Jaywalking with the Irish by Lonely Planet Read Free Book Online

the hedges whenever Bun arrived with his baskets of hot bread or scones from the oven, or vegetables plucked from the extensive walled gardens he tended by the main house below.
    “Good man yourself,” Bun would say, his blue eyes beaming above his long sloping cheeks and craggy chin. Although tall and powerfully shouldered, he moved with a lax ranginess, a lack of physical self-consciousness that is rarely found in an adult. His son Paddy, now in his mid-fifties and my friend for nearly thirty years, moves the same way.
    The kettle would be fired up, and rambling dialogues would ensue on just about any subject under the sun. At night there were trips to Gaffney’s pub at the top of the hill, then a country place, where the owners, spellbound by Bun’s talk, slipped us into the back room for more wild storytelling after closing time. Whatever I read or thought was reviewed and enriched by Bun, rather than the Trinity College lecturers to whom I was a passing shadow.
    Drummed out of pre-law studies for which he was thoroughly ill-suited, Bun dabbled briefly for a time at acting. He in due time followed his older brothers into farming outside Dublin, just as his Anglo-Irish planter family had been tilling Ireland’s soil for three hundred years. Eventually selling his farm, Bun came to Howth in the late 1960s to set up a wood-carving shop. Then he taught himself to chisel fantastical figures in stone. What he carved best were stories, and parades of daily visitors – lorry drivers, lawyers, jewelers, and fishermen – showed up in hopes of losing themselves in his magical tales. Whether we were having tea in the conservatory of the run-down main house where he tended grapes, or smashing croquet balls around the ballustraded lower garden by the bay, or hiding in closets to escape unwanted visitors, laughter ruled. On weekends, he hosted trips to every curious and beloved Irish place he knew. Through visits to ancient monasteries, the wilds of Connemara, or mad parties until dawn at his brother Dick’s Wicklow cattle farm, Bun made a gift of the Ireland he treasured and introduced me to every last person he’d met. Oftenwe traveled to a Tipperary village called Terryglass, to help with his son Paddy’s exquisite pub restoration. The singing there, with Bun on the squeezebox, was mighty.
    A demon for making wine, Bun regularly dispatched me to gather for his concoctions wild dandelions and rose petals, and to scour Moore Street’s bawling, open-air vegetable stalls for the most leathery carrots that could be found. One absurd night, a friend in the Irish Communist Party and I scaled the walls of an army barracks in order to nip a bushel of military carrots that we had spotted in the yard. “Bun had better be happy now,” shouted my friend as we jumped onto his dodgy motor scooter, our sack of purloined provender safe between us. Fortunately, no bullets penetrated our derrieres.
    “Ambrosia and nectar” is the way Bun described the resultant elixir, which he called carrot whiskey, proffering it with a rolling hand motion and diabolical glint to his eyes.
    “It’s only enough to kill a hardened sinner. Drink deep.”
    I did, and drank in the essence of an Ireland I had come to love. With Bun, every day was an inspiration. All it took was for one of us to start a sentence and the talk would flow for hours. He was a soul mate, such as one rarely finds a second time in this life. When the year finally played out, Bun and I parted with tears. Neither one of us knew what we would do next, only that we had shared a unique interlude in which two ages of life crossed in a way that is rarely available to fathers and sons.
    A year later, Bun invited me to Dingle to help with that cottage, his testament in stone, whose picture would ineffably materialize in our newly rented house in Cork. He had started this project with his latest young love (women fell for Bun constantly), but that affair had played out, leading to the bugle