David O'Mahony: I’ve had many lives and more to come

His son's school project prompted David O'Mahony to create a timeline of his own life to put in his shoebox

Teenage David O'Mahony would have been focused on music like Metallica. Picture: Rainer Keuenhof/Redferns

My son packed his life into a shoebox this week.

He’s not leaving, or anything — don’t give me a heart attack like that, he’s 13 and I’m far from ready for him to fly the nest — but it was a project for history class.

The idea is to create a timeline of their life. It’s something his school does every year, seemingly to display on open nights, and it’s interesting to see what children end up putting down as the distillation of their brief time on this screaming mass of rock and water we call Earth.

He discovered gaming in a big way over the past couple of years, which feels very much like a step change from the boy he was at 10, even 11. And that’s no bad thing. Far worse to be stuck, waiting for your real life to begin.

Gaming, though, was only part of his shoebox (an old controller from a console). There was a storybook, Peace At Last, that had somehow survived the pillages of time and children — it was one of five or six I used to be able to recite from memory in the dark, while trying to get his very sleepless brother to doze off — and an old reliable, Thomas the Tank Engine.

We had so, so many of those trains — again, their names and backstories were imprinted on my brain once upon a time; perhaps they still are, and something will trigger them in me like a sleeper agent. I mean, just writing the words “ Thomas the Tank Engine” has the theme song playing in my head. 

Two of them, actually, because a new one was introduced while the boys were small. They’re two, they’re four, they’re six, they’re eight… no, dammit, maturity don’t fail me now.

More poignantly, there was a balloon from his first birthday, and a photo of him and his twin brother as babies with their great-grandmother, who was 103 at the time (she passed away when they were about two, shortly before she herself would have turned 105).

Others in his class included things like dinosaur toys they’d had since infancy, or photographs of them as babies. In some years, the children have included things like their first pair of shoes; in other years, they’ve been asked to recreate a historical event in the shoebox.

Were he to do one just focusing on the past couple of years, it would be heavy on things like Minecraft, Jurassic World, Skyrim, the Titanic, probably Horrible Histories too or black holes. It’s interesting to see how much he’s changed in such a relatively small space of time, though, of course, for him two out of 13 years marks quite a significant amount of time.

Given he seems to think of science as his favourite subject now, who knows what a revised shoebox would look like in two or three years. The world is his event horizon, or something like that.

But as I never get tired of saying, we are all the sum of a myriad little experiences, which can be good or bad but nonetheless write themselves into the DNA of our hearts and minds.

Lego never went out of style for David O'Mahony.

What would my life in a shoebox be?

And because it’s my own column, and nobody can stop me, I’m going to answer that question with another question — which life?

I have, after all, been many things at many different times. Pre-teen me would have leaned on things like Transformers, Lego, and ninja turtles (though I remember them being called “hero turtles” for a while). 

Teenage me would have been focused on music like Green Day, Metallica, and Cradle of Filth… and Lego. 

Adult me — the various adult mes — would variously fill a shoebox with science fiction, German expressionist cinema, horror books … and Lego. The classics never go out of style, baby.

And then there was the me that was a fledgling baby journalist, who would have included cuttings from The Echo and Waterford News & Star (I still have some).

David's shoebox would be stuffed with mementos of trips to Paris, Rome, Greece, Montenegro.

There was the me that lived in Abu Dhabi, where I ended up under a different name because they couldn’t pronounce Dáithí (I still fondly think of myself as Daythee, and would include my Arabic ID card for work, with the name so badly transliterated from Irish it made the security guard laugh).

There was the me that joked he had retired from journalism because he had gone into academia — so there’d be medieval history and Latin textbooks in that shoebox, God help me — and there’s the one that came out of retirement to join this fine publication while also continuing in academia (that shoebox would be very confused, but then again journalism is the first draft of history).

Hell, there’s the me that fancied a particular girl in college, and the me that married her (they are two quite different but recognisable David O’Mahonys, each considering themselves lucky beyond their station). 

Those shoeboxes would be stuffed with mementos of trips to Paris, Rome, Greece, Montenegro, the trips to Munich and China we should have taken. It’s the things you don’t do that go toward making you you as well.

And children. Endless hordes of children. Well, three, but if you’ve been in the parenting trenches you know what I mean.

What my daughter would put in her shoebox is anyone’s guess. At seven, she’s already told us she plans to hold on to her first pair of shoes and some of her dresses for her own daughter.

And so the circle of life — and the lives we outgrow and leave behind — goes on.