Praise for Postcards From Ireland
“A laugh-out-loud tale of love, Laundromats, and finding a new life in a very foreign (and wet) land. In Postcards from Ireland, Michael Harling has once again written a humorous and witty account of how traveling can sometimes lead to unexpected destinations.”
Talli Roland, author of The Hating Game
“Postcards from Ireland delivers the author's trademark dry humor, but this time with a twist: a charming touch of romance!”
Toni Hargis, author of Rules Britannia!
http://www.expatmum.blogspot.com
“Ireland’s charms through the eyes of a baffled American.”
Michelle Gorman, author of Single in the City
http://www.michelegorman.co.uk
Postcards From Ireland
by
Michael Harling
PUBLISHED BY:
Smashwords Edition v02
Postcards From Ireland
Copyright 2012 by Michael Harling
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book, please purchase additional copies. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
Also by Michael Harling:
Postcards From Across the Pond
More Postcards From Across the Pond
Dedicated
to the cigar industry
and the Foot and Mouth outbreak of
2001;
without them, none of this would have happened.
Contents
Part I – Searching for Epiphanies
Part II – Searching for Ireland
Foreword
This is a true story. Barring occasional exaggeration for comic effect, all the events described herein happened just the way they are depicted; even the conversations are, for the most part, verbatim. This was happily verified to my satisfaction by the copious journal entries, photos, letters and e-mails relating to the events and the peripheral events leading up to them. These memory-aids were not, however, altogether necessary, as this entire adventure is etched indelibly in my mind.
Part I – Searching For Epiphanies
Heathrow Airport
Ultimately, it was all because of the cigars.
I was several months into an eight-year relationship with a woman I now refer to only as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named when I finally took notice of the Tupperware container in the far reaches of the fridge. It had been there since I moved in, so whatever it contained had likely spawned mutant life-forms by now. I pushed aside the plates of leftovers and the untouched bottle of ketchup and took it out. When I opened it, however, instead of seeing things generally confined to Petri dishes, I found half a dozen cigars. The brands were all unfamiliar to me, but I recognized their quality; these were good cigars, not the Dutch Masters or White Owls my father used to smoke.
“I see you’ve found my cigars,” She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named said, coming up behind me. “I keep them in Tupperware in my fridge so they’ll stay fresh; put them back or you’ll make them go stale.”
I complied, but my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her why she had them; I’d never known her to smoke a cigarette, much less a cigar.
She explained that she and her old college friends used to go camping together once a year in a cabin in the Adirondacks. One of the traditions of that get together was the smoking of cigars around the fireplace in the evening. They hadn’t done it in years but she kept the cigars because she saw no reason to throw them out. So when we began staying in the cabin in the Adirondacks, we brought the cigars with us and resurrected the tradition.
After that, events escalated at a surreal pace.
We knew a few people at work who were cigar smokers as well, and after a while we began going out in the evenings for occasional “herfs.” A herf, we learned, was a cigar term of unknown origin with a versatility that rivaled everyone’s favorite four-letter word: to herf was to smoke a cigar, if two or more people met up for the purpose of smoking, trading and talking about cigars, that was a herf. You could herf at a herf, or be herfing on your own, or have a herfable cigar, or…well, I expect you’ve got the point.
Soon we began tapping into the computer frontier equivalent of Facebook and Twitter: newsgroups. There was a newsgroup for cigar smokers and we became active participants. Soon, our little group began to grow and we started holding weekly herfs at a sympathetic local restaurant where the owner himself was a cigar smoker.
Inexplicably, this same phenomenon was simultaneously taking place in cities and towns all over the country and in other parts of the world. These groups organized themselves into chapters and we established a loose, yearly schedule of herf exchanges, where members of other chapters were invited to the home turf of a local chapter for a weekend of herfing, dining and drinking. These cigar crawls became a matter of pride for each local group as we strove, not to out-do each other (one-upmanship was not part of our cigar creed), but to show our herfing brothers and sisters a good time.
Our chapter name—by a majority vote—became The Herftones, our annual event was ASHCAN (Albany-Saratoga Herf, Crawl and Nosh); soon we became legends in the herfing world, and She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named became its star.
As you might expect, we considered ourselves cigar aficionados, which meant—in addition to you not wanting to talk to us for very long at a cocktail party—that we were on a constant quest for the world’s best cigars. This quest was, and remains, something of a sticking point with the US Government, as the cigars we considered the best originated from a country America was not eager to do business with. But we weren’t going to let a little thing like the Trading with the Enemy Act stop us; we were herfers, and not just herfers, we were Herftones, and we would have our cigars.
One of the many ways She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named overcame this speed bump on the road to herfing nirvana was to cultivate an on-line friendship with a London cigar merchant who was willing to sell and ship cigars to a location that, technically, he shouldn’t. Packages from this merchant arrived in thick, padded envelopes purporting to carry travel brochures, which they, in fact, did; the travel brochures contained cigars.
