Origin of the Species

By the time I was born my father was missing an ear. There were several versions of how he lost it, some from the source himself, others from official documents culled from Marine Corps files; the responding MP’s report has yet to turn up but one could assume that scenario would most closely approximate the truth. Every version did include alcohol and a jeep destroyed on impact. The location, even the country, is in dispute but Pop was definitely in uniform somewhere in the far east. That’s enough for me. Given his genetic imprint, I'm comfortable with any variation save an act of God. He had no truck with the dispensation offered to the religious and you can’t be an atheist and believe in fate. It was his fault, whether someone ran a stop or he had blacked out behind the wheel. He’d insist that somewhere leading up to it, he could have made any number of alternate decisions had he just been alert.

I am my father's son, consequently I don’t believe anything: I either know something or I list the most plausible to the least- I don’t get that from my mollycoddled youth. That’s his gift, along with the blue eyes.

He was honorably discharged, likely because he did see action and was clipped by a bullet. Whose bullet we’ll never know, but if he was impulsive he was certainly no coward and the Corps, weighing the balance of service, let the DUI slide and cashiered him with honor.

He was mustered out in San Diego, the town where he began his military career as an attention-scrambled fourteen year old knot of unregulated hormones, ecstatic for the discipline and uniformity of military school once emancipated from the backwoods idyll of his moonshine soaked Oregon upbringing. Concepts like family dysfunction were foreign to country folk. Whether you were the sire of inbred simpletons or erudite inebriates you simply made the best of the hand dealt. In those days and in that world there was nothing like consensus reality to be imposed by the state, so the certainty of Pop’s military fantasy was embraced with an enthusiasm that today medical authorities would classify as sociopathic. If he had any recall of his mindset, its certain he’d report even his dreams followed guidelines implied by the academy handbook.

Sad then, I suppose, that he had his glorious career cut short by rolling a jeep while on leave; I might have made it out of somebody’s womb regardless, but I got here through his decisions, reasoned or not, and play the hand I have with about as much foresight, probity and measured response as my father…

Alias

When rich people get radical the poor get dead. Whatever salons the popinjay Irish industrialist Henry Joy McCracken attended where the praises of the French and American revolutions were sung in the late 1790’s, the result was that only the smallest remnant of my clan were able to escape the feverishly ill-conceived plot known as The Wolfe-Tone Rebellion; McCraken helped design this farrago with the insane ambition to engage the greatest military force since Imperial Rome. Two of my kind survived; two cousins styled O’Kane, and maybe twelve years old at the most, whose families had migrated down from Derry and the stalk of Bloskey O’Caine, slayer of Murtaugh O’ Laughlin. The surviving duo, one child almost certainly named John and the other as certain to be named William, slipped out of Antrim as it burned, hidden under corpses of Presbyterians and other disloyal subjects who had been put to the pitchfork by the militias and tossed on carts like codfish to be buried in ditches outside the walls. The Monaghan guard, desperate to show Whitehall they were on the right side of history, had flipped sides and allowed the old divisions to fuel their savagery. Hangings, gutting, pitch capping and rape attended the collapse and desertion of the rebellion.

How this slender thread found its way to Cork in the south is all conjecture. What is not in dispute is they claimed an alias, Closkey, after the legend, and their sons and daughters followed as MacCloskey and theirs, McCloskey.