Surprised by Joy

Let’s just be clear, I left an hour early, a whole hour.

Even considering my tendencies to misgauge city distances, underestimate travel time on public transportation, and overestimate my own navigational skills, I felt confident that I would meet my friends at the Grand Social absolutely on time, if not early.

I had considered taking the bus, but the sky was perfectly clear—a rare occurrence in Dublin—and the air was warm enough for me to wear only a tank top under my thin jacket.  I even left the scarf at home.  So I zipped up my walkin’ boots, stuck in my ear buds, packed my purse—wallet, phone, camera?—No—pub pictures never turn out anyway—and started a happy stride up Rathgar Road towards Dame Street, Westmoreland Street, O’Connell Bridge, and the pub.  A route I’m intimately familiar with, especially at that time of day, when the sun tilted west, casting honey glow on the sea-foam church dome, the Georgian chimneys in neat rows, the gardens of lilacs, holly and rose bushes.  Dubliners hurrying home for dinner, or out to meet friends, taking smokes under shop lintels, walking their foxhounds, Airedales, Yorkies.  I crossed the O’Connell bridge to the beginnings of an amber and lavender sunset, dusk already settling into the bellies of the faraway clouds, the color reflected in the chipped surface of the river.

Reaching the north bank, turning right, walking a few blocks before the faded green front of the pub came, tucked in a corner between a few restaurants and mid-level hotels.  The air cool against the long-shaded cobblestone.

I preemptively texted my friend—“I’m here, where are you guys”—as I walked through the door, passing one group sitting in a bay window, another knot of people at the bar, a couple making out in the corner, a group of Italians at a long trestle table.  The pub was big, dark and mostly empty.  Most importantly, empty of the friends I was supposed to be meeting.

Let me just say, my friends had said they would arrive at 6:00, I had planned to meet them at 7:30, it was now 7:15.  I was early.  Where were they?

I meandered around the pub for a few minutes, checking the beer garden on the roof, trying to ignore a teenage janitor who eyed me every time he went to the broom closet.  Mildly annoyed, I called a couple of my supposed drinking companions, only to get empty rings, voicemails and the ever-annoying, “The person you are calling has a voice mailbox that has not been set up yet . . .”

I was heading out the door when my phone rang:

“Hey.”

“Annie? Yeah, it’s Dan, sorry but we actually moved to a pub on Tara Street called O’Reilly’s, it’s right next to Trinity.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, sorry we went to the Grand Social but it was too dark.  We’re in Temple Bar right now, do you know where the Hard Rock Café is?”

“Yeah,” I had a general idea (over estimating navigational skills).

“Okay, yeah, it’s right by the Tesco, the only Tesco in Temple Bar, can we meet you there?”

“Well why don’t I just meet you at the pub, I don’t want us to miss each other.”

“You’re going to meet us there? Okay.”

Ending pleasantries and we hung up.

Back down the quay, over the bridge, I wasn’t sure where the Tesco and the Hard Rock Café were, but they were in Temple Bar, close to Trinity, and Temple Bar only has one long street crossed by small alleys.  I would start at the end closest to the university and walk until I found O’Reilly’s.  Seemed like a solid plan.

Through the crowds of photo-snapping, Leprechaun-hat-wearing tourists, through the fiddle and flute notes blaring out of speakers over ever door.  Past street musicians and rowdy knots of twenty-somethings, the bright-fronted bars—The Auld Dubliner, O’Donoghues, The Oliver, Gogarty.  Green, red, yellow, black with gold lettering.  Farringtons.  It started to rain.  Big cold drops splashing out of the sky onto my unprotected head and neck.

Remember when I packed my purse?  Was an umbrella on that list?

Like the true foreigner I was, I’d expected that if the sky was clear when I walked out my front door, it would be clear while I got lost in the city—incorrect.

Soaked, shivering and more than a little cranky, I still felt the righteous thrill of triumph when I saw “O’Reilly’s” painted on a buff colored sign, swinging up ahead.  My navigation wasn’t so bad after all.

But when I opened the door, a rather trendy restaurant full of modern furniture and high-end graphic wallpaper made me waver.  This was not a pub.  But there couldn’t be two O’Reilly’s.  Right?

As the well-trained waitressing staff eyed my dripping cuffs and soggy boot soles, I trudge in between the neat place settings, looking for familiar faces.  Found none.

One of the nervous waitresses approached with a map, explained that yes, there were two O’Reilly’s.  My mistake, however, was in thinking that the O’Reilly’s I was looking for, was in Temple Bar.  It wasn’t.  My friends had been in the Temple Bar area when the called, but the pub was actually farther down the river.

Now thoroughly annoyed with myself, my friends, myself and the weather, I trudged back out into the rain, back the way I had come, back up Dame Street, Westmoreland Street, to O’Connell Bridge, hung a right, this time heading towards the sea, when I happened to glance up.

