Last week, we discovered that what I wanted to do when I grew up was write a novel. The Great American Novel, no less. And by Great, I mean Big. Big like “Atlas Shrugged” or “Gone With the Wind” or “Anna Karenina.” (This bigness, it turns out, was my first big mistake. But we’ll save that for another day.)

So, I now had “Great” and “Novel” covered. All that was left to figure out was “American.”

Seemingly apropos of nothing … The year before my “I’ll write it!” eureka moment occurred (see last week’s post for eureka #1), I visited Ireland for the first time, and, boy, did I ever fall hard for its charms, hook, line and sinker. Ireland made me feel like I had been wandering all my life and had now come home.

Which is very poetic and all, until some years later someone told me that’s what happens to everybody when they visit Ireland. All of a sudden, I felt like tchotchke in a souvenir shop. With the air blown out of it.

Nonetheless, we soldier on.

My love of all things Ireland included their emigres. And there was my answer. I would write about an Irish immigrant who comes to America. The Great American Novel. Perfect. Except, 15 years and two children later, I still hadn’t written word one. Any notion of writing a book had completely disappeared. Children have a way of getting in the way. By then I was living in Massachusetts, and I found time to think about the book again. The Irish were a big part of Massachusetts history — Lowell especially, and of course Boston. The only thing was, everything I read about the Irish in Boston or the Irish in Lowell depressed the heck out of me, the antithesis of freedom and liberty. The politics were the worst. This was not the Irish in America story I wanted to tell. Massachusetts was a dead end, and once again, the book went on hold.

One of the things I loved most in Ireland was traipsing through the ruins of castles and churches and old abbeys, and that led me to start reading up on Irish history. Several books into my new hobby, I came to one in which the author devoted a couple of paragraphs to a rebel group called Young Ireland, who in 1848 led a rebellion hell bent on Ireland ridding itself of and attaining its independence from England.

My first reaction was who were these guys and why had I never heard of them before? And that was my second eureka moment: By golly, if no one else is telling the story of Young Ireland, then I’ll do it. It has all the elements I needed: freedom, liberty, heroes. Perfect.

And that, my friends, is how the journey of the Great Big Good Irish Novel began. It’s been quite the trip so far.

This morning’s sing-a-long comes from John Hiatt with the very talented Ry Cooder on slide guitar …