There were other deceptions—some more interesting and inventive—employed by members of the cigar sub-culture which helped retain America’s title as the number one importer of cigars from a country that the US, officially, conducts no business with, but they are not relevant to this story:
The cigars from London, when they arrived, were lovingly liberated from the travel brochures; She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named got the cigars, I took the travel brochures.
In this way, the petty smuggling of contraband became responsible for me ending up, some years later, in Heathrow airport at 5:30 in the morning on my way to Ireland. The idea of going to Ireland had been evolving for some time and the ads in the brochures about hiking the Irish coast had provided the opportunity for me to turn the notion into reality. Heathrow, however, was my own idea; one of many bad ones, as it turns out.
My itinerary gave me a dozen days in Ireland, including a week of walking with a group from the UK tucked into it. I would have Friday afternoon and Saturday morning to explore on my own before meeting up with the group at Shannon airport, and another three days without adult supervision after we parted ways. My friends kept telling me how brave I was to go off on my own to a foreign country for two weeks, but in retrospect I don’t think it was bravery; I was simply too naïve to understand what I was doing.
The first ill-conceived notion I had was that I could pack all the clothing and equipment I would need for the two weeks into a carry-on case and my backpack. This was possible only because I assumed there would be Laundromats in Ireland and that “going for a walk” meant the same thing to me as it did to the tour organizers. To their credit, they tried to warn me. They even sent a questionnaire designed to assess my hiking skills, which I found almost insulting. After all, I hiked the Adirondack trails practically every weekend, conquering peaks such as Hadley, Black, Buck and Cathead. Alright, so most of them were in the low 2,000 foot range but, according to the brochure, the tallest—and only—mountain we were scheduled to climb was Croagh Patrick, and that had an elevation of only 2,500 feet. Compared to the Adirondacks, the gentle hills of Ireland could offer little more than a placid stroll; the planned ascent up Croagh Patrick would be the only activity worthy of my level of hiking proficiency. The rest was going to be easy.
With that thought in mind, I set about preparing for my journey by visiting my favorite Irish pubs, attending an Irish Folk Festival and watching some Irish Dance competitions. I also practiced my own dancing and piping and brushed up on a medley of Irish ballads on my guitar. I even started playing the penny whistle. And just to round it all out, I drank a lot of Guinness.
As an extra measure, I began rehearsing a "Why yes, I am a little bit Irish on my mother's side," speech. I wanted it to sound natural, as if I'd been saying it all my life.
Actually, my mother’s family came from Germany and my paternal grandfather was born in England, and I didn’t think being a Limey Protestant was going to do me much good in a real Irish Irish Pub. In the American Irish pubs, I allowed people to believe I was Irish and never told anyone any different. After the clientele put a few pints under their belts and started banging the tables and shouting pro-IRA slogans, things could get fairly nasty at the mere mention of an Englishman. No way was I going to rub elbows with the locals in Cork, Dublin or Kilkenny without some Irish in me, even if I had to make it up.
My packing was undertaken with similar insight and forethought: I stuffed seven pairs of socks, underwear and shirts, along with two pair of jeans, into my newly purchased carry-on bag. I had room left over so I put in a few extra shirts—a mixture of long and short sleeved—and a light jacket. My toiletries, electric razor and plug adapter set all fit neatly into a little travel bag, and I stuffed that in, as well. That was me, done packing.
Fortunately, I had a day or two left to think about it and, on the afternoon before my flight, I decided it might be handy to bring along a second pair of sneakers and a rain jacket. I had to go out and buy the sneakers; the rain jacket—a cheap, bright red plastic affair—I borrowed from a friend. These items, along with a two-week supply of cigars and a notebook, took up more space than I had anticipated, making some last minute rearrangements necessary. In the end, I jettisoned one of the two pair of jeans and all the extra shirts—seven should be plenty.
The next day, toting a bulging carry-on case and a pack stuffed to the breaking point, and armed with a level of confidence that can only be inspired by ignorance, I would be boarding a jet for Heathrow. I could have flown directly to my destination, and, in fact, the travel agent strongly advised that this is what I should do, but I had a plan. I told her I wanted to fly to London, set my foot on British soil, take a few photos of the land of my forefathers and then catch a connection to Shannon. The travel agent looked dubious and told me it would add three hours and two hundred dollars to the trip. I told her it would be worth it and insisted she make the bookings.
My friend Jeanne drove me to the airport so I could avoid the parking fees and not have my car vandalized while I was roaming around the Irish countryside. I hadn’t been to Albany Airport in years, and the last time I had flown from there I’d had to walk from the terminal to the plane and climb up a portable stairway. Improvements had been made since then, and now the airport had an actual jetway along with a new name—Albany International—made possible, rumor had it, by the fact that they offered a weekly flight to Montreal.
