Slán

Whatever else I expected of my last day in Ireland, it wasn't to be captured in an extended frenzy of girls trying to understand how someone could be leaving them. I knew that saying goodbye to these girls, especially Charlene and Claudia, would be difficult for me; what I hadn't thought about was how their world is constricted in ways far more profound than the geography of their perimeters. For Charlene and her sisters especially, their knowledge of place barely extends beyond the locations they can walk to. A car ride is a rare treat. They have no vacations. Their annual school tour day takes them as far away from their center as they are likely to get in a year. For all of the girls the concept of travel across time zones is unimaginable. When they first heard from me about the time difference between Ireland and California they kept asking, What time is it now in California? What are they doing back there now? as they tried to grapple with the knowledge that my daughters were sleeping when I was so clearly awake. After many frustrating attempts to understand one of them finally tried to find an end to the confusion by asking, Which time do you like better, California's or ours?

In the morning I managed to slip out of their grasp for a short time. I headed to the main shopping street (some say the longest high street in Ireland, which is not a compliment) on a couple of errands. When I got there after the short walk, one of the banks was tranferring its cash. In Ireland this is a frightening scenario. The vicinity of the bank is surrounded by a convoy of black Range Rovers with blocked-out window glass. They are parked around the armored truck that is actually collecting the money. The Range Rovers are there to dispatch the guards, six or seven beefy men with closely shaved haircuts dressed in military camouflage. They stand at various posts on the street holding sub-machine guns, the straps across their chests and their fingers on the triggers. The men, seven or eight in all, look like the photos of mercenary soldiers in the news; they are not smiling. In addition to the private guards there are always at least two police cars belonging to the local Gardaí parked so as to force traffic away from the armored truck. This is a reminder of the raw violence that accompanied Ireland's quest for sovereignty, although the über-machismo of the scene also smacks of theatricality and a slightly over-extended hysteria. Later in the day as I walked into Tesco, an armored truck was also there, parked in front of the supermarket. The driver stood next to the open door of the truck; a Tesco employee in an apron and a name badge was transferring large bags of cash into a shopping cart. There wasn't a submachine gun in sight.

After an early lunch at the Eden Deli (temporarily the Ede Deli; some creep stole their N) and a last visit with the warm and caring Niamh, I headed back to the apartment and the full onslaught of my girls. For most of the day there were five of them with me: Charlene, 13, the eldest of her family; Victoria, 7, Charlene's sister; Shannon, 12, their cousin and the sly one in the group, always looking out for what she can get; a second Charlene, 9, pale and shy, with a face that nearly always looks on the verge of tears; and finally little Kaitlin, the younger sister of Charlene and Victoria, whose speech at age 3 consists of drawn-out yowls instead of words. Two other girls, Claudia, my upstairs neighbor, age 6, and her friend, another Shannon, who is slightly older than Claudia but looks more like 10 because of her size, stay at the fringes of the group. I have noticed that Claudia and Charlene and her sisters seem to have some antipathy, which I suspect has to do with the rough situation in which Charlene's family lives (see my earlier post), which sadly has a great deal of truth to it.

On the Saturday night of Claire's visit as we were relaxing in my apartment after a long day, I remarked how quiet the apartment complex was. But when I opened the window to prove my point we heard screams cutting across the still night. They were as harsh as I've heard, and they were coming from Charlene's mother; I recognized her voice even through the shrieks of her yelling, which pushed her voice up a good octave above it's normal tone. As we listened, an ambulance came slowly around the corner and pulled up in front of their apartment; half an hour later it left, the lights inside indicating that someone was riding in the back.

On Monday everything seemed back to normal. I talked with Charlene briefly, relieved to see that she and her ever-present sisters were okay. On Tuesday I ran into my landlord, who told me that the Collinses were being evicted from the apartment after the incident. My landlord, a kind man, is worried about them. He has found them places to live before, but this time Charlene's dad, who just got out of prison, is so out of control with drugs that no one will have them. I'm not sure if the family even knew yet about the eviction. Donal, my landlord, asked me if Charlene had started drinking. His question shocked me out of some sort of complacency or blindness about the true hopelessness of her situation. No, I responded. Not yet.

