gibberish that has racked my brain at births, marriages and deaths. Ah, sure 'tis the little things in life that give us pleasure!

Yes, I'm stressed. I'm going home. Home to Ireland.

My friend Evie, from Brooklyn, called the other day. "Heard you wuz goin' to Oiland again. Hey Marie, youse rob a bank or what?" I love Evie. She makes Jackie Mason sound like a mimic. Rob a bank! I would wish. I'm as poor as a church mouse! When I tell people I'm going back to Ireland, they laugh. I'm trying to make it sound as big an adventure as Sherpa Tenting climbing Mount Everest. They're thinking, "she must have more money than we thought" or "she's really mad after all."

My sister just phoned. She was ecstatic! "Ireland beat Holland! You'lF,e here, you'll be here." I love the World Cup. I told her.'"You didn't sign over your half of the house did you!" What now! "Don't do it! You've been there for over thirty years." Actually, it's thirty five. "You might miss it, you'll want your own space, it's something to go back to. Why is everyone worrying about my coming back! "You might be bored in Ireland." Bored! I tried not to scream. I've never been bored in my life! I won't be bored. I'm taking over my new laptop and a suitcase full of computer stuff, I'm already 'o-d-ing' on all this technology.

Plus, I'm buying a camera with a zoom lens. Believe me, I won't be bored. "Well, you could always write something about Dublin, Ireland, the scene, you know." I want to photograph birds. I told her. "Well" she scoffed, "you've heard of the Birdman of Alcatraz, you'll be da Birdwoman of Dublin."

I heard Christopher Anderson interviewed today on CNBC. He's the writer who published the book on Diana's sons. It was an excellent interview. The interviewer challenged Anderson about the veracity of the material in the book, as he had never met the royal pair. "Oh," said Anderson, "I've written twenty-two books in thirty five years. All biographies-never met any of them. You get the best information from the subject's friends, the people around them, never fEom the person themself." Does that mean that no one really knows themselves, that their real existence is the one mirrored in the eyes of their friends! Makes one think If that was a cop-out on Andersons's part it was brilliant.

Maybe they are right. Maybe I·am mad. Or even a little bit daft. Money! I'm pulling it fi·om my 401k, which has to be the smallest 401k in the world, especially if you consider that I worked in the financial industry. Yes, eight years of studying. Licenses up the wazoo! 60 hour weeks. How could I give it all up so easily! So thoughtlessly. So.......I hated it. That penny took eight years to drop! 'Vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself!' Well, being unemployed has some rewards. For the first three months I was all gungho. On top of it. With it. Going for it. Then I started to get angry. I was getting angry al interviews. Commission only! No salary! Listen, I told them, I don't think that's ethical--I refuse to be in a position where I'd sell me own mother to meet my mortgage payments. They smiled. Limp handshakes. I felt like the Hollywood starlet. Don't call us, we'll call you. But they don't. I don't want them to. I'm going home.

Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss."

"Live for today, today is life...." The Sanskrit says.

One of my daughters has a mental health problem. Once, I was driving her from a hospital to a rehab clinic and I pulled over to the side of the road. The doctors had given me a large brown envelope to give to her new providers. I opened it. "...the mother is an Irish stoic... That was how they explained away my strength at being able to deal with her problem. Stoic! Shades of the nuns again. Gospel of St. Luke. Wish I could remember the word for those who only believed in enjoyment! Wish I could only believe in enjoyment. I'm trying!! Oh yes, another one of those psychiatrists told me that John Calvin would have loved me, no, John Calvin would have been proud of me, so imbued was I with the work ethic. Needless to s~y, these doctors were all male. Tell me about your work ethic if you're widowed twice by the time you're thirty-seven with three children to support. This is not Hollywood, not even Danielle Steele.

The Saturday morning my second husband died--I thought of the movies. I was sitting outside the intensive care unit when the bells started ringing and doctors in white coats came running. They had previously told me to go home, that he was alright, that he had survived that morning's first heart attack, but I had stayed and waited. With bells ringing and doctors running I knew it was the end. That's him, I thought.

Don't be ridiculous! Your mother-inlaw died last Saturday. This is your birthday. You've only been married three months. These sort of things only happen in the movies! Don't be dramatic!!! We buried him the following Wednesday. The previous Wednesday we had stood hand in hand when we buried his mother in the same family grave.

When I asked the Veterans Administration recently about a widow's pension they said sorry, you weren't married a year. When I asked Social Security, they said they couldn't--I wasn't an 'exception'-exceptions being accidents. Heart attacks weren't accidents. I felt like a Chinese war bride. Yes, we were only married three months. No, I didn't marry him to become a citizen. Not after twelve years in the US. But the guy in the Social Security office smiled as he told me I could collect on the first one, Husband, that is. Throughout the interview he kept stating--for my confirmation-"and no more husbands since the second one!" No, I answered dryly. I told the third about the first two and he's still running. No smile. He writes. "You're not entitled to this till you're sixty, which is not until November. Why are you applying now!" I'm going back to Ireland I told him. "But you're coming back!" The whole world asks.

"You're coming back!" Do I know! Did I plan this!

I came to the U.S. when I was twenty four. I had three daughters and an Irish husband who had left the previous year to go to Canada. He then came to the U.S. as part of the 'brain drain.' Russia had launched Sputnik. The Americans were galloping to catch up. There was a shortage of engineers. We were lucky. John F Kennedy, in his earnest efforts to stem emigration from Ireland, had lowered the quota of Irish allowed into the U.S. and if you didn't have family to claim you it was practically impossible to come here.