I went to the check-in desk and was immediately relieved of my carry-on bag. This was a disturbing turn of events. I had, after all, specifically purchased an official airline carry-on bag so I could keep it with me. If I knew anything about international airline travel (and, indeed, I did not; most of my knowledge came from travel-inspired horror stories heard third hand) it was that, once out of your sight, your bags would never be seen again, eventually turning up in Morocco or some similarly exotic location. I didn’t tell that to the clerk, but I did explain that my bag met the carry-on standards set by the airline industry—it said so on the tag. She informed me that, because I had over-packed it, it was too big, and she was insisting that I leave it with her and there was no talking her out of it. So, I relinquished my bag, resigned myself to spending my two weeks in Ireland naked, and sulked off to the departure lounge with my backpack. And waited.
The wait gave me time to once again check my camera to ascertain its readiness for the early morning photo shoot. It was an antiquated digital model that could take 45 pictures before the internal pixel reservoir began to overflow, an amount that stunned me when I first got it but which now seemed paltry indeed. Fortunately, a friend had loaned me a memory card that boosted the camera’s capacity to an astounding 300 photos. I’d have to limit myself to 21 a day, but I thought I could manage that. To break it in, I took a photo of the departure lounge and another one of the view from the window, where the runways and a bit of the countryside beyond were visible. In about ten hours I would be at Heathrow, looking out at a similar scene; the thought was too amazing to comprehend.
It made me wonder what lay ahead, and if I would really end up getting a tattoo.
The idea that Ireland was going to change me was not a thought I had started out with but rather a notion that had slowly built up over the last few months into a dead certainty which, at this point, I didn’t question. Somewhere in Ireland an epiphany lay in wait, one that would solve the riddle of my life. I wasn’t sure how this was supposed to happen, maybe the Celtic spirit would call out to me and guide me home, wherever that might be, or the beauty of Ireland would stir my soul into some dramatic realization. Whatever happened, I thought maybe a tattoo would be a fitting way to mark the event. Something tasteful, and Irish, like a shamrock on my butt.
I didn’t tell anyone about this—the epiphany or the tattoo—but its unquestioning reality was reconfirmed as Jeanne dropped me off in front of the terminal. After our cheery goodbyes had been exchanged, she gave me a serious look and said, “This trip is going to change your life.” I nodded and said, “I know.”
I didn’t obsess about the idea—I didn’t need to—it would simply happen; of that, I was certain. Besides, they were calling my flight, and obsessing over the flight and the likelihood of making it to Boston pushed all thoughts of epiphanies out of my mind.
The flight to Logan proved uneventful, and there I transferred to the British Airways jet that would carry me across the ocean and I experienced a sudden shift in my perceptions. The plane I was getting on made the ones I had flown across the US in look like toys. It brought to mind a picture in one of my 4th grade school books comparing Columbus’ fleet of ships—the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria—to a modern ocean liner. I had flown in from Albany on the Nina and was about to board The Queen Mary. It was sleek and majestic, glistening under the rays of the setting sun, with engines the size of subway cars and wings large enough to host a southern family reunion on. It was the largest, most awe-inspiring machine I had ever seen; a wonder of engineering that would, I felt certain, drop like a stone from the sky and plummet, in a blazing ball of fire, into the Atlantic Ocean.
Despite the certainty of impending death, I boarded the plane, found my allotted row and sat watching the other passengers stuff suitcases twice the size of my carry-on, along with various bags bulging with airport purchases, into the overhead lockers. I found this terribly unfair; how come they were allowed to bring oversized luggage onto the plane when I was destined to die bagless and without a change of underwear while my suitcase enjoyed a two-week vacation in Morocco? I glared at them all, and consoled myself by imagining them whimpering in terror as the plane plunged toward the gray expanse of the North Atlantic, but then I realized this scenario would have me wetting myself and dying milliseconds after them and, instead, turned my attention to the wing.
I found the wing fascinating, which was a good thing because I didn’t take my eyes off of it for the next eight hours. I felt it my duty to be vigilant, in case it decided to do something untoward, like separate from the fuselage or drop an engine. It’s not that I felt any obligation toward my baggage-hoarding fellow fliers, I just wanted to be the first to know we were all going to die. So I watched the wing, during a bone-rattling take-off, during the steep ascent, through the cloud layer when the tip was shrouded in mist, into the evening and gathering darkness until just the red navigation light kept me aware of its alarming wobbles and waving, and finally through the rising dawn, as we banked over a snaking river I took to be the Thames and eased onto the runway at Heathrow. Bleary-eyed and glad to be alive, I began to clap; it’s what everyone did the last time I had flown and I thought it a marvelous idea. No one joined in this time, however, so I slowly stopped and looked back out the window until it was my turn to leave the plane.
