Jaywalking with the Irish (22 page)

The Mondays passed, the mellow evenings lengthened, and the kids’ schools were all closed at the very beginning of June. Collecting children on their last day of classes is always a touching rite of passage, especially when it serves as a benchmark of a year on foreign shores. Our three were scarcely the same kids we had dropped off in the eagerness of early September, countless uniform stains ago. They were inches taller, their accents had altered, and their presences were larger as they stood in their schoolyards surrounded by beaming friends who were no longer foreign but as familiar as those left behind in Connecticut. The eyes moistened at the thought of all this, and the fact that they would be on our hands nonstop –
for three months
.

A wonderful sailing camp near Kinsale launched their summer happily, and we proudly watched Laura tack across the jeweled bay, handling this challenge as if it were an easy metaphor for the much larger voyage upon which she and her brothers had embarked. In the evenings we played chess, the kids having gotten quite shrewd at that pastime, as phenomenal numbers of children do in Ireland, what with the country’s affinity for caginess of all kinds.

Eventually, the time came for a follow-up meeting with another exec at Thomas Crosbie Holdings. In most places, an interview of similar importance would be fraught with straightforward probes to challenge and inspire personal revelations about why one felt qualified for a particular job. But nothing about this session and this individual squared with my expectations. His longish hair was parted in the middle, his spectacles horn-rimmed, his fingers worrying at the knot of a stylish silk tie knotted above an academically plaid shirt – as if the point of the meeting was to discuss Joyce or Yeats. Adding to the confusion was the fact the man was formerly
the editor of the town’s afternoon tabloid newspaper, the
Evening Echo
, whose paperboys sing the name through Cork’s streets with a skip in their voices that is meant to, well, echo and echo. “I imagine you’re quite well versed in Cork culture by now,” he feinted. This wasn’t phrased as a question, yet I wondered whether I was supposed to recite some list of bona fides, or perhaps launch into a personal rendition of “Maggie.”

“I’ve met a tremendous number of people here,” I started. “I love Cork, and this magazine will be a tribute to the town and county’s dynamism.”

“Your enthusiasm is apparent. But how do you envision the ownership structure being formulated?”

Hold on there, I hadn’t finished responding to the opening gambit, and already we were galloping off on a new tangent.

I just smiled and laid out my plans for the great publishing venture. The paid consultants nodded and settled into their chairs while their billing meters whirled.

“We think the idea is worthy of further consideration,” the interviewer concluded, disappearing before my elaborate portfolio of sample covers and articles could be presented.

Attempts to arrange a casual follow-up lunch failed. Phone calls and emails were not returned. So there was no surprise when June ended with a runic note indicating that, for reasons unexplained, windfalls of investment capital, sometimes called “dosh” in Ireland, would not be blowing my way. The subtext seemed to say that I was not yet long enough in Cork to be considered bankable. It felt as if my shiny new Irish identity was still painfully tentative. Back in the U.S. I could walk into a business presentation and confidently anticipate every nuance. But in Ireland there remained a slipperiness underfoot, as if some part of myself had still not arrived across the sea. The question nagged as to whether I could provide for my family, with this or any project here. Had I perhaps been pursuing a fantasy all the Irish while? Was our excursion nothing more than a lark now needing to be curtailed so that we could return to the stability of our previous lives? Night after night, Jamie and I pondered and talked. I fretted that Ireland was doing to us what it had done to every invader, seafarer, and planter who had
landed over the centuries – dizzying our bearings, and confusing our direction.

“There are other fish in the sea. You’ve got to give this thing more time,” Jamie said. “We’ve only played half our hand here.”

She was right.

We made plans for a holiday in the U.S., while in the meantime squeezing in various lunches and get-togethers with Irish friends who might offer words of wisdom. “You absolutely must stay; we’re only just getting to know you, and look, you’re all doing beautifully,” said the raven-haired Mary Lynch, whose warm sentiments were seconded by many others.

