December 17th, 2002
Dublin is a small town. You might think that you would have exhausted all of its streets during part of a lifetime lived there. Recently, during a ten day visit there, I discovered new vistas, new corners, new junctions. Going up Merrion Street past Doheny and Nesbitts pub I take a left down a lane and another left and am back on Merrion Square where I have just walked through the beautiful park in the square. I am killing time before meeting a friend in the Merrion Hotel. This approach to the square gives you a head on view of the fine Georgian architecture of the National Gallery, Government buildings and the grassy splendour that surrounds them. All newly clean, reminding us of Ireland’s economy that continues, if a little more slowly of late, to grow like a cabbage. This town is, in many respects, so different from the one I left seventeen years ago, return is both endlessly familiar and reminiscent of visiting a European city that you have never been to before. There are portions of it that are etched into my head, as familiar as one’s own moles. Bewley’s Cafe with its stained glass Harry Clarke windows: I meet a friend for breakfast (weak milky coffee, rashers, cherry buns and Irish butter). There is a roaring fire in the fire place and the whole place is suffused with a golden light. How many afternoons in the past did I spend here? But now the city also supports wine bars, cheese shops, and business people dealing tęte a tęte or on cell phones. I am from here but no longer exclusively of here. I meet a man and am reminded of my own race’s entertaining and eloquent charm, the sturdy flesh and pale skin, am reminded how I was often oblivious to the appeal of my own when I lived here. My mind performs a temporal boggle: This man and I are married, we have children, I work at something other than I do in New York, we go to the West at weekends. You peel back the fragile skin of destiny to expose the bundled nerve endings of another life, a life deserted, and your whole being loses its equilibrium like a ship in a gale force with its ballast ripped out. People, especially outside of Dublin, now mistake me for an American. I stare at the new Euro coins like a geriatric trying to make change. I know the city streets but get hopelessly lost when trying to negotiate the ever expanding suburbs with their glossy new EU funded roads. Sometimes it seems that everything has conspired to make me an outsider, even in my homeland. But the grand tradition of universal homesickness is a privilege I enjoy.
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Dublin is a small town. You might think that you would have exhausted all of its streets during part of a lifetime lived there. Recently, during a ten day visit there, I discovered new vistas, new corners, new junctions. Going up Merrion Street past Doheny and Nesbitts pub I take a left down a lane and another left and am back on Merrion Square where I have just walked through the beautiful park in the square. I am killing time before meeting a friend in the Merrion Hotel. This approach to the square gives you a head on view of the fine Georgian architecture of the National Gallery, Government buildings and the grassy splendour that surrounds them. All newly clean, reminding us of Ireland’s economy that continues, if a little more slowly of late, to grow like a cabbage. This town is, in many respects, so different from the one I left seventeen years ago, return is both endlessly familiar and reminiscent of visiting a European city that you have never been to before. There are portions of it that are etched into my head, as familiar as one’s own moles. Bewley’s Cafe with its stained glass Harry Clarke windows: I meet a friend for breakfast (weak milky coffee, rashers, cherry buns and Irish butter). There is a roaring fire in the fire place and the whole place is suffused with a golden light. How many afternoons in the past did I spend here? But now the city also supports wine bars, cheese shops, and business people dealing tęte a tęte or on cell phones. I am from here but no longer exclusively of here. I meet a man and am reminded of my own race’s entertaining and eloquent charm, the sturdy flesh and pale skin, am reminded how I was often oblivious to the appeal of my own when I lived here. My mind performs a temporal boggle: This man and I are married, we have children, I work at something other than I do in New York, we go to the West at weekends. You peel back the fragile skin of destiny to expose the bundled nerve endings of another life, a life deserted, and your whole being loses its equilibrium like a ship in a gale force with its ballast ripped out. People, especially outside of Dublin, now mistake me for an American. I stare at the new Euro coins like a geriatric trying to make change. I know the city streets but get hopelessly lost when trying to negotiate the ever expanding suburbs with their glossy new EU funded roads. Sometimes it seems that everything has conspired to make me an outsider, even in my homeland. But the grand tradition of universal homesickness is a privilege I enjoy.
- rachael 12-17-2002 8:55 pm