Slowly, excitement began to replace panic. Here I was, in England! The country everyone in my family had talked about going to visit and, except for my uncle’s tour of duty during the war, I was the first to actually make it. It was still too dark to get a picture; I would have to take one while I waited for my connecting flight to Shannon. I had over an hour so I wasn’t worried, which shows how little I knew about Heathrow and international air travel.
Early as it was, five other jumbo jets landed the same time we did, so getting through customs was like going to a summer sale at Wal-Mart. I squeezed into the back of the crowd and was soon enveloped in bodies as more people joined the crush from behind. We moved forward by inches. I looked at my watch and my itinerary; an hour, I realized, was not going to be enough. Sometime later I was ejected onto the far side of the immigration desks like a pip squeezed out of a lemon. Then I was herded onto a sort of train on wheels, along with a few hundred other travelers, and treated to a ten-minute ride around the airport.
From this low vantage point, the airport looked like a city with really wide streets and big boxy buildings from the Borg school of architecture. I couldn’t see beyond the buildings and, even if I did see something worth photographing, we were too jammed in for me to get my camera out. I also didn’t have much time: we were soon unceremoniously ejected into another building where we were, apparently, expect to use our own cunning and resources to locate our connecting flights, leaving me just a few minutes to find a window, snap a photo and get to Gate 90 before it closed.
I set off down the corridor at a trot, preparing my camera and searching for a window with an aesthetic vantage point. I was high up now and should be able to see beyond the airport to the outlying countryside. When I found a window, I stopped and readied myself to snap a photo of dawn breaking over England’s green fields and spend a moment or two enjoying the view. What I saw, however, was the sun rising over tarmac, towers and taxiing aircraft; Heathrow, I belatedly realized, was big. Very big. The countryside, if there was any, would be miles away. Two hundred dollars and three hours wasted. I took a photo anyway and continued running down the corridor looking for Gate 90.
Inexplicably, I was alone, and the further I ran, the more unsettling this condition became. At length I found someone who worked at the airport, or at least seemed to know their way around, and in desperation, asked for help.
“Gate 90 is that way,” the man said, pointing in the direction I had just come from. So I retraced my steps, running just a little faster this time. I arrived out of breath but, thankfully, on time. Even though I was flying a relatively short distance, this was still an international flight, so there was an immigration clerk on hand to wave through all the passengers with EU passports. Then I arrived at the desk, still red-faced and puffing from my sprint down the corridor, and handed her my passport. She studied it a moment, then looked at me.
“What are your plans?”
“My plans?”
“Yes. What are you going to Ireland for?”
In all my preparations, it had never occurred to me that someone might pose that question. “I’m searching for an epiphany,” or “I thought I might get a tattoo,” were more likely to land me in a secure cell than Shannon airport. At length, I said, “I thought I’d just travel around, you know, see the sights.”
The woman looked down, shook her head slightly then gazed back up at me.
“Where are you going to be staying?”
That one also threw me; to tell the truth, I hadn’t even thought about it.
“Well, just anywhere, I guess. You do have hotels in Ireland, don’t you?”
This time the woman sighed.
“I can’t let you in unless you can tell me your plans.”
The first tendrils of panic began to seep through my addled brain. I had come this far and now they were threatening to turn me back because…because…I had no idea why, so I asked.
“Why on earth not?”
Another sigh, accompanied by a mixture of puzzlement and pity.
“You might be planning to stay illegally.”
I was too shocked to answer. What was she talking about? Illegal aliens lived in America, not Ireland. I stood with my mouth open while behind me people shuffled impatiently and in front of me the plane readied for takeoff. The clerk made one last attempt.
“I’m sorry, but if you don’t have any definite plans, I can’t let you in.” She sounded sorry, but at the same time, she sounded like she meant it. “Don’t you have anything?”
I reigned in my confusion and fast-forwarded through the next two weeks.
“Well, for a couple of days I’ll be hiking with a group from England.”
“Can you prove it?”
I pulled off my pack and began tugging at various zippers.
“I have their brochure, but I don’t know if it’s in here or my carry-on, and they took my carry-on from me back in Albany, even though it was officially the right size…”
Apparently convinced my ineptitude was not a sham, she stamped my passport and waved me through. I found the plane, and my seat, and stared out the window, amazed at how puzzling the world outside of America was turning out to be. And how small. We were barely airborne when the pilot informed us we could enjoy a view of the coast of Wales if we looked out the window (as opposed to a view of the back of the seat in front of us if we didn’t). I looked and, sure enough, there was a coastline. When I had visited Seattle I flew for six hours and landed in the same country, yet we had already left Britain behind and hadn’t even attained cruising altitude.
