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August 6, 2001
I mentioned a night out with a friend B. and waking the next day feeling miserable (May 22nd). During my visit to Ireland I had dinner with her. She apologized for not having phoned the next morning after our night out in New York; her husband had gone on a Sopranos tour and she had sat in the sauna of the hotel and wept. She hadn’t been sure why she had spent the day weeping but mentioned having these days of late.
My clearance of the books led to a desire to clear everything. I tackled the boxes of photos and was doing well until I encountered the past. Photos are all the past, but some—it’s partly to do with the quality of those photos, they are good photos, and with the point in time when they were taken—render the past in a more acute manner. One set of photos is particularly redolent of this phenomenon. In the photos it is apparent that it is not warm. We are in Donegal. There are five of us; four women. We are swimming naked in the Atlantic, drying our shoes with hair dryers in the cottage and walking on sea foam covered rocks. B. is there. It’s probably seventeen years ago. There is a very vivid sense of movement in the photos, of us walking on the beach, jumping across rocks, of wind. There is something not quite static about them, as if they might start up again at any moment and subsume the present. The past has distributed itself unevenly in the box of photos, some are merely old, but in the ones of Donegal there is a great glut of old time silting up the images.
I mentioned to B. at dinner in Dublin that I had awoken in a similar state after our night out in New York. I hazarded the lost girlhood theory as an explanation for our melancholy and knew immediately by her reaction that for her this was not the case for her.
August 2, 2001
Tribes spotted while passing through summer SoHo: herd of tourists betraying themselves with backward backpacks, strange shoes and their refusal to cooperate with that widely held belief that if you are not in a hurry in New York there must be something wrong with you: at least know how to get out of the way quickly. Starved mother: birth is no excuse for a few extra pounds. Good pant girl: girls with pants that make both wearer and observer pant.
July 30, 2001
During this visit to Ireland I rediscovered the joy of socializing with my mother while seated within the confines of her disintegrating car. Hurtling along, with the necessary exchange of power provided by me being at the wheel, delivered an ease that was absent in the home. We talked, laughed and performed dull chores together: the purchasing of a new mattress, the repair of the vacuum, the gathering of the groceries. For me, one who is always alarmed by the challenges of the simplest task, assisting my mother suddenly lent me an efficiency I don’t associate with my daily existence. There was no room for foundering, for getting lost in the jungle of north Dublin, no possibility that we shouldn’t be able to find a parking space. I became the warrior of chores, understanding that our unheeded progress was vital to the maintenance of our camaraderie. We made our way to Classic Furniture to buy a new mattress. En route we pass the Cadbury’s factory. We stop at the traffic lights and I become hypnotized by the purple script declaring the brand of product being made within. The C of the sign is a purple whirlpool, the d and b mirror images of each other. I want chocolate.
Classic Furniture is one of those stores that provides its own form of relief by containing nothing that you could possibly want. I want to proclaim from atop its highest CD tower: “Classic Furniture, you have temporarily freed me of desire.” Nothing in Classic Furniture is remotely classic, it is all a dull modern conglomeration of shoddy function that has bypassed anything conversant with the pleasure that can be derived from form. However, in the back we find a good orthopedic mattress to replace the tired noodle that my mother has been folding herself into for too long. She asks strange questions of the salesman that he answers with patience and conspiratorial smiles directed at me. I have fallen into one of the armchairs, my mother has shifted gear into an uncharacteristic spending spree: why not replace all of the mattresses? On our return home I phoned my friend Una who had recommended Classic Furniture as the nearest mattress outlet; we had devised a vague plan to meet there that afternoon as she too was in the market for a new mattress. Her trip to Classic Furniture had been somewhat less successful, she had left without purchasing a mattress as her two children had immediately thrown tantrums, used the beds as trampolines and filled their diapers to capacity. I sympathized with them.
July 27, 2001
Connemara: Every time I go there I flirt with the idea of learning the place. Of finally putting the names together with the places, putting the map on the land, of being sure that the island one sees from the house is High Island and not Friar or even Cruagh. I have some vague urge to know the history, to understand the geology, and even in rare flights of fancy to learn the language (Irish). The landscape is filled with birds and wild flowers, one could match the pictures in books with the living things. But I never seem to make any real progress. I’m not even very good at getting to know the owners of the local pub. Some of this is my innate lack of tenacity, some of it is the very nature of the landscape (an island appears alone, becomes three as you continue on the road), much of it is the familiar comfort of, once again, not belonging. The vagueness of the visitor precludes many responsibilities and it also breeds an easier love.
Going home, the phrase, for me refers to when I go to Ireland even though I have not lived there for sixteen years. Where in Ireland is this home? I suppose it is Dublin and more specifically the village and the house where my parents live and where I grew up. So going away from there, going West to Connemara, is leaving home again and yet it is still inside the bigger idea of going home to Ireland. Even though I am a tourist in the West, albeit a returning and enthusiastic tourist, there is a certain point in the road when I feel closer to the idea of coming home than I do when reaching any other place. There is a mountain on the right where the landscape changes from the more pastoral farmland that lies to the East of Oughterard into the rock strewn, green lunar landscape of “the West.” This place confirms my theory that all land aspires to be coastline. This is why the earth’s plates move around, why it cracks and erupts, why is freezes and thaws, why rivers are so busy making to the sea. They have coast envy. Connemara has coast in spades; it has resolved itself into a glut of coast.
