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

her scowl.
    Thereupon, she produced in either hand a formerly adult shirt, now shrunk by the most advanced imported American appliances to miniature elfin sizes. Until very recently, the Irish used to believe that the missing sock problem was explained by fairy mischief, which suddenly seemed plausible to me.
    “Just right for a leprechaun who fancies Marks and Spencer,” she growled.
    Women of course possess a knack for establishing networks that could cement kingdoms over problems just like this. So hassles small and large became fodder for constant visits with the neighbors. For a while, it seemed that every time I turned around, gregarious spirits like Breda Higgins, on the day shift, or the hilarious Belfast-born Mary Lynch, who preferred to stop in after 10 p.m., appeared in our kitchen to transform conversations about their favorite “cling film” or the mysteries of Gas Mark 6 on the cooker into weightier discussions, often ending in peals of laughter, about Ireland and America, restaurants, shops, movies, novels, and the like, before digressing into the more personal stuff of passions, memories, and dreams. Thus was our web of new connectedness woven, with Jamie dispensing tea or wine as was called for, and mixing as freely as if she had been in Ireland all her life. The idea had been that we’d just settle in for a sabbatical of renewal for one year or maybe two. But watching my wife and kids embrace their changed lives, forever seemed possible too.
    Me, I manfully procured four wheels by buying a small “estate” car, or station wagon, that had a sign in its front window two hundred feet from our house. Something’s not clicking? Take your clicker out of your pocket and click it, said the avant-garde composer John Cage. The kindly Welsh owner, whose name sounded something like Brynbrrryn, handed over the keys three days before being paid, which was very trusting indeed for a locksmith. Click. A celebration seemed in order, and I instinctively thought of that curious upstairs pub I had espied on our first walk about town, the Hi-B.
    “Wigs for Hire,” a wiggy sign said on the floor just above it, but never mind. In no time at all, I climbed those dingy stairs to the linoleum landing, and then opened a black door to an aria blast such as emitted by Mahler in one of his more bellicose moods. Behind a crescent-shaped bar, a man with flying wisps of white hair stood waving an imaginary baton beside shelves thick with whiskey, his pupils rapturously dilated. He was singing something that went – dee, Dee, DEE! It definitely was not B.
    Before the maestro, a number of curious-looking individuals hunkered over cylindrical columns of black stout. One had an unruly beard whose tendrils looked as if they might store months of famine-resistant nutrition. Another with a goatee expelled the heavyweight word “procrustean,” albeit garbled in the Urdu-like thickness of West Cork speech. Beaming at him was a dark-haired woman with a puppy at that moment raising a hind leg as if contemplating releasing a benediction on the floor.
    I found a free stool and gazed about in wonder. The proprietor, who I quickly learned was named Brian O’Donnell, offered some fleeting curiosity my way as he fussed with his Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.
    “That’s a sad light tonight,” he pronounced about an element not much of which looked to have ever touched his milky white skin.
    “Drive a man to seek refuge,” I tried, not realizing that our interchange could have long-term consequences.
    “I take it you are from America. Americans are not often intimate with the word ‘refuge.’ Nothing personal, but I am justthinking, isn’t vocabulary diminishing everywhere?” Brian said and turned away. His voice was peculiarly shrill and his attention span short. He lost himself for a while in fishing through a stack of papers with a manner not unlike that of an eccentric collector of antiquarian books. My kind of man, I thought, while