And now The Big Tam, RIP, 007

And now The Big Tam. RIP, 007. there can be only one.

The Irish sure pick their days to depart. My grandmother, mother, and brother all departed during this time when the gates to the Otherworld are open. The banshee always came when my grandmother’s siblings died. She found my grandmother in California. The bean sídhe, the woman of the Sídhe has no borders, other than the the liminal boundaries of the otherworld. Tonight she freely roams both worlds.

And now 007. The only real 007. We will miss you, Big Tam. Yesh. There’s a simple bronze place on the building where he was born in Edinburgh. An auld fellah ambled over to us and told stories of Tom (his first name) the milkman, as he was known in his youth.... 

One of my favorite stories of Sean Connery was that he was visiting a friend in Marin, and she  needed to pick up a few things at the Mill Valley Safeway so he was pushing the cart for her while she grabbed items from the shelves. People would stop and stare, then shake their heads in disbelief, and leave the store, mystified.

Oh, my.... a fit 40ish Bond in a red loincloth. I don’t think the loincloth ever recovered from being such an intimate costar. Or coaster. Shaken, not stirred, I’m sure. The irony was, that Sir Sean couldn’t get any rolls in films after being typecast, then decommissioned as 007 by The Home Office. So, he starred in some rather dodgy B grade movies, and was the better for it, as he made a comeback as a bald man, making bald beautiful. Who knew! There can be only one. Yesh.

And for the record, Sean (his middle name) was of Irish descent, born in Scotland. His great grandfather was a Wexford Irish traveller who fled to Glasgow during the Great Famine. Sean’s father never gave up his Irish Catholic roots. The Irish Scots settled in the toughest slum, the Barrows, or The Barras, as they were called, which made New York’s Hell’s Kitchen look like candy floss. Glasgow was one mean city. Most of the Barrow has been razed in the process of urban sanitization.

The great-grandson of an Irish Wexford traveler, Sean traveled far into the world and to the outer reaches of the galaxy. But his Irish accent sucked. RIP, big fella. There can be only one. Yesh.

Go n-éirí on bóthar leis. May the roads rise with him...