(real) Life in Ireland

A couple of nights ago I pulled into my parking spot in Clonmullen Hall, where I live, about 10:30pm. I was returning from Dublin, a trip that no matter how I do it remains fairly arduous. This time I drove to Kinnegad, a town about 20 minutes from Edenderry, parked the car and took the bus into central Dublin. After a 6pm reading at the Abbey Theatre and a rather unfortunate hotel meal with my cousin Deirdre I took the bus back to Kinnegad and drove home over the nearly pitch black and narrow roads. Driving at night is a challenge I don't relish at the best of times, and tonight I just needed to get home and go to bed.

I hadn't opened the car door when Darren, a smart 12-year-old with a faceful of freckles and an eyebrow piercing, ran up to me. "My uncle's mad for a cigarette. Could he borrow one?" I told Darren that I didn't smoke (a fact I'm sure he was aware of) but he repeated the question, adding that his uncle would get money from the ATM but his card wouldn't be activated until tomorrow. This story isn't as implausible as it sounds, given the hysterical nature of password issuance here when it comes to bank accounts, but I pretended that I didn't understand that he was asking me for money for the cigarettes and just said again that I didn't smoke.

Darren's uncle is undoubtedly one of the statistics here. In Edenderry unemployment has increased 130% since last year. That is not a typo. 130%. This town is now one of Ireland's unemployment 'blackspots', with the third largest unemployment figures of anywhere but the major cities. The effects have been swift and highly visible. Storefront after storefront is vacant here. Men are visible in the streets all day long, hanging out in front of the two types of businesses that seem to be stable, pubs and bookies. The level of litter has risen even since I came here, one sign of a community that has given up its sense of pride. Today the manicurist, chattering in a strong Irish lilt to me during my pedicure (the first attention my nails have gotten since I came), told me that she has gone from full time work in the salon to working two days a week, and that there is barely enough work to sustain those two days. She lives at home, as many young people do, in the same house where she grew up. To most of the people that I meet, California is a place they see on the telly.

Darren being sent by his uncle to hit me up for fag money was most likely precipitated by my paying four of the neighborhood kids to wash my car. This was a mistake, since it sent the signal that somehow hadn't occurred to anyone before: that I was an American with money. The four girls did a fantastic job with the car wash, especially considering how filthy it was after two months of driving on country roads and the fact that there is no outside hose. They did it with a bucket and some thin rags. James, one of their endless stream of cousins, showed up late and was given the job of washing the wheels. I paid each of the girls €5. James got €4; as he put it, one for each wheel. Little Kaitlin, age three, who worked away with the rest, got a euro.

Even before Charlene, her sisters and her cousin Shannon finished the car, Charlene's mother (whose name, like mine, is Kathleen) and her friend showed up with an ancient car seat in tow, asking for a ride to the shops 'for baby food'. Evidently the fact that the girls were washing the car gave their mother errand rights. In the time it took me to grab my purse they had managed to cram five people and the baby seat into the back of my Ford Fiesta. When I balked, they sorted themselves out, Charlene took the baby and the car seat off, and the rest of us drove away to the Spar. The shop is on Main Street, perhaps a ten-minute walk. It was an entirely unnecessary trip from the standpoint of driving, but that wasn't the point. I realized that a car ride was a rare occurrence for this family. I'm not sure what they bought at the Spar--I waited in the car with the two little ones--but I don't think it was baby food, judging from the size of the two bundles and the sour smell of alcohol coming from the back seat. On the way back we stopped at the chipper to get some takeaway for Jessica, the daughter of Kathleen's friend.

On the night I turned down Darren's request for fag money, Kathleen and her friend, who were as usual sitting on Kathleen's front stoop and drinking, called me over for a conversation. I climbed the stairs to their apartment reluctantly; I was not in the mood for a chat, especially with someone who was drunk. When I got there Kathleen said something to me about electricity. (She has no teeth, and between that and the slurred speech I sometimes have a difficult time understanding her.) I had to ask her to tell me again what she meant. As I was listening to her I slowly realized that the house behind her--the front door was open--was completely dark, and it began to dawn on me that she had an electric meter inside that needed replenishing but she had run out of money to top it up.

Later, with the hindsight of remorse, I realized that what I should have done was to ask where the meter was and whether it took coins or just the card she was trying to tell me about. What I knew was that I couldn't hand her cash, since there would have been no possibility that it would have been used to activate the meter, even if she had been able to top up the card at 11pm. I told her that I couldn't help her right then but said I would check in the morning to see what she needed. Then I left for my place, where I sat up for a long time worrying about what I had not done.

This incident was, luckily for me, forgotten, or forgiven. I suspect that they took a shot, missed, and moved on. Kathleen sends Victoria for my phone from time to time, and the girls sometimes ask if I have work for them. I have been photographing the kids here, and I am making prints for them. I plan to put prints of the three girls, Charlene, Victoria, and Kaitlin, in small frames. One photo posted here is of Charlene and Kaitlin; the other is Victoria. I will miss these girls, all the more for knowing that the childhood they are having now, in a dark apartment with a toothless, alcoholic mother in a town that exudes anything but hope, may be the best time they will ever have.

