Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  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:

  Family Lawyers = Child-Trading Association

  These Incompetent, Inept, Bungling Bloodsuckers are the Gene Pool of Tomorrow’s Judges

  Family Law is a Killer

  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 ha
d 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.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 26

  Endless rain blackened the weeks after September 11, and the Irish had their own struggle with the changed terms of the world. The tourist industry and foreign investment, both critical to the country’s fortunes, plummeted; layoffs occurred by the thousands; and the overheated property and construction markets ominously stalled. A fear spread through the land that the Celtic Tiger might be tottering on its last legs. But the Irish know as much about economic travail as perhaps any people on earth, and they simply soldiered on.

  We tried to do the same, concentrating on the children and our work, while slowly regaining our day-to-day direction and resolve. In time, the rhythms of life began to provide their healing, as did the invigoration of fresh experience one gets from living abroad, once one turns a deaf ear to fools. And what had all our Irish struggles amounted to in the end, compared to the suffering of families directly affected by September 11? Friends from the U.S. kept saying how fortunate we were to be far from the malaise that had settled over our homeland, that there would be no profit in trudging back there. In time, we began to take a larger stock. It was obvious that malaise had not yet conquered Cork. The life force of the place was too resilient for that, and, considering the gloom elsewhere, we resumed thinking that this was the best place to call home, at least for now.

  Jamie’s brother Dave and his wife returned for Christmas, and, escaping the monsoons this time, were treated to a grand tour of the places we had come to love. “You should just stay here, you know that?” advised the ever-supportive Gayle.

  We sampled the cornucopia of Cork’s gifts – the theater, the music, the laughter, all combined one night in a marvelous candlelit performance by three local tenors in white dinner jackets at a pub called Pa Johnson’s – and counted our Irish blessings. A memorable trip followed to the haunting Burren in County Clare, that lunar landscape of endless rock shelves and rubble where nature still finds a way to spring tendrils of fresh life through the smallest crevice. The even more treeless and gale-wracked Aran Islands floated in the hazy distance, where survival, until recently, required that garden soil be conjured out of seaweed and sand. All one needed to learn about fortitude and perseverance lay right there.

  Harris had his twelfth birthday in January and received the one thing that our household still sorely lacked – a pet snake. This he named “Roberto Boa,” after his best friend and former snake-hunting partner in the U.S. Mr. Boa was in fact a four-inch-long baby corn snake that a St. Patrick-defying Cork entrepreneur had flogged for seventy euros (the insufferable new money having taken over on New Year’s Day). The creature, the very species Harris used to pluck out of woodpiles for free any summer day he chose, soon shed his old skin, and we began to do the same.

  The despair of autumn receded further as the seasons changed and spring approached again. Many of our problems had faded: the diatribes disappeared as the world spun forward; Harris prospered under the nurturing of a single, unchanging teacher; the teenagers who had harassed us had mercifully continued their hiatus; and no night raiders crept back through our kitchen window. Meanwhile, certain positive developments began to emerge from the society at large. The gardaí finally made sporadic efforts to curtail the late-night violence on Cork’s streets, and Irish motorways started being policed with a new, radar-equipped vigilance. The country also started tackling some of its mounting environmental problems, pushing recycling and even instituting the simple innovation of levying a fee on every plastic bag that heretofore had been mindlessly left to blow off onto the beaches and streams where I fished.

  And despite the economic setback after September 11, Ireland, so long accustomed to adversity, seemed determined to keep growing. Diminutive Cork, the little metropolis that could, was appointed European Capital of Culture for 2005, meaning that more than ten million of Brussels’ euros would be poured into the city’s coffers for the realization of grand visions for its streets and public squares and arts of every kind. Meanwhile, shops were being spiffed-up on every street, even as certain venerable pubs, more sadly, underwent ghastly face lifts.

  Americans tend to think that they live in a land of unique opportunity, energy, and can-do spirit. Yet a
vastly smaller country like Ireland has in many ways more-fixable problems, while remaining largely innocent of threats from abroad. The pace of its changes and breadth of its contradictions kept amazing us. The call of piety remained strong enough that over a million people visited the touring relics of St. Theresa, often standing in queues for hours to get their seconds-long chance for veneration. Meanwhile, Ireland’s holy wells were still attracting supplicants in great numbers, the visitors draping ribbons and fragments of the clothing of departed loved ones on nearby trees as they prayed that God would speed the souls of the deceased on to eternal life, or work miracles for the infirm.

  Yet as April 2002 unfolded, frosted glass “adult stores” and slick new lap-dancing clubs spread throughout downtown Cork – this in a city that would have all but banished a young lass in a halter top a generation ago. A flagship of such establishments, Dublin’s Club Lapello, was recently hauled into court for not having a license to facilitate patrons dancing with their hostesses. The defense solicitor argued, “There is no practice within the club of people dancing with people rather than at them.”

  One personal change was to limit visiting hours to a certain establishment where two more newly deceased regulars had their photographs taped to the mirror. The place was becoming bad luck. But the curious old Lee-side town and the inspiring county that surrounds it continued to amuse and engage us with its plucky celebration of life. You never knew when people would break out singing, in your home, on the street, or in the pub – or when the ever-improbable Irish would dart onto the center of the world’s troubled stage. Bono, the illustrious Dublin rock star with two seaside homes about to be connected by an aerial walkway, was busy touring Africa with the straight-arrow American Secretary of Commerce; the weird duo explored schemes for eliminating poverty, while draped in black-and-white striped robes and clownishly floppy hats that made them look like prison escapees in a vaudeville act.