To add fresh italics to our lives, the Courtmacsherry lifeboat crew took the family out for a voyage far along the coast of West Cork – past the Seven Heads where starving locals used to race to the stony shore to retrieve the barrels of maize and rum that washed in from Famine-era shipwrecks, but now blithely lolled about in the summer sun; past Galley Head with its gleaming cliffs topped by timeless pastures and newly hatched holiday haciendas; past Glandore with its spectacular yacht-dotted bay where a few commercial fishermen still plied their ancient trade. The light on the water was heaven-sent, the journey a reverie of Ireland old and new.

That evening a great throng materialized on Courtmac’s main street. It was time for the village’s annual horse race on the mudflats exposed by the ebbing tide. Shafts of silver flooded through the clouds as the riders in green-and-gold jackets walked their steeds forward. As if out of nowhere, country men with tweed caps and rugged, time-worn faces gathered in clumps, while gnomic bookmakers unfolded slate tote boards on which to offer their odds. Freckled children wheeled about with fistfuls of sweets, and suddenly it looked as if Ireland had never changed. The first contestants gathered beside a huge oval that a tractor had traced in the wet sand, and Laura shouted, “That’s Gavin! He’s from my school!”

So we wagered a fiver on the young jockey just before the starter’s pistol fired. What unfolded was spellbinding, the galloping steeds hurtling beside incandescent waters, the sand flying at their
heels, a rainbow exploding overhead to create the aura of a dream. We lost our dosh, but won something else.

As the sun set and the moon rolled on high, I walked along the strand, reflecting back over our year now finished. Inevitably I thought of Bun, and could almost feel his presence, like a shade, keeping a brisk stride beside me in the twilight, pointing toward discoveries large and small. “Good man yourself, you haven’t done a bad job, not at all,” I could almost hear him whisper. Without Bun I would never have embraced Ireland so long ago, would never have been so mesmerized by this island and pursued our improbable adventure. I stepped down that lonely Irish beach and suddenly began to rejoice, thinking my transplanted family had completed a great circle of becoming on these shores, with profound indebtedness to my old friend.

“Every person I meet makes me larger,” Bun once said to me. Well, I was immeasurably larger for having known him, and now thanks to so many new friends in Ireland, my wife and kids were too. When each of us befriended another person here, when we were astonished by the outpourings of imagination and mirth that this society of storytellers tossed around like goblets of inspiration – well, we were passing on gifts first presented from Bun to myself, and in some not insignificant way passed ineluctably forward.

“Only enough to kill a hardened sinner,” Bun had said of his magic carrot elixir, but of course he was speaking of the incarnate spirit of Ireland, which by now seemed to be our element, too.

I wandered back to the village and found my family caught up in a sidewalk conversation with Gavin and his parents and many siblings. Looking back over everything that had happened, I could only conclude that we had done the right thing. But our departure to revisit the States loomed.

Our return to the U.S. in late July brought many reckonings, some salutary and some not. True, certain accents encountered on our first stop in Jamie’s New Jersey turf were grating enough to send one running for the nearest earplugs, if only the heat wasn’t so
hellishly torpid as to discourage walking to the next room. “It’s a scorcher,” they say in Cork when the temperature is about as mild as an April breeze. An American “scorcher” could reduce an Irishman to a puddle, and I was gasping for the more moderate, albeit fickle, weather of our adopted land. But the ocean in New Jersey, while not remotely as beautiful as the coast of Cork, can be swum in for as long as one likes, without shrieking for the warmth of terra firma. The grilled hamburgers and steaks, the clams, sweet corn, ice cream, pizza, bagels, nachos, and junk food beyond naming were all much more indulgently satisfying, even if the strip developments that purveyed the stuff looked more nightmarishly ugly than anything Ireland has yet produced. Jamie’s family surrounded us with warmth, and even our young German shepherd, whom the in-laws had nurtured during our absence, responded as if we had only left the week before.

Our house in Connecticut, the next stop, seemed like a haven only fools could have ever left. By day, the kids swam in the lake, and in the evenings we had a string of those leisurely, mosquito-ridden barbecues that are the hallmark of an American summer – sixteen nights in a row featured visits by friends close and far, and my side of the family. Young Owen, who seemed to never eat in Ireland, suddenly wouldn’t stop. “I only grow in America,” he explained.