These size differences had contributed to my confusion when I attempted to find the time difference between the west coast of Ireland and Albany, New York. I had searched time zone websites but all I could find was the time in Dublin, which was on the opposite side of the country from Shannon. How many time zones did Ireland stretch across? It took some digging before I uncovered the surprising answer: just one, and it shared it with London. After this discovery, I then spent a half hour checking land masses and was surprised to find that all of Ireland could just about fit into the Adirondack State Park and that England was, give or take a few square miles, the same size as New York State.
I barely had time to marvel over these facts afresh, while wolfing down my second breakfast of the day, before we began our descent. Outside the window, through a gap in the clouds, I saw the famous green and rolling hills of Ireland. Then I began to wonder why everyone kept warning me about the dreadful Irish climate. It looked perfectly inviting from where I was sitting. In fact, the sun had been shining during our entire journey across the country. To my credit, the reason for all the sunshine was beginning to occur to me even as the plane dipped below the cloud cover to land in the gray and drizzling Irish dawn.
Shannon Airport was a cozy little place when compared to Heathrow, much like Albany Airport before the improvements, but with jetways. This, I discovered with some relief, made it difficult for me to get lost. To my further relief, they had my bag, and the crush at customs and immigration was nowhere near as thick or frenetic as the one I had left behind in England.
When I reached the arrivals hall, I exchanged my American greenbacks for Irish punts, or pounds, as they were commonly known. Ireland had signed up for the euro, I was told, but the actual euro currency would not come into effect until January; until then, most prices would be displayed in both euros and pounds and the currency would remain in pounds. I thanked the woman behind the counter for this useless bit of trivia and slipped the wad of unfamiliar bills into my money clip. Then I wandered away to begin my adventure.
Before I could fully comprehend what was happening, I had walked out the front entrance to stand, for the first time, on Irish soil; or, more accurately, on an Irish sidewalk. It was eight o’clock on Friday morning; I had traveled over three thousand miles in thirteen hours. I was, after months of planning, finally in Ireland. And I had no idea what to do next.
Limerick
When I first booked my trip to Ireland, I did so with a solid plan in mind: stay there. It wasn’t a very detailed (or particularly rational) plan, but it was a sincere one, born out of desperation and a skewed world view.
I was in year eight of my life sentence with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and would have happily traded places with a Japanese prisoner of war and considered myself to have come away with the better deal. It was a strange situation to be in, because I had no reason to be unhappy; I was living with an intelligent, attractive woman in a tidy suburb with an easy commute to a job I loved. On the surface, those factors should have added up to a high quality of life, but once “The Ketchup Theory of Relationships” is factored in, you will understand how something that looks straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life (the good parts, where he really does have a wonderful life, not the segments where Clarence is psyching him out) can actually be a thin cover for the “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it get the hose” scene from Silence of the Lambs.
The Ketchup Theory of Relationships states, quite emphatically, “If your significant other will not allow you to use the brand of ketchup you prefer, then you should leave. Immediately.” I know that sounds harsh, but believe me, you will avoid a lot of heartache if you follow that rule. Think about it; you want something, but your significant other is devoted to making sure you don’t get it. There is something dark at work in that dynamic, and it manifests itself in the following way:
You’re out shopping. It’s early in the relationship so shopping is still an exercise in discovery. You get to the ketchup aisle. Your significant other does not even use ketchup. You reach for your brand and pick up a bottle.
Instead of simply allowing you to put it in the cart, a discussion ensures. Perhaps that’s not the best brand. Perhaps you should pick a different one, one you don’t happen to like but which she insists is superior. This will be a gentle suggestion at first, then made with increasing degrees of vehemence the longer you refuse to comply. Accusations will follow—you aren’t doing what she wants because you think she is stupid, or you don’t love her, or you’re mentally ill. From there—if compliance is not forthcoming—it will escalate to real anger, tears, threats and violence, but you are unlikely to run the full gamut of this argument arc at the supermarket. At some point before the crying starts you will probably just shrug, pick up a bottle of the other brand and put it in your cart. You will think nothing of it, but you have just established the relationship hierarchy, and you are definitely not the one in control.
If this happens, it is best to extract yourself from the relationship as soon as possible.
Moreover, if, after you put your significant other’s brand of ketchup in the cart, she removes it and selects an identical bottle off of the shelf and puts that one in the cart instead, you should lose her in the produce section, duck into the stock room and escape via the service entrance.
If you don’t, you are likely to find yourself, some years later, waking up to the realization that everything in your life—who you see, what you eat, the way you dress, what you read, where you go, what you do and even, to as much an extent as possible, what you think—are all being decided for you.
So when this happened to me, I did the only logical thing I could think of: I plotted to escape by running away to Ireland.
