Jaywalking with the Irish (23 page)

Endless rain blackened the weeks after September 11, and the Irish had their own struggle with the changed terms of the world. The tourist industry and foreign investment, both critical to the country’s fortunes, plummeted; layoffs occurred by the thousands; and the overheated property and construction markets ominously stalled. A fear spread through the land that the Celtic Tiger might be tottering on its last legs. But the Irish know as much about economic travail as perhaps any people on earth, and they simply soldiered on.

We tried to do the same, concentrating on the children and our work, while slowly regaining our day-to-day direction and resolve. In time, the rhythms of life began to provide their healing, as did the invigoration of fresh experience one gets from living abroad, once one turns a deaf ear to fools. And what had all our Irish struggles amounted to in the end, compared to the suffering of families directly affected by September 11? Friends from the U.S. kept saying how fortunate we were to be far from the malaise that had settled over our homeland, that there would be no profit in trudging back there. In time, we began to take a larger stock. It was obvious that malaise had not yet conquered Cork. The life force of the place was too resilient for that, and, considering the gloom elsewhere, we resumed thinking that this was the best place to call home, at least for now.

Jamie’s brother Dave and his wife returned for Christmas, and, escaping the monsoons this time, were treated to a grand tour of the places we had come to love. “You should just stay here, you know that?” advised the ever-supportive Gayle.

We sampled the cornucopia of Cork’s gifts – the theater, the music, the laughter, all combined one night in a marvelous candlelit performance by three local tenors in white dinner jackets at a pub called Pa Johnson’s – and counted our Irish blessings. A memorable trip followed to the haunting Burren in County Clare, that lunar landscape of endless rock shelves and rubble where nature still finds a way to spring tendrils of fresh life through the smallest crevice. The even more treeless and gale-wracked Aran Islands floated in the hazy distance, where survival, until recently, required that garden soil be conjured out of seaweed and sand. All one needed to learn about fortitude and perseverance lay right there.

Harris had his twelfth birthday in January and received the one thing that our household still sorely lacked – a pet snake. This he named “Roberto Boa,” after his best friend and former snake-hunting partner in the U.S. Mr. Boa was in fact a four-inch-long baby corn snake that a St. Patrick-defying Cork entrepreneur had flogged for seventy euros (the insufferable new money having taken over on New Year’s Day). The creature, the very species Harris used to pluck out of woodpiles for free any summer day he chose, soon shed his old skin, and we began to do the same.

The despair of autumn receded further as the seasons changed and spring approached again. Many of our problems had faded: the diatribes disappeared as the world spun forward; Harris prospered under the nurturing of a single, unchanging teacher; the teenagers who had harassed us had mercifully continued their hiatus; and no night raiders crept back through our kitchen window. Meanwhile, certain positive developments began to emerge from the society at large. The
gardaí
finally made sporadic efforts to curtail the late-night violence on Cork’s streets, and Irish motorways started being policed with a new, radar-equipped vigilance. The country also started tackling some of its mounting environmental problems, pushing recycling and even instituting the simple innovation of levying a fee on every plastic bag that heretofore had been mindlessly left to blow off onto the beaches and streams where I fished.

And despite the economic setback after September 11, Ireland, so long accustomed to adversity, seemed determined to keep growing. Diminutive Cork, the little metropolis that could, was appointed European Capital of Culture for 2005, meaning that more than ten million of Brussels’ euros would be poured into the city’s coffers for the realization of grand visions for its streets and public squares and arts of every kind. Meanwhile, shops were being spiffed-up on every street, even as certain venerable pubs, more sadly, underwent ghastly face lifts.

Americans tend to think that they live in a land of unique opportunity, energy, and can-do spirit. Yet a vastly smaller country like Ireland has in many ways more-fixable problems, while remaining largely innocent of threats from abroad. The pace of its changes and breadth of its contradictions kept amazing us. The call of piety remained strong enough that over a million people visited the touring relics of St. Theresa, often standing in queues for hours to get their seconds-long chance for veneration. Meanwhile, Ireland’s holy wells were still attracting supplicants in great numbers, the visitors draping ribbons and fragments of the clothing of departed loved ones on nearby trees as they prayed that God would speed the souls of the deceased on to eternal life, or work miracles for the infirm.

Yet as April 2002 unfolded, frosted glass “adult stores” and slick new lap-dancing clubs spread throughout downtown Cork – this in a city that would have all but banished a young lass in a halter top a generation ago. A flagship of such establishments, Dublin’s Club Lapello, was recently hauled into court for not having a license to facilitate patrons dancing with their hostesses. The defense solicitor argued, “There is no practice within the club of people dancing
with
people rather than
at
them.”

One personal change was to limit visiting hours to a certain establishment where two more newly deceased regulars had their photographs taped to the mirror. The place was becoming bad luck. But the curious old Lee-side town and the inspiring county that surrounds it continued to amuse and engage us with its plucky celebration of life. You never knew when people would break out
singing, in your home, on the street, or in the pub – or when the ever-improbable Irish would dart onto the center of the world’s troubled stage. Bono, the illustrious Dublin rock star with two seaside homes about to be connected by an aerial walkway, was busy touring Africa with the straight-arrow American Secretary of Commerce; the weird duo explored schemes for eliminating poverty, while draped in black-and-white striped robes and clownishly floppy hats that made them look like prison escapees in a vaudeville act.