For now, Charlene is careful about accepting things from me. I have learned that if I want to give her or her family something, anything, I have to offer it to her in a bag so that others in the apartment complex don't see what she is carrying. She told me once that if she is seen accepting goods or money, the people living around her will accuse her of begging.

When I returned from my lunch (salmon quiche, excellent as always) all six of us, the five girls and I, headed to the library. I had books to return and some to donate to the collection, plus I was bringing the fiction books I had gathered while I was here to be distributed at the launch of the new book club that would take place that evening. Each girl wanted to carry something to help me. Kaitlin clutched a large library book to her chest and held onto it for dear life for the entire walk. When we got there the library was closed, so we marched back home. One more errand to accomplish later. We left Kaitlin at home for the trip to the recycle, a rather unsavory place on the edge of town that is anything but safe for little ones. After paying my €3, a disincentive to recycle if ever there was one, the four girls pitched in and we got the contents of my trunk, a good two months of paper, glass and plastic, distributed to the right bins in record time.

The girls wanted to help me pack, but by mid-afternoon they were restless and started pushing me to drive them to a hill they knew of outside Edenderry. Since I was reluctant to drive somewhere that could easily be much further than the 10 minutes' distance they promised, I ended up loading four of them in the car (Kaitlin being enticed back home by Charlene, since I refused to take more of them than I had seatbelts for, not to mention the lack of carseat for her) to make one more drive to Ballinderry. I knew Alan and Eleanor were at work, so we couldn't go into the house. This time I stopped at the front gate as I had done the first day I arrived , and told the girls that my mother was born in the house they could see in the distance. This was difficult for them to comprehend--sometimes it has been even for me. The house looks so big, sitting at the end of the avenue; it's only when you enter it that the scale of the place becomes intimate. After a minute or so of silence, one of them asked how many bedrooms it had. Seven, I answered. Although that sounded like a lot of bedrooms, putting a number to the rooms gave it a more human scale.

After pausing at Ballinderry we called in at Nodlaig's. I knew she would like to meet the girls, and I could also demonstrate to her why I would be late in getting to her house, the last stop of my last day in the countryside. We arrived to an already full house (Nodlaig adores visitors and tends to have lots of them; this time there was a big contingent loading turf into her shed), so I simply introduced the girls and we headed back to town. I still had what I thought was one more trip, which turned out to be two, to the post office, and very little packing was finished.

In the end I simply began to toss stuff in the car in the knowledge that I could pack in earnest once I got to Dublin and Dierdre's, even though I knew she and Eric wouldn't entirely appreciate the relative chaos. The two trips to the post office were made with all five girls in the car: the distance was very short, and arguing about the number of seatbelts seemed silly at this point, even to me. On the first trip I bought everyone an ice cream, begging them not to get it all over the back seat.

Back at the apartment the girls helped me clean, and Charlene and Shannon arranged the cushions and bricabrac that I had put away when I first moved in. Shannon is good at helping; her mother has taught her well about cleaning, and she sees what needs to be done.

Claudia came to the front door as I was beginning to show signs of stress over the level of noise in the house, with four of them saying, Kathleen, where does this go?, Kathleen, is this yours?, Kathleen, should we make the bed? Kathleen, do you want to save this? Kathleen, can I have this bowl/pillow/candle/pen/notebook? Claudia has something for you! someone shouted. I went to the door and there she was, with a small bag in her hands. The bag held a tiny plastic box and a card. Inside the box was a crystal angel, about two inches high, a travelling angel to guard me on my journey. The card said Miss You on the front and was signed by Claudia. For the first time since I began my many goodbyes I cried; I would miss her too.

Finally, it was time for me to leave. Charlene and Shannon wrestled my suitcase into the car and swept through the apartment one more time to see if anything was missed. Until the very last goodbye one or the other of them kept asking, Do you have to leave? Will you be staying in your apartment one more night? When will you be back? I will miss these wonderful, intrusive, sweet, infuriating girls. I drove off knowing that I would more than likely never see most or all of them again, and hoping that they might remember me from time to time on their own journeys, whatever those might turn out to be. They were nearly the first people to greet me when I arrived, and they were the last, except for Nodlaig, to wave goodbye. They were so much a part of the place that I got to know and to love, a place so full of life and so lacking in hope, the place of my ancestors, this small island that has been my home for the past three months.