 

The full arch of a broad rainbow curving up over the gray stone spires over Trinity College, under the clouds lit peach by the horizon-bound sun shining beneath them, over the river and into the white colonnade of the Custom House.  A second, duller rainbow hovering beneath like a colorful shadow or strange visual echo.  The whole world lit and glowing in the sudden sunlight.  The air flashing with the rain still pattering to the sidewalk.

 

I stopped and stood, stared.  People continued to hurry past me, ducking left and right around me in their hurry to get to wherever.  I could barely understand.  How could anyone not be staring at the sky right now?  How was the whole city not absolutely riveted?

“Deadly isn’t it?”

I looked up.  A kind-faced man flashed a smile over his shoulder as he continued on his way.  His eyes laughing good naturedly at my unabashed and astonished joy.

“Yes it is!” I cried, laughing.

He nodded one last time and turned down the street.

I marveled at his word choice, deadly, I supposed that if I’d noticed the rainbows mid-intersection, or mid-stair-step, then perhaps deadly.  Deadly to motion, deadly to focus on anything else.  Deadly to awareness of or desire for anything except a view of the atmosphere.

(Only much later did I realize he probably said lovely.)

I’m not sure how long I stood their, straining my neck when a tall man or a lurching bus obscured my view.  Taking a strange, mournful joy out of the slow fade of the spectrums back into clear.  Happy at the fleeting nature of it.

Remember when I packed my bag?  Did I bring a camera? Pub pictures never turn out anyway.

I’m happy that I didn’t.  If I’d had my little Nikon, I would have spent those precious seconds trying to cram a three-sixty vista of sky and city into circuits that could never hold it.  I would have wasted the view on an attempted memory, and thus forfeited the memory itself, the moment.

As the last greens and reds of the arches faded, I made my way to O’Reilly’s, shouting over the music, inhaling the cigarette smoke and beer fumes.

“Did you see the rainbows?” I called to Dan.

“No, I’ve been in here,” he shrugged.

I’d left an hour early, arrived half an hour late, and in the interim, I’d been surprised by a deadly (lovely) joy.

Seven Hundred Stairs

I knew I was in trouble late Sunday night.  After spending the day sipping homemade lemonade with a new American intern (Gwen) arrived from Indiana, then watching children, collies and tango at the St. Stephens Park with Gwen and Amelle, …

Prayer Pattern – Derailed

Saturday night, Amelle and I walked home from the tram station after a night at the pubs.  The neighborhood—so cheery during the day—looked strange under the whining yellow street lights, casting everything in shadowy mustard colors.  Not sinister in the dark, the primary-colored doors still shone from their frames; the brick terraced houses still neat and warm looking, still with tidy gardens and vine-covered wrought iron.  Not sinister, or gloomy, but strange, like a bright café festooned for Halloween, the pale blue walls hung with cobwebs and paper bats, the floral mugs sitting on black tablecloths—incongruous.  I found nighttime and streetlight illumination incongruous with Rathmines.

“What do you do tomorrow?” Amelle asked, her heeled boots clicking against the sidewalk.

“I promised a friend I would go to church,” I said.

“Well, there are very many churches in Dublin.”

“Yes, I have lots of options,” I said, but I my thoughts strayed towards Christ’s Church—and wasn’t I annoyed that this church and its great sister, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, were Anglican?—the churches that weren’t options, well, options for experiment, but not for my chosen prayers.  Churches like the one slowly growing in our view, a gray mass of stone angles.  Somewhat distant from the last street lamp, it stayed dark, with its diamond-paned windows dully reflecting an ashes-and-honey mosaic—gray, black, gray, yellow—the maples and sycamores breathing softly in the yard.  The old tombstones tall and tilted, like a partially destroyed house of cards.  Holy Trinity Church, also Anglican, sat right at the end of my street, visible from my front door.  It’s constant presence in my peripheral vision coaxing my annoyance towards something more complicated.

Well, there are very many churches in Dublin—Yes, I have lots of options—in some ways.  My thoughts strayed farter, back to the cab driver from my first day—Lost a lot’a churches here’a late.  B’cause d’at child abuse scandle’s so drawn out’ere . . . Yeah, lost a lot’a churches here—then I was thinking about Spain, about Seville.  There, almost a year ago, I attended the Sunday morning Mass at the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, third biggest church on the planet.  It’s size, the weight of the brown stone above, making me feel like I was underground, far underground staring up towards some unreachable opening, the pale stained glass windows high above.  In the world of gloom-and-shadows stone, the blue and green in the windows became a better place of grass and rivers, of light.  I was supposed to be gazing up to heaven, but I felt like I was descending into hell a la Dante, then looking over my shoulder, back up to Earth, wondering—What am I leaving?

 

“I hope people actually go to church here,” I told Amelle as we neared home, “when I was in Spain there were many beautiful churches but they were often very empty.”  Mass in Seville’s cathedral on a warm July Sunday: only fifty people, most over sixty, the rest bumbling tourists who talked through the service, a rapid-fire homily, no music.  Mass complete: forty minutes elapsed.

