Midlife Irish (15 page)

I left my bed and breakfast and decided to buy a local paper. It felt that this might give me a better feel for things. It
was a rainy day (big shock there) and the store was about a block away. When I got in there I decided that I would get some
candy and a few other things, maybe a cigar.

The man behind the counter, a man about sixty with a bald head, big ears, and interested-looking eyes, said something to
the other man in the store, a younger man with a cap and a jacket and a cigarette. It went like this.

They’re working on the road again and they don’t seem to be any different than they were the day before. It’s a wonder that
we pay these people. They stand around and we pay for it. That’s the system. They’re working under the ground. I think it’s
the pipes. Now, what are pipes doing under the road? You’d think they could put them under the ground. Then they wouldn’t
have to be tearing up the roads. It’s some sort of sewer apparatus that they’re hammering at. Why do they hammer when the
work involves pipes? You turn pipes, you don’t hammer at them, for Godsakes. Did you see them? Yes they were out there already.
Already, they’ve been there for three hours. Drinking coffee. My son works for the city and he spends half his day drinking
coffee. Why isn’t it tea? I’ll tell you why. Because there is just coffee that they use for these things. And they can’t bring
tea? Sure, they can bring their own tea but why bring it when the city has coffee? It’s a small thing to bring tea, but why
not let them pay for everything? My son doesn’t bring tea. But he doesn’t like tea anyway. He drinks water. And we know why
he’s drinking water in the morning. The Guinness. He loves Guinness. He drinks that enough. Is he still doing that? He’s doing
that and a lot of things don’t you know? His mother is beside herself with all that. I say don’t worry about it. He’s young.
He won’t be young for long. That’s right, let him do his thing, woman, they’ll have him tied down soon enough. The women won’t
understand that. No they’ve got their ways. They think a man should be a saint. A saint. Sure. They’re all like that. Sure
my boy was one but now look at him. Yeah you have to say that, you have to let them. You’re from America. I could tell by
the way you look. You might as well announce it. God bless you, are you down the road, you and the missus? No children. That’s
the way. Do it when you can. You only live this one time. And it’s over before you get
started. I was, it seems that way yesterday and now look at me. Yeah, look at you. Ah, you’ll look like us soon enough.

Where do I put the quotation marks?

One of the really great things about Ireland is pretty subtle. When you are in Ireland you get, every day and free, the sound
of “Irish English.” I grew up listening to it, and I never get tired of it. People of the non-Irish variety have told me that
they love the sound of Irish English. There is nothing like it, don’t you know?

On the surface, one might understand why the Irish people might have a resistance to English, the language of their long-term
oppressors. But that isn’t the way it is. That isn’t the way it is at all.

While I was in Ireland I tried to investigate the subject. What was there about the Irish use of English that made it such
a wonderful literary tool? John Synge, the great playwright, said that whenever he was stuck for a line, he would listen to
the western Irish people in the kitchen below his workroom. They would always give him amazing little tidbits like this one
from Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World:

Christy: “It’s that you’d say surely if you seen him and he after drinking for weeks, rising up in the red dawn, or before
it maybe, and going out into the yard as naked as an ash tree in the moon of May, and shying clods against the visage of the
stars till he’d put the fear of death into the banbhs and the screeching sows.”

There were many times in Ireland, not always in a pub, when I’d hear amazing words put together in a way I had never heard
before. While I listened to these little spontaneous prose poems, I would always think, “I wish I had a tape recorder,” or,
failing that, a much better memory.

These amazing little verbal flourishes weren’t spouting from some poet or writer. Often they’d be coming from a guy who worked
on the road or a bartender or just somebody
who wandered in to sip a few. It’s a place where words are important, where words, in a sense,
are
life.

The Mecca of all this Irish talk is, of course, the Blarney Stone. The stone itself is set in Blarney Castle in County Cork.
The kissing of the stone is supposed to magically produce that “Irish talk” quality in the kisser. According to legend, Queen
Elizabeth I was putting a lot of pressure on the local Blarney chieftain, a man named Cormac McCarthy (maybe a distant relative
of today’s Cormac McCarthy). Elizabeth kept pressing him for a tangible show of loyalty, and Cormac kept adroitly fending
her off with a torrent of words. Finally, fed up with McCarthy’s continual verbosity, Elizabeth is said to have screamed,
“Blarney! Blarney! It’s all Blarney!”