The decision was not immediate; it evolved over time, taking into account my growing love of all things Celtic, my meagerness of job skills and the fact that I can’t speak any foreign languages. At the time, the Celtic Tiger was on the prowl and, lacking even anecdotal evidence to back up my conclusion, I assumed it wouldn’t be difficult for someone like me—a man with no college credits and a sketchy, self-taught knowledge of computer programming—to get a job over there. I would fly to Ireland and my troubles, even if they weren’t over, would at least be three thousand miles away. I bought a book (“The Idiot’s Guide to Moving to Ireland” or something like that), read it during the few private moments I could squeeze from my day and kept it hidden in the secret place where I preserved the last remaining vestiges of who I once was. I don’t remember much about the book except that it made moving to another country seem like hard work. It talked about visas and passports and immigration and I stopped reading about two thirds of the way through, not because I was disillusioned with the book or the idea of escaping to Ireland, but rather due to the realization that She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named would never allow me to travel anywhere on my own.
So the Ireland dream fell to the back of my mind, where it remained until one autumn day when we were at a herf somewhere in New Jersey. The ensuing years had seen She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named growing steadily chummier with her UK connection, resulting in many late nights in the chat rooms and occasional talk of us taking a European holiday, one that would include, or be limited to, Great Britain. I expect, at that time, her problem was similar to mine: how to get to the other side of the Atlantic without the inconvenience of having your partner in tow. The answer to this came during the cigar party, as she sat chatting amid a cluster of wives and significant others at the far end of the smoke-filled room.
“We’ve decided the trip to England will be a girls-only trip,” she said, turning and calling to me. Seeing as how she considered it a foregone conclusion, discussion was not required, so I merely nodded. Then I said:
“Okay, then I’m going to Ireland.”
She couldn’t unmask herself in front of her friends, so she nodded in return and my Irish escape route sprang to life.
Naturally, it didn’t continue as smoothly as that. After calculations and negotiations, I was just about to book the trip I wanted to go on when she came to me and said, “You don’t want to go on that trip. This one is better; I think you should go on this one instead.”
Knowing it was pointless to resist, I dropped negotiations for my trip and began researching her idea. After a week or two of e-mails and transatlantic phone calls, I was, once again, ready to book. And she said, “You can’t go on that trip; it’s the same week I’m going to England and you have to stay here to watch the dog. You’ll have to go on the other one.”
So I booked the trip I had wanted to go on in the first place. And this time, it held, because it was she who had ordered me to book it.
A lot of machinations, negations and money, and all of it unnecessary; by the time the trip rolled around, I was a free man. The end came with a whimper, not with a court order, as I had imagined. Something inside me, some relic of self-esteem must have found purchase in the stony ruins of my spirit and sprouted because one glorious, mid-February morning I opened my eyes and knew—in a way that required no explanation and would suffer no denial, in a way that was physically infused into my make-up, in the way that I knew I was right-handed and had brown (or at least it used to be brown) hair—I was no longer afraid of her.
The strength of knowing meant there was no need for discussion. I said nothing. That Monday I took the afternoon off of work and rented an apartment. On Tuesday I called in a favor from a friend who owned a pickup truck. On Wednesday She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named informed me she was going to a cigar crawl in Buffalo for the weekend and I would have to stay home and mind the dog, and it seemed like it was meant to be. On Friday we went to see Carmen, performed by a British theater company. The last thing I ever did for her was buy her a small British flag. We got home late. She got up early, packed and I kissed her goodbye. As soon as her car rounded the corner, I called my buddy with the pickup truck.
It wasn’t a hard job moving me out. Most of my things were in boxes in the attic, where they had lain dormant for nearly a decade. When we were done, we took a last tour of the rooms to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.
“You’ve lived here for eight years,” my friend remarked, “and we just moved all your stuff out but the place doesn’t look a bit different.”
I looked around and nodded. “That about says it all, doesn’t it?”
This is how, eight months later, I arrived in Ireland, not as a fugitive looking for a safe place to hide, but as an adventurer, with my need for liberation behind me and a bold new future ahead. Strangely, standing in front of Shannon Airport holding a bulging backpack and an overstuffed carry-on case, I didn’t feel bold, or even liberated; mostly I felt tired and unaccountably confused. It was an airport; there were cars, roads, signs—familiar things you would expect to find in Albany—but they were all so foreign.
I don’t recall how long I stood there in the gray morning, or how I eventually came to terms with the unfamiliar road configurations and the backward traffic, but before long I had made my way to a bus stop. This option, and location, must have been pointed out to me by a kindly stranger (or suspicious security guard) because I know for a fact that the idea of taking a bus would never have voluntarily entered my mind. Americans do not ride buses; buses are the province of recently released felons, impoverished students and fringe-dwellers who lack the means, ambition and/or skill-set to own a car. I had, in fact, never willingly stood at a bus stop prior to this, and the mechanisms behind bus routes eluded me. Did I—as I used to do in grade school—simply get on the first bus that came along? How would I know where it was going? What sort of cost was involved? And why do they always post a copy of the periodic table at bus stops?