Amelle looked at me curiously, “Ireland is majority Catholic, no?”

“So is Spain, supposedly.” We walked on for a while, turning onto our street, narrower, the houses slightly shabbier, trash in some yards and flushed against the curbs.  Paint peeling from the lintels and gables, from the green and red doors.  Rust showing through on the railings.  Overgrown ivy beside wilting daffodils.

“Do people go to church in France?” I asked, hoping to illustrate my point.

“Eh, no.  No in France most people do not believe, they are—I do not know what is the word?” As we opened the purple gate to our driveway.

“Atheists?”

“Yes.  Yes, most people in France are atheists and they do not go to church.”

I nodded, bid her goodnight, and slipped upstairs, hesitating a moment before setting my 7:00 alarm.

 

I didn’t get out of bed when it went off.  Gray light seeping in under the heavy blinds that I kept drawn against the street lamp outside.  I had planned to attend the eight-o-clock service—I generally prefer the early-bird bunch to the crowdedness of later services—but now eleven-o-clock was my only option.  Listed as the “family Mass,” I prepared for screaming children, cooing parents and crowds.

But instead of getting up at 9:00, I laid in bed for another hour, feeling slightly morose and not really wanting to leave the accumulated warmth under my comforter.  Eventually hunger overpowered laziness, and I crawled out to make pasta—my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Down in the gray kitchen, absently stirring the pot and watching the clock.  10:20—and it was about a fifteen minute walk to the church.  Finish cooking, eat, brush teeth, put on make-up, walk—sudden anxiety that I wouldn’t even make the eleven-o-clock, or worse, that I would make it late.

But apathy quickly smothered anxiety.  If I didn’t make it to church, I didn’t make it to church.  I’d go next week.  For now I’d retreat to my comforter, watch a movie, talk a walk in the city this afternoon if weather permitted.

I left the house ten minutes later, not quite sure how I’d managed it, pleasantly surprised that I’d be to the church fifteen minutes early.

Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners is just as grand as it sounds.  I hesitantly approached the four huge pillars supporting a triangular façade, reminding me of old Greek ruins except for the stone angels staring down from the corners and the huge copper-dome-gone-green.  Through the heavy wooden doors, I entered a space of blues and creams, incredibly ornate arched ceilings covered with robin-egg insets and cream-plaster medallions.  Even on that overcast day, the sun through the windows reflected off all the pale surfaces until the whole space glowed—so different than Seville.

Rows and rows of dark wooden pews and red-fabric kneelers. I counted them, estimating this place could hold six hundred people.  But at the moment, I was the only one.  Three older women talked quietly at the back of the church, arranging weekly bulletins and exchanging gossip.  One broke away to kneel in the back pew while I went halfway up the aisle to sit, feeling incredibly conspicuous, my heels clicking on the tile.  I knelt and sighed.  This was Ireland, not Spain.  People might just come late.

And they did, all thirty of them scattered through the wide sanctuary.  We looked like a congregation of xenophobes.

After a few more people filtered in, a rather round woman with short honey hair stepped up to the ambo—“Good morning, it’s great t’see so many people here”—I resisted the urge to glance around with raised eyebrows—“and we’d like to welcome the O’Connell family who are here f’r’a family reunion”—she gestured left to a block of about ten people sitting in their Sunday best.  I was doing the math on how many people must usually come to this Mass, and coming up with about two.  The woman continued—“T’is morning we’re going t’do somet’in’ a little bit different, we have t’hymns printed in the regular bulletin instead of printing an extra hymn sheet”—I flipped to the inside of my bulletin, opposite the readings from Acts, Revelations, and John, were three short hymns and a psalm.  The woman sung the first verse of the hymns for us to learn—because there were no printed notes.  “Now, the ot’r t’ing we’re doing different, is t’at we’re goin’ t’sing t’e psalm today, which is somt’in’ we don’t always do at t’is Mass.  How it works is, I’ll sing t’refrain first, t’en you sing it wit’ me, here, let’s practice—‘O God, may all the nations praise You, let all the nations praise You’”—she raised her hand for us to join, I hit the first note and immediately killed the motor.  No one else was singing, not unless breathing into your bulletin while moving your lips counted.

“Good,” said the cantor (and this time I did raise my eyebrows), “Let’s try’t once more.”

I gave my alto notes a little more reign, hoping people would be more confident if they felt like others were singing.  Incorrect.  I remained solitary.  Loud, and solitary.  The cantor made eye contact with me from the ambo.

After the singing lesson, Mass began.  A slender bald priest taking his place to the left of the altar, “T’Lord be wit’ya.”