Since records of all the utterances didn’t exist until the 1800s, the whole story is pretty dubious. But it makes for “some
fine talk.”

Whatever the truth, if you want to kiss the stone, which is located on one of the castle’s parapets, you have to hang down
and trust someone to hang on to your feet. (For the record: I did it; Paulette chickened out. Hey, I’m the writer.)

Cork is the extreme southwest of Ireland, maybe three car hours from Dublin, ninety minutes from the Cliffs of Moher. It’s
a small trip when you consider the fact that you’ll be receiving the gift of eloquence. It will be more than handy if I’m
ever audited by the IRS.

My mom and dad spoke “Irish English”: That is, they spoke with a “brogue.” The word “brogue” is Irish for “shoe,” and it was
originally used in a derogatory way, something like “having a shoe on the tongue.” The shoes on my particular tongue are more
New Jersey than Irish. The only trace of “brogue” in my speech is a tendency (I am told) to
turn “th” into “d” once in a while. After kissing the Blarney Stone I expected that I would never again say “this” when I
meant “dis.”

Blarney Castle itself would be pretty amazing in say, Anaheim. But in Ireland, where castles are as common as lawyers in Jersey,
it’s not that striking. It’s a nice enough castle, I guess. The most interesting thing about it is a bit of folklore/legend.

Supposedly a great many Irish soldiers escaped through a secret tunnel during the Cromwell siege of the seventeenth century.
I would be very happy if that actually happened, and I can’t say that it didn’t. But it seems that whenever things get truly
awful in human history, humans like to invent ways out. Someone escaped. Somebody got away.

Still, it’s a pretty nice castle. It’s a tower, actually. The towers always seemed to outlive the castles, much like all the
antebellum chimneys in the American South that are all that is left of the old mansions. The chimneys stand out there alone
in the middle of vast fields. There are a lot of solitary towers in Ireland. It’s as if God wanted people to remember what
was once there, and he left the tower to show you how big it was.

That explanation was given to me by an old man in Donegal. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.

One day I took a long walk in Ireland.

I got up from our B&B bed in Clifden. Paulette was asleep, so I took a shower and headed out. Taking a shower in your average
Irish B&B is like standing naked, with soap, in the rain. It gets the job done, though. It just takes longer than you are
used to.

I put on some khakis, some white socks, sneakers, a white T-shirt, a golf shirt, a sweater, and a tweedy-looking coat. I looked
at myself. An Irishman out for a stretch of the leg. As I walked along I wondered whether anybody could tell I was
a “Yank.” I resolved to try out my pseudo-Irish accent on the first person I met.

I decided to wander along in a random fashion, always careful to keep the Atlantic Ocean on my right. I calculated that this
must be south. I did this because of my complete absence of a sense of direction. I walked out of the little town and went
happily on my way. I’m an Irish guy, I thought.

It was a cloudy day. There were a lot of birds. I walked for about ten minutes and did not meet a single Irishman or Irishwoman
on my way. I didn’t even meet any Yanks. It was a slow day for stretching the leg. I tried to think of Irish songs. I tried
to think of that song that my dad used to play. My brain did not cooperate. I ran through a lot of Smokey Robinson, a lot
of Stones. Nothing Irish was stored up there.

I then saw someone approaching. An Irish guy. A wandering Irishman. As he got closer I could make him out. Tweed coat. Jeans.
Big brown shoes with thick soles. He had a beard and a hat. A baseball hat. We got closer and closer. I could finally make
out the hat. Boston Red Sox.

We walked up to each other and stopped. He spoke.

“Hey, how you doing?”

He sounded foreign. His accent was not like my accent. I spoke.

“Doin’ good,” I said.

“Where you from?”

“New Jersey,” I said. It just slipped out. Damn. “How ’bout you?”