After a while, it occurred to me that the periodic table was, in fact, a bus schedule and that, to get anywhere, I was expected—without the assistance of an enigma machine—to extract meaning from its unfamiliar and esoteric markings. Then a bus bearing a sign for Limerick pulled up and that struck me as a satisfactory destination—after all, they did come up with those trippy little poems—so I decided to get on.
This wasn’t as straightforward as it should have been, seeing as I had a suitcase with me. I wasn’t certain if I was allowed to drag it down the aisle to share a seat with me or not and I was contemplating my next move when the driver got off. I assumed he was coming to take my bag and stow it in the cargo hold or tie it to the roof or whatever they did with luggage on buses in Ireland, but instead he rolled a cigarette. I stood on the sidewalk, alternately looking at him, and the bus, and back again until he nodded at me, and the bus and back again. When I didn’t move, he mimed opening the cargo compartment on the bus. Surely he didn’t expect me to do it. It was his bus, and his job; what if I pinched my finger? What about Occupational Safety? What about lawsuits? He didn’t seem concerned, so I opened the hatch and slid my suitcase inside.
A simple thing, and yet strangely liberating. It wasn’t until I was seated and rumbling toward the highway that I realized how coddled and cosseted I was in America; every possible threat, every conceivable danger, was covered with foam rubber and hazard warnings. That our headlong rush to achieve 100% safety was in danger of eclipsing our common sense was highlighted by a recent government proposal to erect a 15-foot hurricane fence along the edge of a local overlook so that people stopping to enjoy the view couldn’t fall over the cliff. Or see the view. To their credit, this idea was eventually vetoed, but only after a fight. Safety, however, was still their number one concern, and they certainly would never have allowed me to do anything quite so reckless as put my own suitcase on a bus.
The trip to Limerick took about twenty minutes. For much of it, we motored down a road that looked remarkably like an Interstate Highway, flashing past weed-choked verges and roadside trees that resembled scenery I would expect to see while driving in New York, albeit a bit greener. When we hit the outskirts of Limerick, however, I could no longer pretend I was still at home: the streets and sidewalks were impossibly narrow and the houses, squeezed tight together like fat books on a library shelf, sat flush against the pavement, putting pedestrians in ever-present danger of running into a door every time someone checked for the morning paper. And the signs! They were sub-titled in English; the world’s primary language given second-billing to a totally unintelligible collection of letters.
Then the bus began making periodic stops to let people off and the primary flaw in my plan became apparent: if you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you have arrived? I had visions of the bus making a complete loop through the city and heading back to the airport with me still on it, so I got off at a likely spot, retrieved my suitcase and watched with a strange sense of abandonment as the bus trundled away, leaving me standing on a street corner in the gray morning rain in a foreign city that appeared to be deserted.
Slinging my pack on my back and dragging my suitcase behind me, I set off in the direction that the bus had gone, making the assumption it was heading for the center of town and that I had gotten off too early. It seemed the wise choice; after a few blocks I began to see people, and a smattering of traffic, though not nearly as much as you would expect to see in downtown Albany at 9 o’clock on a Friday morning. The city also had a strangely squat feel to it; there were no soaring civic office blocks or expansive nineteenth-century edifices sporting gothic spires and frilly facades. Instead, the buildings sat like rows of concrete boxes facing each other across narrow streets, making me feel as if I were trapped in a labyrinth of canyons, like a mouse in a maze.
Eventually, I came to a wider street with a bit more traffic and, as there didn’t appear to be anything wider or busier in the vicinity, I assumed I had arrived at downtown Limerick. As if to confirm my assumption, there on the next corner, stood a building advertizing itself as The Royal George Hotel. Jubilant, I headed toward it, only to find my way suddenly blocked by a woman holding a baby.
I had no idea where she had come from; the streets were sparsely populated, there was no one around and yet she had materialized out of nowhere, like a ninja, blocking my way and staring at me with big almond eyes. Her skin was the color of coffee with just a splash of milk and her long black hair was covered by a loose scarf that draped around her shoulders and her peacefully sleeping baby. She was slight and posed no threat, which was a good thing because if it had been her intention to bushwhack me I wouldn’t have even had time to scream for help. She held her free hand out to me, then touched her baby and then laid her palm against her cheek, inclining her head as if she were resting. She did this several times and, slowly, I began to understand she was telling me she and her baby had no place to sleep. I must have stood there for over half a minute, mesmerized, watching her, before it occurred to me she wanted money.
