Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  “I still haven’t found what I’m looking fo-oor,” Bono sang from under his omnipresent wraparound blue shades to African children who did not understand a word. But neither had I, and Ireland still had room for grand dreams. I even wondered if one day I might yet launch that long-planned Cork Magazine, my small testament to all the brightest things we had come to know in our new land. The post-September 11 world had settled into some kind of new equilibrium after all, and so, it felt, had our lives in Ireland.

  One weekend, we journeyed for a lunch in Inchigeelagh, an exquisitely tranquil nook in the hidden folds of Mid-Cork. “Now!” said a slightly shriveled, bob-haired waitress as she made a flurry of activity out of setting five paper napkins around a table in a cosy, hearth-warmed room in Creedon’s Hotel. Something about her was pure cat.

  Out she came with the forks and knives. The cutlery descended, and our very pleased waitress repeated “Now!”

  Tea came with a “Now!” Saucers: “Now!” A bowl of sugar: “Now!”

  Surprisingly strong portraits of time-weathered country people and rugged hills stared down at us over discreetly displayed bits of sculpture. Serious books lined nearby shelves. And here came our soup – “veg” naturally, but steaming and spiced true to some prescient soul’s fine sense of taste. “Now!”

  Was the server blipping monosyllables because she was daft? Or perhaps she was a native Irish-speaker who knew no other English word?

  Baskets of sandwiches appeared with a fresh “Now!”

  Laura had her eyes cocked in amusement. No McDonald’s could have provoked the same sly smile.

  “Now!” The woman repeated it perhaps five times more before we were done with that meal, never uttering a single other word.

  Perhaps the waitress was an oracle.

  “Now.” What a ring that little word held. We had fretted so often about the past and the future and probably the pluperfect, too. But there was the message – carpe diem. Cork was our “now,” and the spirit and rhythms of the place were in our bones; perhaps this “now,” right here before us, was where we belonged, not on an extended lark, but for good.

  So it was that we contemplated buying a house in Cork, and at last putting down roots. This quest proved frustrating, however. Unless one has Bono’s riches, purchasing property is not an easy process in Ireland; in fact, commissioning seven thousand slaves to erect a desert pyramid could be less daunting. Thinking back on the beneficence of small-town living for raising kids, we first explored possibilities in Kinsale. But it became apparent that one would get better value in Beverly Hills or the toniest enclaves of London. So we pointed our Irish dreaming to Clonakilty, that charming, bustling gateway to West Cork.

  Perhaps I felt some ancestral pull toward the place owing to the Deasy blood on my mother’s side. That versatile Timoleague and Clonakilty clan had once distinguished itself by smuggling contraband along the West Cork coast; it then graduated into running rum from the West Indies, before finally creating a great brewery in the nineteenth century. The resultant stout was so thick and faculty dimming, locals dubbed it “the wrastler.” One wag remarked that across a pewter pot of the stuff “you could trot a mouse.”

  So it was Deasy Land here we come. The first inspection was of a Georgian behemoth on an exquisite town square. Never mind that it had twelve bedrooms and we had only three children – Michael Collins had boarded inside as a youth, and there was no telling what we were capable of while in the process of remaking our lives inside out. Running a hotel? No problem. That would be a piece of cake compared to some of our more capriciously discussed alternatives to the magazine: starting a miniature golf course, a slick coffee shop, an art gallery, or perhaps pushing a hot-dog cart outside Cork’s hurling park. A hotel seemed doable, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to give the kids access to the playing fields at the edge of town, and the great beaches and fishing spots at a stone’s throw, when not insinuating ourselves into the talkative company at De Barra’s to quaff a few “wrastlers”? The only catch was that the particular abode had no heating, the walls festered with rot, and it carried a price tag high enough to cover the cost of every property in the village two decades before. Drive on coachman, drive on.

