singing Galway Bay| Tom Hamilton When I was nine years old my father and I went into an elderly woman's house and it was gasoline dry that Summer so she had vasoline on her hands and they went from lamb grease to ice cream like a smile might move to a frown but ( So ) When she found me a rugged dip well I supposed I had just best eat it because my father weighed four hundred pounds and his hand was like a first baseman's glove so if you caught his kind of cold you might sneeze blood all night and when ( So ) we sat inside that front porch screen he started singing Galway Bay his big frame it was vibrating and entertaining and she began to cry because that song reminded her of her still still Irish husband and when my old man honed that final note well he could have been a pro why everyone said so but he was a pro of another kind so before she had even sponged her eyes she wrote us out a check for ten times the amount of what the work was worth but ( So ) I didn't really mind too much because I only knew of cheeseburgers and such and baseball and coins and Evil Kneivel toys and that I had best varnish off the rest of that vicious sheep meat ice cream until I could see the Flintstones and Dino and they could see me with lapped clean porcelain eyes.