(almost) goodbye

My last days here are nothing like my first. Then I was a tourist; now if I don't exactly live here, I am leaving behind friends, cousins I never knew before, spaces I have grown to love, people I didn't get to know well but would like to.

Yesterday, the penultimate day, I again met the walking group that has recently formed here. We left the Parish Centre at 9am for a short walk to an area at the edge of Edenderry that I hadn't seen before, a charming neighborhood full of pristine gardens and the occasional horse pasture. As we crossed over the canal on the way back into town I noticed that the space just below the bridge where people normally park their cars when walking along the canal path was now filled with small caravans, the rather romantic word here for camper vans, a sign that the Travellers are in residence, as I"m told they usually are this time of year.

Seeing the caravans reminded me about the most extraordinary scene that Claire and I came across as we drove to Cork. We were heading south on one of the main highways, not quite the motorway but a wide two-lane road. As we rounded a curve I was distracted by a lorry parked along the side of the road, the driver tinkering with his engine, while behind it was a car with its hood up, steam pouring out of it. But slowly my mind registered another far more stunning occurrence in front of us. Two huge bright red Barry's Tea semitrailers, one behind the other, were approaching us from the opposite side of the highway. In front of the first truck two horses were coming at full tilt straight down the roadway. Their black-and-white manes were flying in the air as they galloped in perfect unison while the two trucks followed closely behind. For a brief moment the combination of horses and red trucks made me think this was a circus stunt, but somewhere in my mind I also suspected I must be hallucinating. As I concentrated on avoiding the various potential hazardous obstacles--lorry, overheated car, semitrailers, horses--horses?--Claire and I were aghast at what we were seeing. Later, Alan told us that the horses belonged to Travellers. When they set their animals to graze on borrowed land they don't tie them up in case of the need for a quick getaway. If the horses stray to the roads they often panic and begin to run. Once that happens they just run until they exhaust themselves. But when they passed us going at their great speed they looked like they could run forever down that highway.

After the walk we headed for the ring road behind Dunnes Stores, one of the town's two supermarkets. We put on our gloves, picked up our litter pickers, and moved along the chain link fence picking up the discarded cans, bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags and whatever other detritus had been tossed there from moving cars or blown in from the Dunnes car park. This initiative, to help clean up the town, began at the inaugural meeting of Edenderry Women in Business; when someone asked me what I most disliked about Ireland I answered that there was a disturbing amount of litter everywhere, and that Edenderry was unfortunately one of the worst places I had seen. The next week our new walking group picked one of the entrances to Edenderry and spent about two hours cleaning it up. Since this is a small town the women were easily able to marshall help in the form of a trailer to haul off the trash, the donation of litter bags, and even a man with a portable pressure washer who sprayed the town sign and the park bench at the bus stop. Later that week we all got our picture in the paper, and the tidy town initiative was off and running.

I left the cleaning crew after an hour or so begin some packing and to change; I was having lunch with a friend I had met at Alan and Eleanor's. Grattan is a retired banker whose professional career was spent in London except for a glorious six months in Chicago, which he managed to stretch to seven by refusing to leave, when he was 30. Grattan lives in the family pile, an elegant and much added-to Georgian big house set, as the big houses here always are, in the midst of pastureland and reached via a long, curvy drive under a canopy of mature beeches. I entered Drummond through a square formal hall with a simple eighteenth-century wooden bench as the only furniture. These entry halls are always built into the houses here, as a transition into the house proper and also no doubt as a buffer against the cold and rain and a place for visitors to wait while the servant checks to see whether the master or mistress of the house would like to see them. At home I have three small wooden rosewood chairs, late nineteenth century, that would have been in the hall at Ballinderry when my grandmother was there. These chairs are not really meant for sitting; someone infirm might perch on the edge, but they were there for decoration, not the comfort of the guests. At Ballindoolin the front hall is huge, much larger than most other houses of its size, and the outside door, always called the hall door here, is equally outsized. The door and hall were built to accommodate a horse and rider; evidently Mr Bor, the original owner, loved to make a memorable entrance by riding right through the door and dismounting in the hall. Over the years the heavy door worked its way loose due to the strain of the weight on the hinges. In 1993 Bobby Tyrrell, my cousin, a frail and elderly man living alone in the 32-room house, opened the door one last time. It fell on him and killed him. He was found with a revolver in his pocket, the same one he had carried every day for his entire adult life.