“I still haven’t found what I’m looking fo-oor,” Bono sang from under his omnipresent wraparound blue shades to African children who did not understand a word. But neither had I, and Ireland still had room for grand dreams. I even wondered if one day I might yet launch that long-planned
Cork Magazine
, my small testament to all the brightest things we had come to know in our new land. The post-September 11 world had settled into some kind of new equilibrium after all, and so, it felt, had our lives in Ireland.

One weekend, we journeyed for a lunch in Inchigeelagh, an exquisitely tranquil nook in the hidden folds of Mid-Cork. “Now!” said a slightly shriveled, bob-haired waitress as she made a flurry of activity out of setting five paper napkins around a table in a cosy, hearth-warmed room in Creedon’s Hotel. Something about her was pure cat.

Out she came with the forks and knives. The cutlery descended, and our very pleased waitress repeated “Now!”

Tea came with a “Now!” Saucers: “Now!” A bowl of sugar: “Now!”

Surprisingly strong portraits of time-weathered country people and rugged hills stared down at us over discreetly displayed bits of sculpture. Serious books lined nearby shelves. And here came our soup – “veg” naturally, but steaming and spiced true to some prescient soul’s fine sense of taste. “Now!”

Was the server blipping monosyllables because she was daft?
Or perhaps she was a native Irish-speaker who knew no other English word?

Baskets of sandwiches appeared with a fresh “Now!”

Laura had her eyes cocked in amusement. No McDonald’s could have provoked the same sly smile.

“Now!” The woman repeated it perhaps five times more before we were done with that meal, never uttering a single other word.

Perhaps the waitress was an oracle.

“Now.” What a ring that little word held. We had fretted so often about the past and the future and probably the pluperfect, too. But there was the message –
carpe diem.
Cork was our “now,” and the spirit and rhythms of the place were in our bones; perhaps this “now,” right here before us, was where we belonged, not on an extended lark, but for good.

So it was that we contemplated buying a house in Cork, and at last putting down roots. This quest proved frustrating, however. Unless one has Bono’s riches, purchasing property is not an easy process in Ireland; in fact, commissioning seven thousand slaves to erect a desert pyramid could be less daunting. Thinking back on the beneficence of small-town living for raising kids, we first explored possibilities in Kinsale. But it became apparent that one would get better value in Beverly Hills or the toniest enclaves of London. So we pointed our Irish dreaming to Clonakilty, that charming, bustling gateway to West Cork.

Perhaps I felt some ancestral pull toward the place owing to the Deasy blood on my mother’s side. That versatile Timoleague and Clonakilty clan had once distinguished itself by smuggling contraband along the West Cork coast; it then graduated into running rum from the West Indies, before finally creating a great brewery in the nineteenth century. The resultant stout was so thick and faculty dimming, locals dubbed it “the wrastler.” One wag remarked that across a pewter pot of the stuff “you could trot a mouse.”

So it was Deasy Land here we come. The first inspection was of a Georgian behemoth on an exquisite town square. Never mind that it had twelve bedrooms and we had only three children – Michael Collins had boarded inside as a youth, and there was no telling what we were capable of while in the process of remaking our lives
inside out. Running a hotel? No problem. That would be a piece of cake compared to some of our more capriciously discussed alternatives to the magazine: starting a miniature golf course, a slick coffee shop, an art gallery, or perhaps pushing a hot-dog cart outside Cork’s hurling park. A hotel seemed doable, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to give the kids access to the playing fields at the edge of town, and the great beaches and fishing spots at a stone’s throw, when not insinuating ourselves into the talkative company at De Barra’s to quaff a few “wrastlers”? The only catch was that the particular abode had no heating, the walls festered with rot, and it carried a price tag high enough to cover the cost of every property in the village two decades before. Drive on coachman, drive on.

Next we settled upon a house that had been owned by Michael Collins’s nephew. This one had fantastic gardens and an orchard, hefty spaciousness, nice views, kids nearby, and a cracked and noseless figure of the Blessed Virgin that looked as if it had been thrown down the stairs in a tantrum. Up and down the hillside rose newly built homes, many done with a stone-facaded tastefulness that Clonakilty’s civic planners, God bless them, encourage. The local school seemed a model of bright stewardship. Perfect. We would live here and flourish.

However, the Collins house had a certain price. Little did we know that this signified nothing. The prices listed for Irish properties proved to be no more real than a free-drink ticket slapped into one’s hands by a shill outside a New York City strip joint.

“We like this place. We’ll buy it,” I told the auctioneer, which Irish real-estate agents are tellingly called.

“You want to make a bid, is it?” he asked, poker-faced.

“Yes, we’ll pay the full asking price.”

We knew Clonakilty’s history, and thought the offer more than fair.

“Well, there is a higher bid on offer already actually.”

“How much higher?”

“Thirty thousand.”

Back when the town was devastated by the Famine, they used to say, “Clonakilty, God help us,” for other reasons.

“Who else exactly is interested?”

“I am not at liberty to say that. I am sure you will understand.”

“But of course.” Now here we were, talking like tut-tutting Brits – a gentlemanly, if cute, former West Cork horse-trader in Michael Collins land (on Michael Collins’s family turf, for Christ’s sake) and a displaced Yank considering pushing a hot-dog cart through his post-fifty years.