“Arrah, for God’s sake, why don’t he pick up?,”
my father said, thinking I was ignoring my answering
machine, which I hadn’t actually had for a couple
years. “I’m just busy listening to your voice mail, Dad,” 
I said out loud to get a laugh out of Jen; I thought Dad 
probably sounded to her like some shillelagh-wielding 
ogre, and I didn’t want her getting too nervous—she was
about to meet him for the first time. I realized then that I 
didn’t have to worry, because she was already smiling at his 
cheerful grumpiness and his brusque West Cork accent. 
Everybody always was already smiling at his easy charm—
from a gene which must have missed me, along with the one
for his peat-rich baritone voice. I think if he had heard me try 
to sing as an adult, he would have said “there are two ways 
to do a thing: a right way and a wrong way,” and I would 
have known he meant, as he always did, “Jesus, Mary 
and Joseph, boy, you’re doing that wrong.” But 
I would have missed, as I almost always did, 
the soft creasing about his sharp eyes, which silently added, 
“But it’s alright, boy. You’re alright.” I hardly ever heard 
that message from him—often as he sent it—until his wake, 
when I heard it in the stories told by people who got him. 

Then I thought about his retirement party video. 
He’d stood like a stout Irish gargoyle in front of the Carlyle 
Hotel for forty years, picking up bags and saying “good 
to see you again, sir,” in case he’d seen them before
(he never could remember a face.) On the video, a desk clerk 
rose to read her newly written “Ode to Paddy O’Sullivan.” 
Another bellman echoed to another bellman, “An ode to him, y’know!” 
My mother, from Kanturk, would’ve called them “thick Irishmen,” 
And, being thick, and being a little drunk, and not being guys who 
talked about odes, they’d laughed. And, being young, and being dumb, 
I laughed, too; I’d learned about odes, and I knew poets 
didn’t usually write odes about bellmen.

Now, I’d like to be able to give him a call and tell him I want 
to write my own ode to him. You know. He’d call me an idjit, 
but I think he’d secretly like it. On an impulse I pick up my Pixel 
and call our ancient phone number, and, over the Verizon error message, I say, 
“Arrah, for God’s sake, Dad, why can’t you pick up?”