“And with your spirit,” I said, and started, surprised by the dominance of my own voice, wondering if I had said the wrong thing, if the responses in Ireland were different.  In the states, everyone speaks together, each individual curving their natural cadence slightly, fitting into the larger voice until all the words come together, a thundering “And with your spirit.”  Each church, each mass even, takes on a slightly different speed, rhythm, rising and falling pitch pattern.  And if you grow up tin the same parish, at the same service for an entire childhood of Sundays, that pattern becomes as internal as DNA, as taken for granted as a native language, as recognizable as one’s own name.  So when I spoke full and confident under the creamy domes of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners—And with your spirit—I was startled to speak alone.  I recoiled immediately, assuming an error on my part. But when the next came, I listened and realized everyone was saying the same thing, but at different times, speeds, and rhythms, without regard for the voices around them.  The church hummed slightly, but did no speak.

I felt the shadows of Seville closing around my shoulders.  I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on these responses, on these words.  I had come, expecting to find a place with it’s own strong cadence, it’s own pattern of prayer.  I had expected to incorporate that pattern into my own, if only a little, through the ten Sundays I would spend here in Dublin.  But instead of a voice, instead of a rhythm I could make my own, I found disintegration and separateness.   I felt as if I’d knocked on the door of an adopted family, and instead of seeing them all waiting around the dinner table—T’Lord be wit’ ya’–And with your spirit—I found my adopted mother, father, brother, niece, uncle, all in different rooms doing different things.  Paying no attention to one another or to me.  The church seemed to darken.

The priest went on: “Now in t’first reading, we see a beautiful city comin’ down from heav’n”—I paused and checked my bulletin.  He was talking about Revelations, the second reading.  The first was about circumcision disputes in the early church, a reading from Acts.  Maybe he just misspoke.

But when the lector came up to read—“T’e angel took me in spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me t’holy city Jerusalem”—somewhere behind and to my left, a baby started screaming, cuing another, then another sitting five rows in front of me, her blond father bouncing her in his arms.  Soon the lector was half shouting—“T’E CITY HAD NO NEED A’SUN’R MOON T’SHINE ON’T, FOR T’GLORY OF GOD GAVE’T LIGHT, AN’ ITS LAMP WAS T’LAMB!”

At least in one expectation for this morning, I had not been entirely incorrect: many screaming babies.

Mass continued.  During the homily, the children came up around the altar, and the priest asked them to imagine their own city of Jerusalem—the general consensus was that it had a purple castle and lots of sheep.  I don’t really remember the rest of what he said.  The incorrigible green-eyed tot playing peek-a-boo with his parents from behind the alter, the sudden discovery that shouting meant the priest’s mic shot your voice around the room, and general cheery mischief distracted me.  Or so my story goes.

At communion, the woman sitting to my left—the direction of the center aisle—made it very clear she was not going up to receive bread and wine. But, as she was elderly and rather round, she also made it clear she was not shifting from her seat.  This caused only minor embarrassment for me, as I tottered along the kneeler in my gray-canvas heels, but the bent-and-gray grandfather behind me had more trouble, and his cloud-haired wife even more.  Soon the no-communion-lady was shuffling into the aisle, huffing.  The grandpa was grumbling, the wife advising, their daughter directing, their son-in-law hovering, the whole church staring.  Lucky for me, once I cleared the bottleneck, a teal-eyed teenager with red hair and freckles waved me into the line, so—letting his courtesy be my excuse to ignore the difficulties behind—I entered the stream, quickly carried away from the pile-up, off to the dinner table.

The communion wafer tasted even more like nothing than the air-and-wheat cardboard served up at home, and while holding the chalice I briefly contemplated downing all the wine and making a break for it.  I rolled my eyes at myself, to the confusion and distress of the woman proffering the cup, who did not understand the inward direction of the gesture.

Mass ended, to a chorus of babies ringing louder than the half-un-sung hymn.  I left my pew, darting around the no-communion woman still teetering at the end of the bench, walked straight up the center aisle and out the double doors, back into Dublin, the city streets.

The Eye Experiment

While I am here, I’ve been experimenting with the power of eye contact.  No, that’s not true, I always experiment with eye contact.  At home, and here.  Mostly when I’m walking—walking to class with my headphones filling my skull with guitars, walking to church and admiring the early Sunday light, crossing the street to the library, strolling around the red brick of my Dublin neighborhood, the strewn beer cans of my Athens one, both bursting with oak trees and lilac bushes.  When I am walking, I make eye contact with the people I pass, even if I shouldn’t.  To be honest, I don’t know how not to make eye contact with them.  The man walking towards me is easily the most interesting thing on the street this morning, and if I look at his pale, button-down shirt or his swishing blue jeans, he might get the wrong idea—though that’s not really the point, because it’s not his clothes that are the most interesting thing, it’s his face, let’s be honest—it’s his pale, not-shaved-for-three-days face with brown stubble shadowing his chin and cheeks, his almost-black eyes, bushy eyebrows and pleasantly straight nose.  It’s the way one corner of his mouth turns down more than the other, the long-faded scar on his left temple, the dark, dark eyes.  The most interesting thing.  And if I look at anything else I feel stupid, like a person walking down the road staring straight up into the sky—I’m sorry, Sir, but I really want to make eye contact with you.  Please, please, please, don’t freak out.  No I’m not a creep, I don’t think.  And no I’m not hitting on you, unless you’re eyes are a surprising shade of blue/green/brown, and unless you lift one corner of your mouth when you look at me.  Then I might be hitting on you, but please, just carry on and forget about my prying as soon as our shoulders pass.