For me the visit, to visit any place, always involves the rhetorical question: “Could I live here?” It is another flirtation, the half seductive threat of permanency foisted onto your fleeting holiday. Annually we perform the ritual fantasy of looking in the three property seller’s windows at the pictures of cottages with ever increasing prices: there was the love affair with the ruin on Turbot Island, the ruins with the sea view and water logged land at Emlagh, the semi-ruin with half an acre on Inishturk. It is a ritual that I remember my parents performing there thirty years ago when you could purchase a house for what a lap top costs today. But they would get commitment phobia and remember the sun that you can find in Spain, the leaks that spring year round, the damp that affords Ireland very efficient hip replacement surgeons. Wind and rain. Summer weather forecasts that daily include a vast array of weather permutations; forecasting that can render even the meteorologist lyrical. Rain coming at you not from above but from behind you and in front of you, a personal assault launched horizontally. So we rent the same house every summer: tenacious tenants. We are familiar with its contents though they are not our own, au fait with its foibles and careful when washing its wine glasses. I have come to realize, that for me, the interregnum, being in transit, the house not owned but rented, is the perfect state. I am not fit for ownership, for citizenship, do not possess the stamina that permanency requires.
July 26, 2001
On the map Ireland looks like a little, hairy, old-man-foetus in profile stretching its toes and fingers into the Atlantic. It’s coastline, particularly that of the Western coast, is a place consumed with getting from A to B by the most circuitous route. My self-donated annual lottery prize is a visit to this part of the world. It is required to rescue soul and sanity, shore up the body for the coming year and refurbish the imagination. It hasn’t failed yet.
There the birds sing with a persistent generosity all morning, like those jazz greats simultaneously accepting and defying their basic pessimism. There is a machine buzz of flies and their kamakaze ticking against windows; huge moths; large black slugs; cows; endless bewildered sheep roaming the hills and the roads; less humans. Nature here is benign, no mosquitoes, no snakes, no Lyme ridden ticks, no man-eating sharks; the most threatening animal I encountered was a sheep dog with mythological ambitions, whenever one walked onto a beach with him he turned into a hormone driven minotaur monopolizing a leg of the nearest female, usually me.
The first days of the holiday are often the most difficult. Going away is like placing the shopping bag of your life on the floor; the contents escape and become fiercely animate objects and the bag loses all its form. It passes. You can spend a whole day reading, cooking, eating and walking. I became convinced while sitting in the wild garden of our rented cottage one morning, a warm sunny morning, that this is where time is manufactured. It emerges from this navel of the world in a wide ribbon, more plentiful at the point where it issues forth than when it reaches other parts. It is immensely comforting to experience this expanse of time. It stays light until 10.30 pm during the summer, which may have something to do with this illusion.
Wild salmon; smoked salmon; local lamb, pork and beef; floury potatoes; giant cooking apples; regal vegetables; milk, cream and cheese: all striving to taste of their very essence. A famine would seem impossible.
Beware the fellow tourist encountered at the start of the trip, he is the ineluctable character destined to haunt your stay. Ours took the form of a Dutch painter living in the vicinity. We’ll call him Ludwig. The previous tenants of the cottage, friends who we overlapped with for a night, had purchased two paintings of the area from him. The exchange of the paintings for the agreed upon price was the last thing to be done before our friends' departure. As I am sleeping in the sun filled loft bed on our first morning, and one sleeps long and hard in these parts, Ludwig’s verbal diarrhea crashes into the cottage. Can I outsleep his incessant ramblings, will my bladder outlast his tale? No. I have to rise, descend the stairs and join him for a breakfast of pig parts and psychobabble. He has met an American woman from Santa Barbara in the nearest town, in its gourmet shop. He is buying his daily cappucino (yes cappucino has come to Connemara) and betrays some hint of irritation that this blow in, the American, is monopolizing the attention of the shopkeepers. She turns to him and says, “you have been rolling a big boulder uphill all your life.” This comment completely disarms the ornery Dutch man and to make an incredibly long story, as he tells it, short it is decided that Ludwig should leave his Dutch wife of 25 years, move to Santa Barbara with the clairvoyant blow in and start painting redwood trees instead of rocky shorelines. We met Ludwig in every pub, on every turn of the road, and in every shop we frequented until he left for California a week after our initial encounter. He lasted six days in Santa Barbara. The gourmet shopkeeper kept us in cheese and gossip, cappucino and local lore.
What I kept reminding myself as I wanted to tear out Ludwig’s tongue, as my mind became saturated by his New Age tide of trivia, and by his egomaniacal stories of conquest and colonization, was that one shouldn’t run off with strangers you meet in the Connemara Hamper and that the devil you are holidaying with is wildly superior to the man ahead of you in the cappucino queue. Perhaps, as Ludwig kept telling me, there are no coincidences.