Bloom

Ireland's main garden show has its eye on the Chelsea Flower Show as both a model and a goal. Having been to both, I would say that the Irish show has a way to go but that Chelsea could watch its back just a bit. Bloom takes place in Phoenix Park on the edge of Dublin, an enormous swath of land that is, at over 700 acres, the largest enclosed urban park in Europe. On a hot bank holiday Monday the park was already jammed when I got there about 10:30. This was virtually the first decent weather that we had had, and everyone was wandering about in tank tops and sandals. The scene reminded me of the parks in London on the first real summer day; the very pale-skinned office workers bask in the sunshine, and you can practically feel the heat of their sunburns rising off of them as you walk by. Irish skin is if anything even more delicate; they should have been handing out sunscreen along with the The Irish Times at the gate.

         My friend Isobel and I have an annual day out at the San Francisco Garden Show, and I was curious to see how our show held up to Bloom. No contest: Bloom sweeps San Francisco right off the garden plot. The first thing I noticed were the number of families. Kids are free at Bloom, and families obviously take full advantage of this. (Otherwise the tickets are very expensive, at €25, or nearly $40, for an adult. This was a splurge of a day for me.) Isobel and I go to the garden show during the week, so we may not see how many kids come on the weekend, but for Dubliners this was clearly a family day; I think the San Francisco demographic is quite different.

         This show had everything. Inside the main hall there were elaborately constructed wedding bowers, but there was also a gorgeous display of produce in carefully constructed mounds. The Irish Craft Council is given major space in the retail hall; ceramists were throwing pots on a small wheel next to the stalls selling garden tools and outdoor ware. Of course there were weavers. I spent a long time talking with the stone carvers, and will try to get to one of their studios before I leave.

         The show gardens, all outdoors, were small miracles of scale and freedom. There were truly teeny plots along one side, dressed up to resemble cottage gardens in an Irish village. There was a replica in small scale of Darwin's garden to mark his 200th birthday, with markers explaining how he grew various weeds to test their survival ability. The best of the larger gardens were characterized by their embrace of the natural, as if the gardeners had come along a month earlier and scattered seed in the wet earth, although of course every inch of these gardens is planned down to the last detail. There was very little of the relentless hardscape plans we always see in San Francisco, since it's in the hardscape that money is made. When there was hardscape here it went all the way: one garden had nothing but long bright red sticks stuck in gravel to represent plants. The winning garden seemed somewhat mundane to me, but that might be because it resembled so many I have seen in San Francisco (and indeed at my only visit to Chelsea, which by the way was with Isobel's sister Tess): careful planting, walkways, the table set up with wine glasses, a water feature or two, and the latest garden must-have, a plant wall. I fell in love with a garden that looked like it had been gently flown in whole from a back garden in the country here, although the one with the chickens was a close second.

         Phoenix Park contains a walled garden of several acres which forms part of the show. It is planted in vegetables except for a massive herbaceous border that is planted in precise mirror image on both sides of the main path. While Isobel would have been appalled at number of plant names I have forgotten, I was able to identify catmint to two women looking at the herbaceous bed. (This might be because the stuff grows practically wild in my front yard, the only plants to manage to look healthy throughout the long dry summer.)

         What San Francisco definitely does not have at its garden show is food. At Bloom there is a building entirely devoted to Irish artisanal food products, nearly every one of them offering generous tastes. I had goat and sheep's cheeses, hummous, pickles, bread, sausages of all sorts, and as many jams, preserves, chutneys and relishes as I could have possibly wanted to eat. There were chocolate bars, truffles, and desserts piled high, and although I tend toward the savory rather than the sweet I did notice that the purveyors of sweets were far less generous with their samples than was everyone else. Perhaps they have found it isn't worth it, as people will buy their biscuits, scones and crumbles anyway.

         After all the tasting, lunch wasn't much of a necessity, which was a pity, since there was a very decent looking glassed-in cafe in the center of the show grounds. (Just outside the cafe was a replica of the new White House vegetable garden, an Irish homage to America's new regime.) What I did eat was a plateful of organic, vegan, raw salads. Every one of the six salads I chose was handmade and incredibly fresh. I loved them all, although I now know that eating raw chickpeas, even well prepared, is not something I should do with my allergies.

         I was of course not able to buy any of the thousands of plants on offer. What I came away with was a small wheel of sheep's cheese, tied with raffia, that still held the imprint of the cheesecloth it had been aged in, a small round of honey and garlic goat's cheese, a container of hummous (about which the sales person said, It should keep for awhile, I made it last night), and a tiny glass jar of sweet pepper relish. I took the sheep's cheese as a hostess gift to the barbecue I was invited to that evening; it was slightly sharp, smooth, and delicious.