Yet many aspects of life there remained disenchanting. At the beach, the different cliques assembled in their usual spots, with invisible lines drawn in the sand around each one, and hardly a smile passed between the locals and the New York weekenders. Things work like that in present-day America, where people can let you know with one turn of the head that your conversation will be a burden, rather than joining together in the free-flowing exchange that is Irish life. I myself grew introspective.

One night we drove thirteen miles to the nearest watering hole in a chintz-bedecked New England inn – a distance that anywhere in Cork would offer a dozen talk-filled pubs. Several people inside well knew that we had returned from an unusual experience, but studiously paid little heed, indifference being one way to show
superiority in our part of the States. A great Irish-American talker who had made a killing on Wall Street cast a wan smile our way before mouthing, “How ya doing?”

“Great. We’re just back from a year in Ireland.”

“Really? Must have been interesting,” he perfunctorily muttered before retreating to his table of fancy friends.

“Book the next flight,” I said to Jamie. In Ireland, people with whom one has only passing familiarity scuttle forward with enthusiastic salutations and earnest questions after an absence of mere weeks. The climate is not remotely as chilly as in New England, at any season. I got scolded for parking at the wrong angle
at the dump
, of all places. In Ireland, there is no such angle.

Children, at least, are free of such adult games. Ours rejoiced in the kids’ amenities that flourish in America – miniature golf and mighty amusement parks, frog-jumping contests, swimming races, and bicycle parades around the town green; so many indulgences of childhood that the Irish have not yet organized. So we worried about a potential insurrection as our return to Cork neared. But our young travelers barely complained when we headed off for Year Two. After such a huge summer, they actually pined to return to the other half of their dual lives.

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“It’s my go,” screeched Owen as Feidhlim booted a ball down the street toward Harris. The boys had been back on their Cork pavement for mere minutes but the thread was effortlessly rejoined. Laura, meanwhile, had her beak in a phone – excitedly calling her scattered West Cork friends.

A lovely neighbor named Lorraine came by with welcome “home” gifts, and so did Shaun and Breda. The next days brought friendly greetings from even the most casual acquaintances. The stringy-haired musician bowing the bent saw was making his magic off Patrick Street; saucer-eyed crusties beamed over their bongos; and young and old stood at the corners collecting coins for some worthy cause, as they do every single day in Cork. On the pavement beside Brown Thomas, the
Titanic
was being repainted for the thousandth time, just as one would expect.

Nearby stood a new petitioner for attention, this one standing beside placards that read:

To the carnival of life we had returned. But hints arose that our second year in Ireland would be different, beginning the first time I walked into the Hi-B. The eccentric Brian O’Donnell remained absent, and the customers did not look quite so carefree as I’d remembered. A photograph hung ominously on the mirror of the
fellow who had offered a soliloquy a year before about the way Corkonians cherish spontaneity, and who we had put up in our house one spring day after he returned from a long hiatus back in his native Scotland. The photo, I soon learned, was a testament to his recent suicide.

The children returned agreeably to their schools, Jamie to her job at the Cork Opera House, and an international magazine celebrating Ireland’s riches asked for a regular column concerning life in Cork, even as a literary agent in Dublin suggested a meeting there. Meanwhile, I began to devise fresh strategies for launching my
Cork Magazine
. All this seemed to augur well, and I decided to have a haircut in preparation for my trip to “the big smoke,” calling into the Turkish barber on MacCurtain Street. Past sessions had featured no Turks, but rather a Kosovan, Tunisian, Italian, and Glaswegian, all testifying nonetheless to the ever-increasing diversity of modern Cork life.

This time, Ahmad, the swarthy fellow with the black ponytail and gold neck-chains, was waiting.

He didn’t like Americans so grew fierce with the razor, burning Q-Tips, and the follicle-yanking noose, but he couldn’t have foreseen the imminent clash of our nations any more than I might have myself.

“Saddam a great man,” Ahmad said. History will tell whether Saddam’s nemesis in Washington was a hero, fool, or tyrant himself, but the Barber of Baghdad definitely gave me a tongue- lashing along with the trim. A lot more of those would come our way soon.

