The Bacon Smugglers

How My Parents Became Persons of Interest at U.S. Customs

Photo by Nima Naseri on Unsplash

When you live as an immigrant, you quickly learn that home isn’t just a place. It’s a taste, a smell, a feeling that can’t be replicated. And sometimes, that feeling is worth smuggling twenty pounds of vacuum-packed meat across an ocean.

For me, its Irish crisps that put American chips to shame, especially the classic cheese and onion, mysteriously absent from U.S. shelves. Irish chocolate is creamier, richer, simply better than the waxy American stuff. But the crown jewels are the meats: rashers and sausages from my hometown butcher, Nolan’s, that make anything labeled “sausage” in America taste like a ground cardboard.

For years, my parents and I had a comfortable arrangement. With each journey across the Atlantic, we’d orchestrate a small-scale import operation—Operation Full Irish.

They’d visit me and my wife Liz in Seattle every year or two, arriving with pounds of Nolan’s bacon and sausages, while I’d return from Ireland with suitcases stuffed with crisps and chocolate. It was a way to keep home alive, along with the Leinster Leader and stories of relatives, births, and deaths.

The contraband would be hoarded for select mornings, and the sausages rationed. The wonderful smell of frying rashers filling the kitchen was a kind of magic, an act of communion.

It worked flawlessly. Until it didn’t.

I was at baggage claim, watching the crowd thin from my parents’ flight. Thirty minutes passed. Then an hour. I started scanning faces, imagining missed connections or lost passports. By the two-hour mark, my neck ached from looking up at the arrivals board for divine inspiration.

At last, they emerged. My father wore a sheepish grin. My mother’s face was crimson, her eyes brimming with fury. She strode ahead without a glance in his direction.

I gave my father a quizzical look.

“We’ll talk about it in the car,” my father muttered.

In the privacy of the parking garage, the truth spilled out. At customs, an officer had asked if they were carrying any meat.
“No, no meat in the bags,” my father said, with the breezy confidence of a man who had convinced himself he hadn’t packed twenty pounds of vacuum-sealed sausages and rashers the night before.

The officer’s expression didn’t change. “Step over here, sir.”

A conveyor belt. A scanner. A shadowy, suspicious shape on the screen. The officer unzipped the suitcase and peeled back neatly folded clothes to reveal the evidence.

Faced with the contraband, my father turned to my mother and uttered the immortal words:
“Sheila, how did those get in there?”

My mother had endless patience, humor, and forgiveness. But my father throwing her under the bus? That crossed a line. I had never seen her so upset.

Later that evening, she opened up.
“You know they took them home and ate them themselves,” she said, her voice trembling between anger and heartbreak. The pettiness of it all had her near tears.

For the next three days, she gave my father a silence so absolute it made Liz’s Buffalo winters seem tropical. Breakfasts were eaten to the sound of cutlery on plates, my father offering tentative conversation starters that died mid-air.

After that, my parents were on a customs watchlist. They got searched every time they visited. They gave up their bacon-running days, and, though they never said it, I suspect the customs hassle was one reason their visits eventually stopped.

Now I spend months at a time back in Ireland running tours around the country. I eat my yearly quota of rashers and sausages in a few glorious months. But they taste different. Maybe it’s because Nolan’s has gone out of business, or maybe it’s knowing that the last time my parents tried to bring me a taste of home, they were labeled a threat to national security.

When I snatch a visit between tours, my mother opens the fridge and the smell of frying sausages fills the kitchen. It’s the same smell. It smells of love. Home isn’t just a place. It’s that familiar smell rising through the house, as if the past has come back for breakfast.