“Boston,” he said. Now I knew the origin of this foreigner.

His name was Lynch. He was an internist. His people were from near Wicklow. He had been in Ireland for three weeks. He was
staying the whole summer. His wife was Italian. He met her in North Carolina. He went to medical school at Duke. He said he
had just come from Wicklow.

“Guess the name of the town we stayed at last night,” he said. He had a big grin.

“Istanbul,” I said.

“No,” he said, “not even close.
Hollywood.” He started laughing. He had one of those laughs that makes you start laughing. I started laughing too.

We talked for a while. Our subject was Ireland in general. We agreed on many things. You can’t get a good sandwich here, but
breakfast, that’s something. If we ate like this for long we would die. He then asked me if I had felt “the Irish thing.”
I said I think so. He said “the Irish thing” had several identifiable symptoms. It makes you talk in a slower, more roundabout
way. It makes you feel as if you belong here even though you’ve never been here. Finally, it makes you feel that life is very
wonderful but very temporary.

Yes, I assured him, I had felt the Irish thing. We said our goodbyes.

I walked until I saw a sign telling me it was eight miles to Screeb. I turned around. By the time I got back to Clifden, Paulette
was waking up. While she got dressed I told her of the Irish internist I had met on the road to Screeb.

In Ireland, there are almost as many castles as there are big rocks. The first one I saw astounded me, but there are so many
of them in Ireland that you start to get used to them. After spending several days at Disney World, you get sick of the “Magic
Kingdom.”

I read somewhere that Ireland has more castles and golf courses, per acre, than anywhere else in the world. I have reservations
about the golf course claim (Myrtle Beach?), but the castle thing is undoubtedly true. They are all over the place and they
usually have English-sounding names. So every time you look around in Ireland there’s a giant house silently screaming, “England
screwed us.”

Some of these places are now tourist hotels. A few are private residences again. Dot-com guys and other rich people own them.
Writers (very successful ones—J. P. Donleavy owns one; that Lord of the Dance guy probably does) own a few, and more than
a few castles are still owned by the ancestors
of the British people who had them built. These people are called the Anglo-Irish. They’ve been in Ireland so long they are
more Irish than English.

A lot of the castles have tours, and we went on a couple of them. Most of the castles were built in the time between the Norman
invasion and Oliver Cromwell’s friendly tour. Most of the older castles are impossible to date because the records were destroyed
in one uprising or another. Historians dated a lot of the Irish castles by finding similar structures in England. There’s
a lot of guesswork.

Norman-era castle life wasn’t really all that lavish. “Living in a castle” was pretty tough. The castles were difficult to
heat, windowless, and the bathrooms were built right into the walls. There was no plumbing, so it must have smelled terrible
all the time.

By the time of Cromwell, things had improved a bit, but it still wasn’t what you usually think when someone says “castle.”
A lot of the castles have a very tangled history with many owners, Irish and English, depending on who was running the general
Irish show. But, if you go on a tour of one of these castles, it’s difficult not to get the creepy feeling that the whole
massive structure is just a giant reminder of English oppression.

The tour guide usually avoids certain awkward facts. Here is an all-purpose castle tour history:

Lord Muck was visiting some of his money and one day he just happened to be passing through Gaelic Lough when he “fell in
love” with the place. He ordered his driver to stop and said, “I will build a house right over there next to that cow.”

He built this house as a charming understated place to go in the early to late spring. He had a large family and they
needed a large house. That’s what they got because there are twelve thousand tons of marble involved in the structure. Ten
laborers died while building the house, and there is an old legend that their spirits inhabit the house, which is convenient
because their bodies are embedded in the plaster-work and floor of the west verandah. On a cold fall night, they are said
to wander the halls. Tourists sleeping at the castle have been known to complain about them!

Lord Muck married a girl named Madeline Blight-Ashen and she apparently loved gardening, or rather she enjoyed looking at
gardening. In the major garden, there are several rare flowers that only bloom once, for ten minutes, every year. Madame bought
enough of them so at least one in the crowd is blooming at all times!