Going through into Drummond's second central hall, the interior one where the real life of the house begins, was like stepping back into the eighteenth century. The house is gorgeous, filled with formal mahogany furniture and carpets. The curved staircase is deftly carved with simply filigree details, and there are paintings, mostly formal portraits, hanging from every picture rail. Grattan led me into the small sitting room where he obviously spends most of his time. There are two small slipcovered chairs set on either side of the cozy hearth. Matching bookcases flank the walls behind the chairs; a small and fairly ancient television sits in one corner. The formal drawing room can be glimpsed through the door opposite where I sat, a large room with a piano at one end and some soft and worn furniture grouped around the much larger hearth. When lunch was announced by Mary, the day woman who comes in to cook and clean for Grattan, we walked through the drawing room into the dining room, where the long table was set at one end for two, with starters (mushroom and onion compote) on our plates along with a basket of brown bread. When we finished the starter Grattan cleared while Mary brought in the main course, which she set on the sideboard. We helped ourselves from china tureens using large, heavy silver serving spoons to lamb chops, new potatoes, carrots, and peas, the meat, potatoes and two veg that are an inevitable offering at any meal here but breakfast. Grattan poured the wine, which we drank in the presence of the wigged ancestors looking sternly down at us from three walls of the room. The fourth wall had a huge fanlight window from which I could watch the cattle in the pasture just beyond the gravel drive. At lunch Grattan told me that his grandfather, a rather hard-up doctor who was the fifth of nine children, had inherited the house from a dear friend who had himself inherited the place but would die childless. Evidently when the original owner first got Drummond it was rather worn down. He invited his mother-in-law to help with the renovation, which she did by taking literally every stick of furniture, every painting, every piece of paper, even some of the books, out of the house, piling them up, and lighting a bonfire.

After dessert (fruit salad with cream), cheese (two kinds) and coffee in demitasse cups we went back to the sitting room and spent a very pleasant couple of hours talking about local history, for which Grattan has both a passion and a vast store of personal knowledge.

Our conversation went on much longer than it should have, so that by the time I arrived at Frank and Phyllis's house tea was well under way. In contrast to Grattan's sanctuary of quiet and order, Frank and Phyll's small cottage, Clayton House, is a crazy admixture of artifacts that reflects the lives of two long-married people very curious about the world around them. Outside, rusting farm implements are propped outside venerable but run-down stone outbuildings next to children's toys. Dogs and cats roam freely, the dogs nuzzling you as soon as you open the car door. Inside, paper, boxes, bric-a-brac, books, souvenirs of their many trips, pottery, piles of videos and the accumulation of the hundred or so years that the family has owned the house fill nearly every inch of the rooms; when one person wants to go from one point to another in the sitting room everyone needs to shift position to let them through. Frank no longer farms, but his son Philip has taken over, so behind the house there are both the old stone barns that would have been in active use before the turn of the twentieth century and the huge new barn that serves the current operation. Frank and Phyll's daughter was visiting from Cork with her children, and Philip's daughters were there as well. Phyll had also invited Sheila, a neighbor and a Tyrrell just like everyone else in the room. The tea turns out to have been in my honor; I was horribly embarrassed to have been so late although I hadn't any idea that they were planning this in the first place. I drank tea and ate brack (fruit bread) and butter, leaving the cakes to the kids and hoping that nobody noticed I wasn't eating them (they did, alas).

At 6:30 I raced off to get home in time to change again before heading over to Ballindoolin to meet Esther for dinner. I could scarcely imagine having to eat another meal, but I had invited Esther out to thank her for the warm hospitality she had shown me. We were going to Furey's, a local pub with exceptional food and the atmosphere that used to be prevalent in Ireland but has largely disappeared. Claire and I had had lunch there her first day in Ireland. At that meal we had burgers at one of the inside tables on a cool, damp day. This time Esther and I sat on the patio and ordered salmon and salad. The patio overlooks the canal, this one with a picturesque canal boat moored there instead of Travellers' caravans. The evening was balmy, and we sat there chatting until I began to feel the real pressure of needing to head back home to pack. I was leaving the next day and could no longer put off the inevitable clearing out that I had so far managed to resist during my long goodbye to Ireland.