By this time, I felt I owed her something for her time, and being giddy with jet-lag and feeling kindly toward the world, I pulled my money clip out of my pocket.
At that time, I had been carrying a money clip for many years, and would continue to do so for several more. It had never attracted undue attention in American and was, in fact, considered somewhat classy, and I never had occasion to regret it. In this situation, however, the disadvantage became apparent the moment my hand—holding a wad of twenty pound notes held neatly together by a gold-plated clip—left my pocket. Her eyes left my face and focused on the money and I realized I was never going to be able to fob her off with a fiver. Still, my mood was not dampened; I was in a position to help and I was glad to do it. I peeled off a twenty and held it out to her.
“Consider this your lucky day,” I said. “You caught me in a good mood.”
I wasn’t sure if she understood me, but she understood the language of money. She took the bill, kissed my hand, bowed, kissed my hand again and then backed away, making various gestures I took to mean “Thank you” as she did. I waited until she was clear of me before continuing on, unmolested, to The George, where I was pleased to find they had rooms available.
The room they gave me began with a “2” so I dragged my luggage up the stairs to the second floor only to find there were no rooms beginning with “2.” So I dragged my luggage up to the third floor where, inexplicably, I found my room. With the door shut and locked behind me, whatever reserves I had been calling on to keep myself together suddenly deserted me. I left the suitcase standing where it was, flopped onto the bed fully clothed and fell promptly asleep.
I woke up just after noon, local time, feeling as refreshed as I could expect after going to bed at four o’clock in the morning Eastern Standard Time and getting up at seven. I also felt strangely famished even though I had eaten dinner, breakfast and breakfast on the flights over. I supposed, despite gorging myself on airline food, my body was telling me it was breakfast time, so I proposed to freshen up and go see what downtown Limerick had on offer.
I unpacked, shaved and puzzled over the shower. It was a foreign contraption that needed to be turned on by a pull cord and then adjusted so a trickle of lukewarm water spurted out of the shower head. I had never experienced such an insipid shower; I was used to the kind where the water shot at you like hot needles, scouring the top layer of skin off your body. I did the best I could with it, then considered my clothing options. I had packed enough shirts for a week and was counting on finding a Laundromat after a few days, but I still couldn’t afford to waste any. A quick inspection confirmed the shirt I had worn on the trip over was now out of the “clean” line-up, so I reluctantly pulled on shirt two of seven. After taking care to hide my passport and most of my money (I didn’t want to make the mistake of pulling several hundred pounds out of my pocket again) I headed out in search of food, Guinness and Ireland.
It was coming up to one o’clock in the afternoon at this point, and I would have expected the lunch time rush hour to still be alive and well, but the streets were as quiet as downtown Albany after all the State workers have gone home. The only person I encountered was my new best friend with the big brown eyes and the sleeping baby. She ambushed me near the same location where I had seen her the first time, and in the same way; stepping in front of me, making supplicating gestures, pointing to her baby, miming sleep. This time, I just stared at her in disbelief. Didn’t she recognize me? Surely she hadn’t encountered any other foreigners gullible enough to fork over twenty pounds that morning, so she must have known she was double-dipping. In Albany, beggars knew enough to only hit you up once. And they were more entertaining about it. One guy used to wander up to unsuspecting people and ask, “Do you have seven cents?” Intrigued, the mark (i.e. me) would automatically put his hand in his pocket, at which point the guy would say, “Or a quarter?” This generally earned an appreciative chuckle and a handful of assorted change. Then the guy would shuffle off and—here is the important bit—try it on someone else. He would never come back to the same person a second time in one day; that would be rude.
But this woman—this pretty and beguiling young woman—did not seem to care. Now, I will be the first to admit I am a sucker for a pretty face, but I was no longer punch-drunk with jet-lag and my sense of propriety overruled (at least on this occasion) my penchant for pretty girls. This woman was not playing by the rules, and I needed to make that clear.
“You already hit me up,” I told her. “Don’t you remember me?”
In reply, she took my hand and kissed it, and gestured toward her baby. She did, it seemed, remember me, and was now asking if I would fund her child’s college tuition.
“No. I’ve already given you money.”
I stepped smartly around her (sometimes you just have to be firm with these people) and hurried on my way, hoping she wasn’t going to chase after me. A block or two later, I found a pub.
It had the look of a venerable neighborhood bar with a scarred and age-darkened bar top and a row of wooden stools, each occupied by an old man and each looking as if they had been there since the place opened—in 1847. The atmosphere was smoky, stale and silent. Sill, none of the patrons looked hostile, so I went in, grateful for the refuge. I sat myself at the last vacant stool, laid a twenty pound note on the bar and waited for the bartender. I was looking for food, but politeness dictated that I order a drink before ordering food, so I asked for a Guinness.