So the experiment goes.  The trouble is that here in Dublin, I walk much more than I do at home, and I pass more people on these busy streets than I do in my sleepy town.  Many more eyes to build bridges to.  And when I’m not walking—instead of sitting in class with eyes I know, or at home with essays and assignments—I’m sitting in pubs or cafes with tables and tables of new eyes with new faces around them.  Sitting in my favorite local coffee shop, a comfy green armchair, tea at my left elbow, and across the way, under a red and yellow painting of a woman with startling, bright eyes—can you imagine what they were in the flesh!—is a twenty-something woman with half her head shaved, the other half thick with dark curls.  Her features are almost masculine in their straight, clean angles, a stud in one nostril, many rings on her fingers—silver, jade, bronze.  She sits back in her chair with her legs crossed, unabashed and emphasizing her strong, broad shoulders, her muscular thighs.  When she notices my gaze, her eyes—an unexpected pale green—flash back.  The very left corner of her mouth pulls up, then more.  I squint slightly.  We look away.  Experiment 6235, Result – Positive.

In a club I scan the room while my housemates return to their native languages.  So I’m slightly bored, but there is a man—long and clean limbed, dark brown hair cut short.  Jaw bone like the flint edge of an arrowhead only slightly hidden by a short beard.  I can’t tell the color of his eyes.  But he sits at a table across the room and listens to his friend, who does most of the talking.  Patience in the easy rest of his shoulders against the leather booth, patience in the stead tilt of his head, patience in listening to the other’s monologue, patience the way we indulge those we love, not because we are willing to wait out their long soliloquies, but because we love to watch them be who they are.  Absolutely attentive.  And in his absolute attention, he looks at nothing else.  Experiment 6236, Result – Inconclusive.

 

 

In a sense I’m testing love at first sight—well, not love in the romantic sense, at least, not always.  Connection at first sight.  Is it all in the eyes?

I’m testing Socrates’ theory that each of our souls takes after a god, and that physical attraction is a recognition of compatible godliness in another—are you the Hephaestus to my Aphrodite, or the Hestia to my Hera?  Can you see that in my eyes?  Can I?

 

 

Walking out of St. Stephen’s Green towards home, the afternoon slipping over into sunset, light going gold.  I turned the corner at the motorcycle shop, the bright shiny bikes already removed from the sidewalk, and begin my long straight-shot down Camden Road.  But just past the bike shop, cramped against the 7-11, is a glass-front café, and at the front table facing out, a pair of brilliant blue eyes, lit from the bright sun slanting in southwest to northeast.  Stop.  My boot soles slow in their steady long strides.  Arrested by blue.  And somehow, some trick of the setting sun, some slant to the light, my face is lit as well, bright and glowing amber, reflected in the glass, my own brown eyes reflected.  I see him looking at me, and I see me looking at him, side by side, our faces almost overlaid.  I watch the left corner of my mouth pull up.  I notice him set down his mug of tea, back on the saucer in front of him. I see him.  I see him seeing me.  I see me.  I see blue.  His eyes still as bright as they were two seconds before, shot with lighter gray.

The brick wall of the 7-11 intercedes between us, as my steps carry me farther down this Dublin street.  Experiment 6237 – Conclusive.  No further tests necessary. 

First Lamb, Fresh Love

Last night we headed to O’Neill’s—my housemate Amelle, her colleague Aurelius, and I—for diner, drinks, and some traditional Irish music.  Night fell misty blue over the cobbled streets, speakers over every door spinning out whatever fiddle, flute or guitar sang inside, street lights coming on, little roads filled with the usual mixture of students, tourists, revelers.  I wanted to enjoy the hand-shaking, shoulder-slapping fellowship of the streets—so different from the carnival-feel of Spain, the sweaty-clubs of Tel Aviv or the drunk boredom of Ohio.  I wanted to have people to call out to across the street, to meet and mingle with, travel in a pack that goes rolling down the street.  But I was—am—still so knew to this city, and last night I was hungry from a pricey afternoon at the Guinness Storehouse which left me no money for a snack between “black stuff” and the pub.  I was cranky, and Amelle—in the measured quietness of her dark French curls and impeccable Paris fashion—did most of the navigating.

We wandered about, asking directions, getting contradictory answers, shuffling down side streets, realizing we were going in circles; I would have thoroughly enjoyed being so lost if my stomach had been a little less vocal.