Claire comes to Ireland

Claire's been back home for five days after her visit here, already hard at work at Borone's Cafe. For Claire our seven days together was her first trip to Ireland, her first time to meet relatives neither of us knew before now, her first visit to Ballinderry, her first Irish chips, her first Guinness (ordered at the pub by her--drinking age is 18 in Ireland). For me it was my vacation from sitting in frigid rooms (even in June) reading bad nineteenth-century handwriting. It was my first trip out of the Midlands since I've been here, my first really good meal, my first time to visit Cork without Nora (so remembering the great time we had there together a few years ago). Mostly it was a chance to spend time with one of my children, all of whom I have been missing so much, to catch up with what Claire has been doing since I left, to hear about her thoughts about the future, and to show her where I have been for the past three intense months.

Cork, which is about three hours from the place I have been living, is a vibrant city on the southern coast. Nora went to school at the University for a semester during her junior year. This time Claire and I stayed in a B&B just across the street from Nora's old campus. We spent the days in the countryside and the nights in the city, the perfect arrangement. The best meal I've had since I've been here was in the resort town of Kinsale. While the town itself is a bit too similar to the crowded tourist towns on the Maine or Massachusetts coasts, the steady influx of tourists does help to support the local restaurants, including one of the best-known ones, Fishy Fishy. Irish foodies tend to worship at its fins; having eaten a superb lunch of mackerel on the sun-drenched patio I now understand why.

Both nights Claire and I were in Cork we went to the theatre. The first night we sat around the perimeter of an open space on the 17th floor of a government building at the edge of the city where we saw a highly updated version of the Medea story. This one began with some backstory coming through a cleverly hidden tape recorder on the elevator ride up. This medEia, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, had three actors manipulating Barbie and Ken dolls in ancient Greek get-ups through the traditional story, complete with numerous inexplicable references to pop lyrics, mostly from Beatles songs. The very best part of the production was the use of a 40- or 50-gallon fish tank, complete with goldfish, to represent the Argonaut, Barbie Medea and Ken Jason riding in glory on top. The actors pushed the tank across the performance space while the fish sloshed around inside.

The second night we saw the kind of play that most kids would be horribly embarrassed to see with a parent. In fact, while we waited for the opening of Slick in a 50-seat black box theatre behind the Cork Opera House, the person behind us remarked that this was the kind of play an actor wouldn't want his parents to see. Uh-oh. The play was billed as adult, even though the main character was a nine-year-old boy who loved to skateboard and whose only wish was that his horribly abusive parents would buy him a helmet. The characters were all presented as puppets, although according to Claire, not at all like those used in Avenue Q. Comparing notes afterwards, Claire and I agreed that the script was simply gross in a way that managed to nearly completely undermine the allegorical comic-book tale of greed, the sort of meta-greed that big oil companies suffer from. Still, the staging was nothing short of brilliant, and Claire is far too sophisticated to be concerned about sitting next to me while something potentially offensive is going on onstage.

To me the sightseeing highlight of our trip to Cork was our tour of Bantry House, a much-added-to eighteenth century mansion an hour or so west of Cork. The house overlooks Bantry Bay, and comes with the usual extensive gardens, this one including 100 steps reaching up to the hills behind the house. Claire held out her camera and took a photo of us at the top of the steps. We also visited an enormous ruined castle, where Claire found a door designed for her height (and we had had another great lunch at a German cafe), and we drove along the gentle west Cork coast.

On the way home we decided to stop in Tulamore to go to the movies, something I hadn't done since I'd been here in this country in which very few towns have cinemas. Our choices were severely limited, but we finally decided on I Love You, Man, a fluffy romantic comedy that Claire had actually seen (she went to the premiere in Westwood and ended up having her photo taken with the star, Paul Rudd). We were a bit late for the start of the movie. As we groped our way to seats in the very dark theatre it dawned on us that we were the only two people in the room. And, as we walked through the lobby afterwards, we realized that even though it was Friday night at the multi-plex the place was like a ghost town, another casualty of the recession here (or maybe they needed to choose better movies).