Whoosh went the hair, and ouch went the ear, and I got out of there. The newspaper joke piece I started about that encounter was never finished. The next day I traveled to Dublin for my meeting in the lobby of a hotel and was puzzled by an open-mouthed crowd gathered before a television screen. September 11, 2001, was the date – the time in New York about 9 a.m. In minutes I, too, confronted the newly minted images of what appeared to be the beginning of the end of the world – the apocalyptic flights into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with all their
certainty of unimaginable carnage and military retaliations to follow. Our meeting ended abruptly. Even three thousand miles from New York, the televised pictures seared the soul. Every viewer looked devastated, but the Americans stood out by their weeping.

On the streets, some pedestrians stood blithely yakking into mobile phones, while others shuffled along beside me, looking haunted. It was obvious who knew and who didn’t.

Heading for Heuston Station, I ran into a passionate, troubled songwriter I had met a number of times in Cork. Noel Brazil’s eyes filled with grief and he grabbed my hand. “This is awful. I am so sorry. I am speechless.” His photograph, too, would be pasted on the Hi-B’s mirror a couple of months later – an aneurysm, not a hijacked plane, abruptly felled this anguished talent at the age of forty-four. I phoned Jamie from the train station and we wept. The ride back to Cork took an eternity.

It felt like there was no haven anywhere anymore, not even in Ireland.

The children all waited up, tossing in their beds, processing their own waking nightmares. Owen, that former filament of sunniness, threw his arms around me and asked, “Will they attack us here, Dad?”

“No, of course not. We’re perfectly safe.”

What else could I say? I did not let him see my tears.

Jamie and I struggled on as if we had lost our next of kin in the distant infernos – and indeed a niece and cousin-in-law had had narrow escapes (a delayed flight here, a prolonged chore there) from personal dates with immolation at the World Trade Center. The only course forward was to wrap the children in the everyday rhythms of their Irish lives, while tucking some extra sweets into their lunch boxes and taking them on a slow walk through that waterfall-replenished glade I’d found a year ago. Some ancient standing stones, resolute through the millennia, arose from nearby fields, but whatever solace they offered was short-lived. I looked at the young beings who mattered more than anything else I knew, whose lives I had tried so hard to enrich in the course of our great adventure abroad, and had the sickening feeling I could no longer
protect them or provide for their futures, not in Ireland, not in America, not anywhere.

There was no going back to Connecticut, not now. No planes were flying, and who in their right mind would put their family on board one of those, unless bereft of all choice? Normally, it is all too easy to spot American tourists abroad, by their naive gazes and hapless clothing first of all. But the Yanks were unmistakable for different reasons on the streets of Cork now, shuffling like aimless ghosts as they blankly stared at what would have otherwise been pleasing sights. Across the country, kind souls began putting these stranded visitors up for free.

Our own Irish friends surrounded us with unstinting compassion, because they grieved and were wounded themselves. One put it simply, “None of us will ever be the same again now.” Neighbors came by to ask what they could do for the children; we had invitations to dinner, where everyone tried to make sense of the certifiably mad world. As gratified as I was by these outpourings of kindness, I kept searching the nation’s media for chaffs of meaning. Alas, there arose an overnight torrent of that Irish penchant for snap answers and sniping analysis. Before the first bodies were removed from New York’s rubble, numerous television and newspaper commentators floated instant geopolitical rationalizations for the unspeakable atrocities, and scoldings about America’s place in the world. The timing of these diatribes felt all wrong. The message between certain pundits’ lines seemed to be that Ireland, more than ever, must keep resolutely neutral even in its sympathies, and back in those raw days, this was hard to take. Suddenly, I felt Irish no more. The idea that we were still somehow blessed by Bun’s guiding spirit seemed like a sentimental indulgence. Of course, my old friend would have cringed at the heartless punditry, too.