Finally we asked a man taking a smoke outside the bright red façade of the “Auld Dubliner.” He seemed to know what he was about—“O’Neill’s?  Yeah, O’Neill’s,” he leaned into the pub to ask the bouncer, then he turned back to us, rubbing his shiny bald head with his free hand.  “Yeah, it’s not far, it’s not far.”  The bouncer joined, “You’re gonna turn here, yes, right here, turn right to Dame Street, an’you’ll see Ulster Bank across the way? Yeah, it’s in the same building, jus’ on t’ot’er side.”

We thanked him and set off down a road we’d walked at least three times, crossed over Dame Street with it’s towering bronze statues, heading for the bank.

“There it is,” I said, pointing to a green and brown storefront complete with square-paned windows and glossy gold-on-black lettering.  Green vines draping down from the flowerboxes.  Going inside, we realized that the modest façade visible from Dame Street concealed a wide maze of dark wood paneling and leather benches, complete with two buffet lines and at least two bars.  The warm, hearty smells of gravy, meat and stuffing pulled us in until we were seated with menus in our hands and our wallets on the table.  I mentally luxuriated in the list of goodies—oysters, bacon-wrapped chicken, salmon, turkey—until the promise of food no longer satisfied. I ordered a steaming lamb shank with red wine and mushroom sauce over two scoops of mashed potatoes.

“What is that?” Amelle asked.

“Lamb, this is the first time I’ve ever had it,” as I sat down with my steaming plate.

“Oh it’s so good,” said Aurelius, “You’ve never had?”

“No, it’s not very popular in the states” with my fork poised over the food, wondering how to attack the hunk of meat.

“Y’ve never had lamb?” a fair-haired man leaned over, speaking thick Irish brogue. “You’ll love it, especially here. An’what’ve you got?” leaning over Amelle’s plate, “Just’a plate’a veggies?” Sounding appauled.

“There’s salmon hiding in there,” I said as Amelle delicately picked at the lemon slices covering her fish.

“You may need to help her, I think,” said Aurelius.

“Well, th’a’ won’be a problem.  I could start righ’ na-ow,” laughing with his companions.  We subsided back into our separate conversations.

The lamb was delicious, warm and heavy with enough fat in the meat to make a dieter cringe, but the muscle underneath so much better for it, the pink and brown meat falling of the bone if I held the knife too close.  I carved it down in fifteen minutes, then wolfishly considered the bone.

After dinner we headed upstairs for the music, squeezing between among a knot of young men enthralled by a televised boxing match and a group of French girls sharing drinks.  The band was tuning up on the small stage—a square-jawed man whose dark hair and beard matched the patina on his flute, a russet haired woman sitting aloof with her concertina, and a ruddy blond guitarist acting as spokesman.  He introduced “d’band” and “d’tunes” with the flute player throwing in jokes—“T’is’s what y’get folks, when I don’drink durin’ a gig,” toasting us with his McCafe cup.  They spoke low to each other under the pick-up of the mics.

The first song—Star of County Down—fingers flashing over frets, flute holes and button keys, the guitarist singing—I’ve travelled a bit, but never was hit since my roving career began—my eyes wandered to the light-fingered flautist, down to the French girls having a drink, a young man with honey-colored hair coming to sit on the stage steps, his long frame languid on his makeshift seat, but his shoulders and attentive face turned towards the group’s beauty—a heart-faced blond.  I’d a heart to let and no tenant yet . . . But in she went and asked no rent from the star of the County Down.  I couldn’t hear their conversation, but gradually she turned more and more from her tittering companions, barely even noticing when several stood to go.

Several more songs I—When off Holyhead I wished meself was dead, or better of instead on the rocky road to Dublin—then an instrumental reel, and I lost track of the music, too engrossed in the slowly shifting posture of the pair across the way, like watching a flower track the sun.  They sat apart facing each other, then leaning in, then further, then holding hands, then touching shoulders.  A slight feeling of jealousy at the sudden simplicity of their lives, of the two-point system they had found tucked within the whirly chaos of music, crowd and pub, their sudden simplicity across from my own life trying to make new friends in this new place, of trying to keep in contact with those back home, of trying to not keep in contact with some back home, balancing, balancing—send that email, not that text, have coffee even though you’re tired and want to go home, laugh even though you’re nervous, look interested even when Amelle and Aurelius speak only in French, go home and blog before falling into bed, connect, connect, fight you’re introverted tendencies, connect, connect, balance.  And here, for these few hours, these two cut themselves from the chatter, scaled down from the light noise of a galaxy to a binary-star, orbiting, orbiting, both around the other.  I was pleasantly envious, the way we envy fifty-year couples sitting on park benches or children chasing geese across the lawns, hand-in-hand parents behind.  Envious of things I might have.  Seeing them makes me hope and sink at the same time—not yet, by maybe.  Watching them lean together, slightly sad at their unawareness of my distant admiration, relieved that it was so, that my watching didn’t break the double gravity of two, for tonight, orbiting.