We went to Dublin twice, once for Bloomsday (June 16th, the first full day of Claire's visit) and once to have dinner with my first cousin Deirdre, her husband Eric and some of their family. But first we went to the World Street Performance Championship in Merrion Square, the heart of Georgian Dublin. Two of the three acts we saw were Americans, as it turned out. One, who billed himself as a piano juggler, told us after his act that had just moved to South Carolina from Santa Cruz where he had been based for 50 years. He said he didn't perform so much these days but that the Dublin championship was so lucrative he couldn't pass it up. It's astonishing that a country so mired in economic woes still opens its pockets when the hat is passed.

In between all the touristing we visited Ballinderry (where Claire met the horses up close), Ballindoolin, Grange Castle, and the wonderful Nodlaig, who welcomed us with tea into her cozy bungalow. For me Claire's visit was one of the very best parts of my time here. It was great to have a travel companion, especially one who did all of the map reading. So much of my anxiety about driving here has been tied to not knowing where I am going; Claire read our atlas so brilliantly that we almost never got lost, and I could relax and just steer the car. Claire's very bad allergies nearly wrecked the trip for her, but she refused to allow them to slow us down. When she left I started the last phase of my stay here, the recent memory of our little vacation always fresh in my mind.

Dinner party

I finally got up the nerve, after nearly three months here, to have a small dinner party. The limitations of my kitchen are challenging, despite the amount of counter space. The electric stove isn't regulated and the heat is very difficult to control. The fridge is an under-the-counter model that would be at home in a dorm room. Generally it doesn't keep food cold enough except when turned up a bit, when it freezes all the produce. I have exactly three dinner plates. Until last night, when I discovered just before my guests arrived that one was broken, I had two wine glasses. The silverware was probably bought by the landlord for picnics, then 'donated' here when it got too funky. Still, I really wanted to thank Alan and Eleanor for their incredible generosity over the three months I've been here, and I thought I could do that better with a home-cooked meal than by taking them out to the only passable restaurant in town, to which in any event they had already taken me. So what if I had to figure out clever ways to cook in a wok, a tiny saute pan, a couple of lidded pots and a metal roasting pan.

Finding food to serve was a whole other challenge. My plan to have cold asparagus as a first course was thwarted when I got to my beloved organic farm shop to discover that the season ended last week. But Deirdre O'Sullivan, the farmer, had some gorgeous ripe figs from Spain on the counter, so I bought six. I got a huge head of her red lettuce, and a bag of already cleaned arugula, also from her garden.

I switched from lamb to chicken for the main course, concerned that I wouldn't be able to control the stove well enough to make a lamb dish; the butcher around the corner from my apartment cut up a gorgeous Irish chicken for me. I appealed to Niamh at the Eden Deli, where I had already ordered dessert (a lemon meringue pie) for help with the figs. She sold me a packet of serrano ham and a log of goat cheese and suggested I drizzle honey over the figs before serving them.

I had planned to serve rice with the chicken, but when I dropped by Nodlaig's house in the afternoon there was a lug of new potatoes, just dug out of the ground by Nodlaig's nephew Brendon and still covered with good black Irish soil, waiting for me. I picked out the smallest ones and decided I would boil them up before rolling them in a bit of olive oil, sea salt and pepper.

When Alan and Eleanor arrived the candles were lit and some toasted almonds and olives were waiting. The fig, ham and rocket starter was on the table (I had two nice plates on which to serve them), the Chicken Marbella was in the oven, the potatoes and green beans were ready for their quick boiling, and a salad made from the organic lettuce was on the counter. I even had parsley and thyme grown in my back yard for garnishes.

I'm not sure if the meal was what my guests had in mind--fresh figs were new to them, and the chicken with its olives and figs is unusual despite its long-standing classic reputation in the States--but the conversation was lively, the food got eaten, and I felt that I had been able to express how much their hospitality had meant to me. I'll count the evening a success.