Jaywalking with the Irish by Lonely Planet Read Free Book Online Page A

call my way. There was laughter alright after arriving there, especially when we stole saplings for replanting from the local convent, or hurtled over the roads smashing crab claws – offered from an admirer in town – on the Renault’s floor for instant snacks. But, alas, all was not perfect this time. Dingle’s panoramas drop jaws in summer, but the winter weather proved unspeakable. The gales lashed off the Atlantic, and the quarters in Bun’s building-site trailer, or “caravan,” werecold, cramped, and too close. Our joyous equilibrium of the year before became tainted by some of reality’s heaviness. Both of us had the weight of uncertainty on our shoulders, our private anxieties mounting about what lay ahead.
    We parted reluctantly at the end of 1975. If only I had known then that I was saying goodbye for the last time. Letters crisscrossed constantly, Bun’s lengthy, eloquent missives keeping my alternate Irish reality ever vivid. Bun and his son Paddy occupied themselves in restoring stone buildings around the Irish countryside. Meanwhile, back in America, I struggled to piece together a living, but never stopped thinking of my old friend. Suddenly, on a dark November day in 1982, I received word that Bun, now in his sixties, was dead. The loss never healed, and here I was called back again under his sign, trying to ease my entire family into a country that was now ineradicably changed.
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Chapter 4
    Earlier explorers of distant lands often returned with spectacular tales of having to hack their way through dense jungles, climb hoary mountains, or traverse wild seas in order to reach their El Dorados. Our family’s first tasks, after arriving in Cork City, kept leaning toward the tedious. Arrangements for a new phone line were attempted with at least eleven different help lines at Eircom, the privatized national phone monopoly that seduced 400,000 Irish people, most of whom had never purchased a sheaf of stock in their lives, to buy shares that became worthless overnight. And no wonder, because none of the cheerful operators at Eircom had the slightest ability to connect with their colleagues at the next desk.
    “We have a comprehensive basic service for thirty-two punts per month, or in your area you might wish to consider installation of a special ISDN Internet-access line.”
    “How much will that cost?”
    Silence. Crackle. Dead phone.
    Twenty more calls and still nobody has the answer.
    “Do you want a split line?”
    “I’m not sure . . . Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.”
    Crackle. Gone.
    Cork’s Department of Motor Vehicle Taxation recently came up with the perfect bureaucratic solution – announcing that, due to unmanageable volumes of calls seeking personal assistance, they were henceforth suspending all answers to that line.
    Nevertheless, we solved each tedious logistical challenge in its turn, and even landed a checking account from a bank manager who evidently bet his vault’s holdings on dark horses. Meanwhile, our boys kept recruiting one friend after another, while rapidly maturing Laura steeped herself in books about Ireland, andgingerly tested the waters with a couple of slightly younger neighborhood girls. Jamie, attempting to stake her claim in an unfamiliar world, nested with a vengeance. Armed with a block of “Fairy” soap, she organized every corner of the house, from drawer to shining drawer, and began to make sense of mysterious Irish household entities such as the hob and “hot press,” the linen closet that also houses the hot-water tank, invariably controlled by mysterious electrical timers. In fact, everything in this house seemed to be controlled by a network of these things, which turned washing machines, dryers, and furnaces on and off at their whim.
    One afternoon, I found Jamie muttering in the laundry cubicle, which we had been told housed “the most advanced American appliances.”
    “What’s the matter?” I asked, seeing