When the band closed, the flute player played the last song, a breathy baritone, like a wave pulling back to sea, or his wooden flute on its lowest notes.  I was glad to leave my bar stool, descend the steps back out into the Dublin streets, the mess of taxis and wobbly, high-heeled girls already four beers deep.  Flashing headlights, whining streetlights, the colored lights of dance clubs, sudden brightness of late-night snack bars.  All the fluorescents, neons, incandescents so much more confusing than the single, steady light of day.  Turn your face to the sun, become one to one, remember them as they were, forever in that corner of the bar, as if they never left, would never leave, honey and wheat on the steps below the flute, one and one, oribiting.

Many Shades of Ocean

The number of blues the ocean holds always catches me off guard.  A coast-ignorant, land-locked girl, I always expect the sea to be a flat blue, the only gradation caused by the wave-texture of the surface, like wrinkled blue cotton, …

Things Beneath Our Feet

I just couldn’t get over the floors, the tiled floors of Christ’s Church.  Green, red, brown, black, yellow, and white tiles that cast back the light so strangely—softly, velveteen—that at first I thought they were some strange, hardened leather.  The glaze had a mottled depth of color like old leather, and somehow this ceramic felt softer under my boots, but perhaps that was a deception of my first impression.

The patterns changed with every step, sometimes wheels with different rings—concentric rows of people, griffons, knots, roses, crowns, fleur de lies—or diamonds, triangles, checkers, all tessellations of these same colors and figures.  I expected them to repeat each other at some point, for some over all design or consistency to emerge.  But I never quite found it.  Trying to unravel them, I walked through the early gothic cathedral with my eyes to the floor.

I’d seen Gothic churches before, of course.  When I went to Spain last summer every town had at least one Gothic church, or so it seemed.  They were so common that my architecture professor delineated Early, Middle and Late Gothic, based on the arches, windows, design, use of color.  He pointed out the baroque elements creeping in through frescoes and color, or the darker, crouching Romanesque elements from early construction.  But all those churches, from the seventh century to the seventeenth, all had plain stone floors, sometimes with simple engravings or patterns to the pavers.  Nothing to distract the upward gaze of the believer as the eyes slid up the columns to the capitals, the arches, the windows, pointing to vaulted ceilings, and through the mortared cracks to heaven.  These intricate and endlessly looping tiles seemed counterproductive.

I tried, at first, to focus upwards, to sit in the rows of wooden chairs and look penitently towards the ceiling—as tourists and pilgrims around me did.  But when I looked up, I noticed other things—the way the north wall bowed inward, severely, looking close to collapse.  I wondered that the windows didn’t snap from strain.  When I looked up, I noticed the extranal window-grates visible through the detailed glass.  Thoughts of stone-throwing, fires and riots flickered and flared in my head.  The legacy Irelands religious tumult?  Legacy of this church as Catholic, then Anglican, then Catholic, then Anglican?  I remembered those Spanish cathedrals, so obviously bearing the scars of their own conflicts, so obvious which windows remained and which were replaced.  And those structures had always housed Catholic prayer, and they still bore scars.

And wasn’t I annoyed—be honest, Annie—that this church and its great sister, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, were Anglican?  That founded, constructed, and celebrated as Catholic for hundreds of years, I couldn’t go to Mass in either?  Didn’t I feel that, at least a little?  Was that feeling allowed?

I immediately scolded myself—Anne Marie, grudging people their place of worship, the place that has been theirs too for hundreds of years is on the exact same spectrum as Jews who refuse to recognize the validity of the Dome of the Rock, or the Muslims who refuse to recognize Adyodhya as a Hindu shrine.  Feelings you condemn in others.  I have seen the results of these feelings—bullet holes in church walls, slanted pot marks gouged from the stone, armed guards at mosque gates, tall in their army green with rifles as long as my leg, angry graffiti, Death to Hindus, Death to Christians, Death to Muslims, contorted faces, shouting, yelling, screaming faces.  Annie, you have seen these feelings. Feelings that sparked riots, bombings, shootings, wars.  Death, Annie, those feelings sparked death and killing.  Excise these feelings from your heart.  They lead to nothing good.

But I still feel them, however faintly, and will continue to feel them—I think—so long as people try to tell me I do not have a stake in this place, or any other, because I am Catholic.  My rejection of this Anglican place is a reaction to past rejection, a reaction to people telling me I cannot lay claim to this or that, because I am Catholic.  How many atheists and agnostics have told me, though not in so many words—You cannot be tolerant, because you are a Catholic.  You cannot respect women, because you are a Catholic.  You cannot respect gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, or hell, even sexually active people, because you are Catholic.  What did one friend tell me when I refused his romantic advances?  “Yeah, I should have known a UU (Unitarian Universalist) and a Catholic would never work.” Translation: You cannot accept and love me, because you are Catholic.  Words that knocked me back a step, or two.

And I feel those words in this church, in the bowed walls, in the barred, saint-colored glass, in the stones those bars guard against—You cannot worship here, because you are Catholic.