We settled in Philadelphia. In the beginning I would stand on street corners and gape, openmouthed---at the pastel colored cars that were a block and a half long, with a 'spare tire on the rear deck,' at the cops who trudged along with their guns at the ready. It was the mid sixties. Everyone talks about the sixties. Flower power. Free love. But in Philadelphia, as in other cities around the nation, racism was seething like a venom. The police used dogs to quell the riots. There was no 'melting pot'. Our first friend was a black engineer. We invited him and his charming family to dinner. For a whole week after that my husband and I listened, terrified, as the neighbors strafed the railings outside with sticks and iron bars. The warning was heard. Sadly, we could never repeat that invitation and our friend also admitted he could not return the hospitality for fear of reprisals from his neighbors.

Later, we moved to Long Island where my husband became part of the team that built the 'LEM Module'--America's first lunar landing vehicle. It was an exciting time. The space race had heated up. The Beatles had arrived. America was awash with music, with excitement. With......riots. Now it was the Vietnam War. Kent State. Draft dodgers. Young men dying in the jungles of Asia, living a tortured hell in prison holes, or surviving battered and maimed in vets' hospitals.

The ones who did survive were only physically intact. They carried back with them souvenirs--in some cases weapons, in some cases ears which they had cut off the heads of the Viet Gong, in all cases it was the nightmare of what they had suffered which survived most. It would take years for America to honor them. So the sixties left their mark, not flower power, not Woodstock, but instead a time of assassinations, of race riots, of the sad futility of war.

I lost my social conscience in the seventies. My personal life had assumed a drama of its own. My first marriage, never really happy, ended when my first husband was killed in a car accident. Four years later I married my second husband, a wonderful Italian American, a warmhearted bear of a man. We had three months of heaven before he died of a heart attack. My 'darlin man' had left me, leaving me a small manufacturing business in Queens that was nearly bankrupt, and not a penny to bury him. Ironically I was able to bury him from the monies left over from my first husband's insurance. I also used this money to rescue the business from its creditors. Then came the threats from his adult children who resented the outcome of his will. Did I not know they were 'connected'!! When I tried to fire a sleazy trucker who was grossly over charging me, I was told to 'be careful' or my car would be 'blown up' with me in it. You want to see me dead, I told him, you'll have to stand in line!!!!

Meanwhile, drugs were rampant in the schools. They were spraying pot with angel dust, kids were smoking what they thought was marijuana and ending up strapped to hospital beds in the threes of seizures. LSD made them think they could fly like birds and jump from buildings or play matador with trains. Either way they ended up dead. If not this way, then overdosing on heroine or freebased cocaine. Madly the schools rushed to introduce drug education, while my daughters nagged me incessantly because I wouldn't let them 'hang out' all the time with their friends. Instead, when I encouraged them to bring their friends home I was faced with these longhaired characters that looked like dropouts from skid row. Our peaceful home became a cacophony of noiseheavy metal, rock, disco. My food bills went through the roof! I think I was feeding every teenager in the neighborhood. Work was never-ending stress. Most of the time I felt I would not, could not survive any of it. But I did.

My daughters started college. I moved easily from one era to the next: Warhol, Capote, Madonna. Opulence was the key. Studio 54 was the place. The business had not only survived, but thanks to my hard work, was doing quite well. I was ambitious, successful, also ruthless, cruel and egocentric. I thought I was the 'bees knees.' I wore sequins from Saks. I ate sushi. All my friends lived in the Village. I wanted a loft in Tribeca. I saw all the Broadway shows. I breakfasted in Chinatown and Windows on the World was just too gauche for dinner. I wore Donna Karan originals and danced at the Palladium. I traveled extensively throughout the US, vacationed in Puerto Rico or the French Riviera. I had my own personal assistant, a beautiful young Italian Adonis. Everyone thought he was my bodyguard. I reveled in it all. The summer my last daughter graduated from college I went to the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York for a vacation. 6 million acres of the Adirondack mountains is a national park, renowned for its lakes and wooded wilderness. I fell in love. That summer I spent every spare moment traveling and exploring the Adirondacks. It changed my life. All my ambition for business and the good life evaporated. I didn't want glitter or glamour anymore. It took two years from that summer to sell the business and my house on Long Island and byJanuary 1990 I had moved into a tiny cottage at the base of Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks.

I spent winter's snowy months listening to the silence. My life had taken a new twist, which it had seemed to do with each passing decade. My year in the Adirondacks was one of the best years of my life. But I knew I had to return to work and reality. The money would not last forever. Not even a rocket scientist could get a job in the Adirondacks for more than six dollars an hour. The recesession of the early nineties was taking over--there was nothing for it but to return to Long Island. got a job in the financial industry, studied and passed exams and con- glitter or glamour anymore. It took two years from that summer to sell the business and my house on Long Island and by January 1990 I had moved into a tiny cottage at the base of Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks.

I spent winter's snowy months listening to the silence. My life had taken a new twist, which it had seemed to do with each passing decade. My year in the Adirondacks was one of the best years of my life. But I knew I had to return to work and reality. The money would not last forever. Not even a rocket scientist could get a job in the Adirondacks for more than six dollars an hour. The recesession of the early nineties was taking over--there was nothing for it but to return to Long Island.

I got a job in the financial industry, studied and passed exams and convinced myself that I wanted nothing more in life than to be a financial consultant. Until now. Of course, this is a new decade, which in my book means change.

So I have decided to go home. The youngest of five, my brothers and sisters still live in Dublin. Time to be with them, to talk about growing old, to laugh over old times and shared memories. The decision has brought me great elation and much heartache. I shall miss my daughters. I shall miss my grandchildren. I shall miss America which has been my home for so many years. But my bags are packed. I have my laptop and my camera. Time to experience and record a new adventure. I'm going home. And again, the poetry fuzz in the head..."this too shall pass, shall pass and change, shall die and be no more and I have gone upon my way sorrowful.