  Next we settled upon a house that had been owned by Michael Collins’s nephew. This one had fantastic gardens and an orchard, hefty spaciousness, nice views, kids nearby, and a cracked and noseless figure of the Blessed Virgin that looked as if it had been thrown down the stairs in a tantrum. Up and down the hillside rose newly built homes, many done with a stone-facaded tastefulness that Clonakilty’s civic planners, God bless them, encourage. The local school seemed a model of bright stewardship. Perfect. We would live here and flourish.

  However, the Collins house had a certain price. Little did we know that this signified nothing. The prices listed for Irish properties proved to be no more real than a free-drink ticket slapped into one’s hands by a shill outside a New York City strip joint.

  “We like this place. We’ll buy it,” I told the auctioneer, which Irish real-estate agents are tellingly called.

  “You want to make a bid, is it?” he asked, poker-faced.

  “Yes, we’ll pay the full asking price.”

  We knew Clonakilty’s history, and thought the offer more than fair.

  “Well, there is a higher bid on offer already actually.”

  “How much higher?”

  “Thirty thousand.”

  Back when the town was devastated by the Famine, they used to say, “Clonakilty, God help us,” for other reasons.

  “Who else exactly is interested?”

  “I am not at liberty to say that. I am sure you will understand.”

  “But of course.” Now here we were, talking like tut-tutting Brits – a gentlemanly, if cute, former West Cork horse-trader in Michael Collins land (on Michael Collins’s family turf, for Christ’s sake) and a displaced Yank considering pushing a hot-dog cart through his post-fifty years.

  Would things in Ireland ever be simple?

  “We’ll give you thirty-two more,” I said, wheeling and dealing away.

  Night fell. “We have your offer and it is a handsome offer indeed, but there has just been a fax to our office indicating that the other bidders will now go to thirty-five thousand more,” explained the man’s boss the next morning.

  Gasp. Reflection. Delay. Then a call back: “We’ll go to forty.”

  So went our days, and our next two weeks – consultations, hair-pulling, ever-higher bids against unknown beings, a process everyone reassured us was routine when buying Irish property and officially called “gazumping.” Clonakilty seemed ideal, full of friendly people starting businesses of various descriptions – one astute soul was even launching a scaled-down newsprint version of the local magazine concept I had so fervently pursued, and it occurred to me that I might hook up with him. But there were limits, and when the negotiations reached fifty thousand above the original asking price, we backed out. The phantom bidders evidently went poof as well, because that fine, fine house is still available as I write.

  Ultimately we reset our homesteading sights upon Cork City. An interesting nineteenth-century house with a walled garden was available at the end of a shockingly narrow road in the desirable Montenotte area up the next hill from where we were living. This had increasingly familiar ingredients – mortar walls crumbling with the infernal Irish damp, and this time, not one but two separate rival bidders appearing from the Irish ether that is so chock-full of reposed saints and panting house purchasers. Up and up went the asking price, and down, down went our resolve.

  We tried one of Cork’s southside suburbs. The modest dwelling had four other potential purchasers poking and prying inside when I arrived for an inspection. In many countries, a potential buyer of a $1000 diamond ring would be ushered into a back room for a respectful, private viewing. But a prospective plonker for a commodity worth three hundred times more will be treated with no such respect in the isle of ancient horse
-traders. The gazumping of course started right on cue. Goodbye to all that, I said. Ireland had simply gotten too expensive, too modern, and too complicated, and I was topped out. Having walked to the very end of the gangplank, I feared I could not earn enough money to pay the Irish piper for the rest of our years.

  So, with sadness in our hearts, we would go back to America after all. The O’Neills, Hans and Lourdes, Owen and Maria, and all the rest were told. We had a wonderful home there for raising children, and, when the truth was weighed, a sound school and good community, even if the latter needed to lighten up. I missed the beauty of the New England countryside intensely. Our Irish adventure had been rich, and would never be regretted, but the stars signaled that it must end.

  Stupid me. I had altogether forgotten about Irish circles. One day in May, Shaun Higgins banged on our door, saying that he had convinced a neighbor across the street to sell his house to us at a very reasonable price with no auctioneer or phantom bidder on the hustings. “Don’t ye see? Ye won’t have to move anywhere at all? Ye can stay right here among all the friends you and the children have already made,” said Shaun. “This is where you belong. Don’t you understand that this is your home now?”

