I started watching Bodkin because I love a good mystery. 

I sound like the little old ladies who used to check Agatha Christie out of the library, but I’ve been a fan since my Nancy Drew days.  Read my first Agatha in junior high.  Wrote the book report.  Went on a Criminal Minds bender when my youngest was an infant.  Nothing like a sleep deprived foray into psychologically deviant minds. 

Now my cup of tea is usually accompanied by a procedural.  As long as the sun shines, I can deal with initial gore or grit for the sake of a suspenseful solution. 

I needed a new binge and there was my recently added Irish series to fill the bill.

Sure Gilbert was goofy (buffoon actually is how Dove refers to him) and the archetypal turns of phrase were expected, but my ancestral funny bone appreciated the familiar.  Both Dove and Seamus’ stand-offish yet authentically honest wit was a salve to my Celtic soul.  And the series itself has a self-deprecating manner.  When minutes after the trio of protagonists steps foot in the local pub Teddy staggers up from his barstool and sings a lyrical ballad, Dove mutters behind her pint, “That does not usually happen.” 

But the frame of Gilbert’s incessant search for the ‘story’ is what truly makes this series sing. Eventually we learn that the silly American came to Ireland for a story better than the one he was living, but everything starts with the fatal effects of Dove’s insatiable search for spilling the truth. As mysterious details come about, we learn it is the story of Dove’s past that haunts her. Emmy is only just realizing that she has a story.

Stories and folklore are integral to Irish culture.  Within the larger frame of Gilbert’s podcast, there is Samhain.  Nestled within that is the historical tradition and tragedy unique to the town of Bodkin.  From that comes the many layers and intertwined threads of the daily interactions of the townspeople. 

But around episode six, Gaelic becomes global.  It opens with Gilbert describing folktales as not only stories, but warnings, saying that “in Ireland they tell the story of the fetch.  The fetch is your supernatural doppelganger.  And if you happen to see yourself, to see your fetch, it means you’re going to die.”

I’ve been reading Timothy White’s Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, wherein he goes into great detail of the Rastafarian and Afro-Caribbean traditions that influenced Bob Marley’s life and lyrical philosophies.  Around 1964,

“He [Bob Marley] believed he was possibly under siege by obeah-directed demonic forces and might soon need a ‘shedda-catcher’ (shadow-catcher, a myalman).  Omeriah [Marley’s grandfather] . . . had performed such services for others . . . in the country, when someone believed he had lost his shadow, meaning his temporal soul force.”

Timothy White

And a few years later as Marley learned the tenets of Rastafarianism, Mortimo Planno explained that “before we are born, we have a name, and when we enter this world, we get a new name.  In each man is a separate genesis joined to that name, and most men learn their name only at the hour of their death.  A very few, however, learn it beforehand, along with the knowledge of their own end.”

Ireland and Jamaica are very different places, but the parallel story of knowing or seeing, naming oneself brought these two together like connective threads spun across the sea.  Every culture, every individual yearns to distill its story and yet stretch it in relationship with others.  Story, for every one of us, is crucial to existence.   

In the final scenes of the series, as we hear Gilbert’s closing words and transition into Dove’s epilogue, we hear that it’s not so much what has happened in the past as what story we choose to tell about it. Which is such a powerful reminder.  Not of fabrication, but of which details we choose to focus. 

How frequently do we cause ourselves pain with a negative monologue?  By frontloading our failures?  By refusing to showcase the successes? 

If we can’t change the things that have happened, maybe we can change the story we tell.

Dubheasa Maloney

Just as a narrative shifts with a new point of view so does our outlook with a different lens.  There are times, however, when the lens is a prism reflecting many of us in its image.