WOULD YOU DREAM OF TAKING A DROP?

WALKING WITH MY COUSIN  IN THE STREETS OF COOKSTOWN, COUNTY TYRONE, NORTHERN  IRELAND.

"WOULD YOU DREAM OF TAKING A DROP?"

Those were the words spoken rapidly in a thick Tyrone brogue that my mother's newly discovered first cousin Johnny Devlin said to us as we walked down the central street in Cookstown.  
My mother and Uncle  could not understand what he said. But I laughed and said it again  plainly "Would we dream of taking a drop?--  I wondered when you would ask."
Johnny took my hand and squeezed and we turned into a side street and marched into a pub-- all four of us.

Things only got better after that.  Johnny introduced us to all of those at the  bar and to the bar tender.  My Uncle Joe--The Christian Brother-- actually agreed to try a small drink of orange soda, and my mother and I had a half pint of  Harp Lager. Johnny had a Guiness and a shot of Irish whiskey.  
After  more  conversations with the regulars, Johnny established that my mother was the daughter and Joe was the son of  Joe Coleman who had left with his brother Big George from Ardboe at the  turn of the century and now we were back to meet our "friends."
And find them we did--right where my grandfather had left them--fishing for eels on the shores of  magnificent Lough Neagh.

That was one of the happiest days of my life and of my mother and uncle's lives.  We had hoped for so little --all we had to guide us were a few  vaguely remembered names which we magically found on a local map--names like the Battery and the Diamond and the Old Cross--there they were. And then as we found the places, and drove there, we asked the people we met if they might  know anyone named Conlon or Coleman --and they did. In fact one man,  Dominic O'Neill whom we  saw in a field, told us that if we went to a pub  called Lavery's and threw a stone we could not help but hit a cousin. And he was right.

At that pub we met a man who hastened to get Johnny Devlin who was most closely related  He told us that as a boy of four he had actually watched my grandfather Joe win a boat race in the  Lough the day before they left for the American shores.  I wish I could say that victory was the first of many victories in Joe's life but I think it was  one of his last.