In the anguished days following September 11, the blather from certain sorry corners of the country’s citizenry grew deplorable. In the pubs, I heard various diatribes from star members of the “you had it coming to you” brigade, who offered ad hoc epistles about how America itself was the culprit, provoking extreme actions by earnest people who had no other means of making their case
heard. However, larger spirits took me by the arm and pointed out that such blowhards scarcely expressed the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Irish people.

In fact, a gifted Cork writer named Gerry McCarthy summed up the crumbling of the Twin Towers better than any commentator I ever heard. “It was like watching the
Apollo
moon rocket, with all the world’s hopes on board, going in reverse,” he told me. His perspective wasn’t Irish or American – it was human.

On September 14, every single business enterprise in the Republic of Ireland shut down for a national day of mourning, an exercise in shared compassion that was replicated in no other country, not even America itself, and one that would mean a very personal sacrifice for countless Irish people. We attended a commemorative Mass in a church that was packed with more parishioners than had been seen inside in fifty years. The mood was shattering.

However, the eve of this day of mourning had an undercurrent of tension. We walked about town then with some friends and witnessed packs of young people celebrating an unexpected midweek break with gusto. For them, the connection with what had happened in the U.S. was obviously remote. I felt a massive disjoint between my adopted country and my true self. Certain voices in the press kept wishing terrorism away. Opinion polls soon suggested that more than half of Ireland’s citizens did not want their airports used for as little as a stopover by American planes en route to Afghanistan, and fewer than 10 percent favored Irish participation of any kind in the global coalition assembling against Osama bin Laden’s nest of terror.

Small packs of protestors occasionally gathered on Cork’s Patrick Street, waving banners saying, “The U.S. and U.K. are Terrorists!” and even in one inane instance, “Make Love Not War.” Laura cried at the sight.

To stake out some sense of identity for my anguished children, and to mourn for our country’s dead, I hung an American flag before my home office window. This act quickly incited our teenage minders to gather before our door and shout, “Yeah Osama, Palestine rules!” whatever that meant. Fortunately, the father of
one of these teenagers made him deliver a message of apology the next day, and the parents of the rest of that crowd finally succeeded in putting an end to their sprees of mischief, once and for all.

“I want to go home,” Harris would weep into his pillow at night, and I myself sometimes sat disconsolately for hours, saying nothing. Somehow, Jamie held the family together.

We discovered that we were scarcely the only Irish-American expatriates suffering from personal abuse. A Boston-born Cork woman called us sobbing about the taunting her thirteen-year-old daughter had endured at school; a Pennsylvanian twenty miles distant said that after more than a decade of contented life in Ireland, he had been so wounded by daily anti-American harangues that he wanted to vacate the country for good. A letter to the
Irish Voice
in the U.S. bitterly observed, “What fools we Irish-Americans have been. Why did we keep the tradition alive here all these years? We must have been laughing stocks going to Ireland, sending money . . . My mother-in-law who scrubbed floors at night to support five kids always sent clothes and more home when she needed help herself . . . This has really put an end to anything I will ever have to do with Ireland.”

For months afterward, Irish newspapers hosted heartbroken letters from Americans who had chased personal dreams to the land of their forebears and were now feeling bereft and alienated. Quite often, these would excite a torrent of “go away” missives from poison-pen correspondents who did not wish to hear such complaints.

Still, this bitter cross fire scarcely represented the Ireland that had welcomed us with such warmth for more than a year. And many other Irish-Americans penned their own missives of gratitude for the great compassion that had been shown them, while other prominent Irish columnists mocked the equivocations of some of their colleagues.

For a long time, the to-and-fro numbed us. In our hearts we were injured, spiritually and, yes, materially. With advertising plummeting in the global economic crash following September 11, publications on both sides of the Atlantic stopped commissioning freelance articles, beginning with my regular feature on
life in Cork. And a silly humor book I had started – to be called
Ireland for the Unwary
– now felt like a waste of time. Advancing the
Cork Magazine
fantasy, targeted partly at the flight-terrified tourist market, seemed ridiculous. Dreams died. Many mornings, I’d lift my head from sleep and crave the idea of shepherding the kids and Jamie back to the United States, the country of our birth, to be with our grieving families and friends. I felt, for the first time, exiled. Every one of us did.

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