I must remember, now, that I set the parameters of my Catholicism.  It is mine to define.  That only in letting others reject me do I feel the need to reject them.

I’ll sit here in these simple wooden chairs, staring at these beautiful tiles that reflect the softness, the infinity, complexity, and un-know-ability of the divine more than these lancet ceilings above.  I’ll stare at the ground and send out these thoughts: I am tolerant, and I am Catholic.  I do respect women, and I am Catholic.  I respect gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, divorced, Hindu, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Atheist, Unitarian Universalist people, rocks, plants, porpoises and platypuses, and I am Catholic.  I can praise God in this place, and feel the power of the thousands who prayed before me, right here, and I am Catholic.  I smooth these feelings of hurt and exclusion, of telling me what I am and am not, I smooth those words over with new ones.  I stare at the floor, at the strange beauty of these tiles, and let the rest slip away.

Eveline Crosses – An Introduction

“The boat blew a long, mournful whistle into the mist.  If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres.  Their passage had been booked.”

– Eveline by James Joyce

This name once caught my eye, chiseled into a soft-edged tomb stone, worn by years of Kansas storms that thundered over the plains of green or gold corn, the towering, tumid clouds visible from miles away, rolling in like a wave.  My sister, Sara, and I walked softly through the lush, curled-over grass of the cemetery, trailing slightly behind my mother and her childhood friend.  Gray and tall, the buildings of the convent rose handsome and gray around us, edged by tall pines and other trees.  The summer wind blew through their branches.

We had crossed the plains to come here, driving from our small town of Athens, Ohio, heading for this middle land of my mother’s childhood.  For her it was a journey into memories, reaching back through three decades retie the threads of old friendships with people and places.  For us too, this journey felt somehow like moving backwards.  Kansas felt older than Ohio, perhaps because life under those wide skies, among the fields, felt slower.  Perhaps because this place felt more “American,” with its flags going down the brick and cobble Main Streets, with its great domed capitol building and spreading lawns, it’s love of fairs and the Forth of July.

Athens, on the other hand, was a college town set among the Appalachian hills.  A town where the old hippies settled after Woodstock, a place where college students rebelled against their parents, their parents’ politics, their country’s politics.  Among this young, who-the-heck-are-we demographic, most of us seemed ready to leave, ready to not be so American.  We learned foreign languages, read foreign novels—Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer.  We spoke of far away places we had never seen and often took ourselves too seriously.  Yes, I am one of those.

I’ve crossed the Atlantic three times now, once to Israel, once to Spain, and now to Ireland.  And the more I travel the more I realize what a child of the Midwest I truly am.  How much awareness of the land, church on Sundays, guitar notes and home-made things inflect the world I see through my brown eyes.

Eveline from Joyce’s story didn’t need the travel to realize whose child she was—Home! She looked around the room, reviewing all its familiar objects, which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.  She belonged to Dublin’s outskirts, the place where the city houses turned into fields.  The long green field where the children of the avenue used to play together . . . they seemed to have been rather happy then.  But everything changes—A man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs.  Eveline’s city was growing, expanding from the river and the sea into the countryside.  She seemed mournful as she looked out her window at these red brick houses, mournful for the changes and mournful for what was left, what she would leave behind, anticipating her journey to the Western Hemisphere with her sweetheart.  She mourned the city, her brothers and sisters now gone, her dead mother, her father long descended into drinking, the field now filled.  And yet for all this mourning, Eveline did not cross the ocean, did not escape.  She went to the North Wall with her Frank, she saw the boat, watched him walk up the gangway calling to her.  But she could not go—All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart . . . No! No! No! It was impossible.  Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy.  Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!

So impossible, to leave this place and all her mourning, so difficult to cross over to a new place, a new life.

When I stepped out of the Dublin airport, the smell of the sea hit me and I breathed deep—Home­—I thought, and stopped myself.  This was not home, and home had never been on the ocean, not land-locked Ohio where I have lived for twenty-one years.  The sea was a place of my travels, when I crossed to Tel Aviv, San Sebastian, Barcelona, Haifa, Cadiz.  Yet I thought it all the same.  Home, the strange sense of return to this place I had never been.  I do not which to imply something fated or cosmic, but something more complicated.  The misty chill in the air certainly felt like Ohio, the way the morning fogs clung to the river and the depths of the valleys.  But this Irish air was cut by the cries of gulls, the brogue of the cab driver walking beside me—“Y’ever be’n t’Dublin, love?”

No, I hadn’t.  For the first time, I had crossed the sea on a shamrock-painted plane, flown over frozen Canadian lakes and the black Atlantic, over Irish towns studded yellow with street lights, flown over from America to here, flown—the name Eveline means beautiful bird.  And as I stepped out the airport, I wondered if the sense of landing, of perching on this green island for two months, was the source of my home feeling.  The ending—or the beginning?—of a journey was familiar to me, a recurring design stitched into my life.

Good morning, Dublin, you will be my place this summer.