  The Victorian, ivy-clad terrace house had superbly high ceilings, grand fireplaces, and a foyer archway leading to winding staircases, but it cried out for renovation at every turn. It could have had banshees, for all I could tell. But Jamie was convinced that it was a project equal to our dreams.

  An aged German woman in the Hi-B listened to our plan and said, “I first came to Ireland with my husband twenty years ago, and thought it was the most beautiful country with the friendliest people in the world.”

  I smiled. “And?”

  “We bought an old house to renovate, just like you’re considering.”

  “And?”

  “My husband had three heart attacks. It was a nightmare, what the builders did to us, and now he’s dead,” she said and burst out crying. Esther whispered that I should pay no mind, because the woman was called “Waterfall” for this teary penchant.

  A few days later I went to a hidden stream to reflect. Some beautiful trout were hooked and released, but I barely admired them, so intensely was I assessing our time in Ireland. Bubbles suddenly began rising from the lip of a long adamantine pool, as if a fat salmon had swum in from the sea. I half-seriously thought of lying down in that dark water with a stone on my belly in order to breathe in those bubbles until I could reason clearly. But memories floated past in the river’s swirls, producing illusions of clarity, one by one. So very much had fallen into our hands in return for what we had risked and I could not walk away yet: it was that simple.

  That old, incredibly cluttered, unheated terrace house across the street took on a sheen of promise. We talked and we thought; and, with our Cork friends promising they would pitch in at every stage of the work ahead, we bought it. Whether this meant committing to a third Irish year or forever, only time could tell. But mark this, ye adventurers, and mark this well – no man who has dipped his feet in Cork’s dreams will ever leave easily.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Epilogue

  “It’s only enough to kill a hardened sinner,” Bun had said about his homemade magic potion, the carrot whiskey.

  The renovations that consumed the first half of our third year in Ireland had a similar impact upon our equilibrium.

  Oh, we thrilled alright to the pulsating dance of the “kango” – this being the Irish term for jackhammer. Often, I was tapped on the elbow as the things were trained, like grenade launchers, upon little G-spots of sensitivity within our prized acquisition.

  “Ah, do you have a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  “This bulge in the wall here. Ah, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, now, but it has some problems with the plaster. The sag is fulsome. It seems to be very, very old plaster. You would be advised to clear this whole area away.”

  “Is it a big job, Mick?”

  “Not at all; no.”

  “Ah, just a moment there, Dave?” – a fresh tap on the sleeve, this time from another workman – “I hate to say this, but the wall in the front hallway, there is a touch of trouble there.”

  “And?”

  “The whole thing really should go.”

  The doorway itself had to go; and of course the electricians, deciding that new wiring was called for in every room, needed massive channels bored through every two-foot-thick, 120-year-old facade that caught their eye. The plumbers, who seemed to be a particularly disgruntled and multitudinous lot, developed a yen to shove pipes through this barrier and that, and while they were at it, blast floors into oblivion.

  On the curiously sunny mornings of that autumn of 2002, I would stride hopefully across Bellevue Park, throw open the front door to our new home – back when a doorway existed – and . . . gag. The entire house was forever enveloped in a post-nuclear-bomb-like cloud of plaster dust and pulverized wall fallout, while the kangos roared and workers in masks slipped like shrouds through the haze.

  One day, my old friend Paddy Wilkinson paid a surprise visit to see our “progress.” He found me with my eyes bulging dementedly, my face and every inch of exposed skin filmed in white powder like the cracked Marlon Brando’s aboriginal friends in Apocalypse Now, while I heaved a choking wheelbarrow down our hallway of personal renovation hell. A particularly fine demolition party was in full swing. The kangos were symphonic and had never rang prouder.

  “It’s going to be a fine house,” Paddy, the master renovator, reassured. Like phantoms in the fallout, a couple of fellas with breathing masks at their chins sat at a surviving table placidly sipping tea, and watching to see whether I would finally lose it. Paddy and I examined the scene, caught each other’s eyes, and suddenly started laughing like madmen. That sound, quickly louder than even the wildest decibels of the kangos, ricocheted down the halls and up the stairs, where it was picked up and amplified by only God knows how many Irishmen who were presently tearing my family’s life apart. It may have even reached the heavens, that chorus of the blessed and the damned.

  In time, after heartbreak and at amazing expense, Paddy’s prediction proved true. We had in the end a beautifully restored house and a firm foot now planted in our adopted land, while we all began to recover from yet another escapade not advised for the fainthearted. Any number of friends had shown what they were made of and showered grace upon our progress – working for nothing, and giving us carpets, cutlery, beds, meals, help of every kind. That was more than something.

  But then people started dying and growing ill back in the States. A beloved uncle, a brother-in-law, another uncle gone, and now an aunt and my mother in trouble. I was making journeys home for the worst reasons.

  In June of 2003, the whole family flew back across the pond to reconnect and sort out, yet again, our imperatives. The truth was that Harris, now thirteen, had struggled painfully through his first year at Christian Brothers’ big secondary school. And with household mayhem prevailing through that sensitive transition, we had done a poor job of organizing a better option for him the next year. All through the summer we struggled to solve issues large and small, among them the fact that the most recent renter had blithely walked out on our Connecticut house.

  In more than a little confusion, we began packing our bags for the mid-August flight back to Cork – we loved the place so much still. But we had just buried our saintly Aunt Seena, and questions nagged. What about our mothers, what about Harris, what about this, and on and on? One day we told our kids we would stay on in America for a while after all, then another afternoon we pronounced no, we would leave, that the rest of our lives hung in the balance, and Cork was it as far as we were concerned.

  Then, as the flight back loomed but thirty-six hours off, Jamie and I looked in each other’s eyes and knew the truth. We could not just blithely wave goodbye to my dying mother, to all these people who made up the very fabric of our l
ives.

  Alone and numbed, I flew back to Cork to take care of our affairs.

  There on Wellington Road, I met a house painter who had practically moved in with us for a few weeks, before walking off the job and leaving his brushes, radio, and painting overalls behind for some better assignment. In time, we would understand that this was fairly routine.

  He was Tony, but I called him Professor.

  “Professor,” I said, always liking this ponderous soul, who sometimes made a point of undercharging us. “I have bad news: we are moving back to America.”

  “Jesus Christ, tell me you are not serious?” Tony responded, his eyes instantly moistening. “You can’t be leaving us.”

  And there I was, not knowing how to explain my confusion, wiping away tears as I talked with a painter who had left his trousers in our closet and vanished. That I had taken this, too, in my stride was perhaps a measure of how Corked or uncorked I myself had become.

  I would soon go through the same anguished routine with innumerable closer friends.

  “I am shocked,” said Pat O’Neill.

  “But you are one of us,” said Hugh McPhillips.

  It felt as if we were committing some betrayal. We had been tested and scalded but ultimately accepted with open arms in this strangely interconnected little world; we had survived a rite of passage reserved for very few from points afar – and now we were just packing off and leaving.

  I hid behind curtains and answering machines, not wanting to tell our story anymore. What a remarkable thing it had been to move across the seas with such caprice and find that you belonged in your adopted town, at your stab at the end of the rainbow, more fully than anywhere you had lived since childhood. How remarkable that you had discovered your heart’s home at fifty, but now were abandoning it.

  Jamie flew back to Cork to help with the final, rending packing. The banger of a car was sold at the last minute, and renters were found for the year ahead, though turning over the keys to them was not easy. I couldn’t look at the towering brick hearth without seeing Pat Lynch applying an evil goo to strip off ages of encrusted paint; way up on the dangerously steep roof there still reigned the smiling face of Hans, the friend who would placidly risk his life for us without charge. Renovated and polished to perfection, this house was filled with spirits. And they were ours.