Last Days

At Galileo’s on bank holiday Monday night my cousin Alan tells me that August 1^st is Lughnasadh, the beginning of the harvest in Celtic tradition. Bank holiday weekends aren’t named like US holidays, and don’t seem tied to memorials the way our long weekends are. Given the fierce hold on so many things Irish in this country, I find this lack of connection with Celtic ritual surprising.

I haven’t been here quite so late in the summer before, so am also surprised to realize that August 1^st seems to be the beginning of autumn here, if not actually, then at least mentally. I arrived just after the solstice, when the night sky is barely dark at 11, the morning is bright at 4 and there is never enough dark to reveal stars. Now, less than two months later, mention of the weather also brings mention of the gathering dark. This gradual hastening toward winter is something that people here need to prepare for in a country where, in December, it will be dark by 4pm, and children will travel to school in the dark at 9 the next morning. There is a fierceness in this place that breeds strength and despair in equal parts. It is no small tribute to the people who live here that strength wins out.

On my last day for this summer I wave goodbye to Esther, Trina and the boys from the front gate of my little house. Esther, free of the garden and the tearoom now that Ballindoolin is closed for the season, is off to London with her daughter and grandsons. One final trip to the library to use the internet and drop off a box of candy for the librarians there who have made my stay so much easier. To the bank to make a last deposit of a few euros into my account, a float for next summer. On my way to Nodlaig’s I stop at the front gate of Ballinderry for a last look. I have said my goodbyes to Alan and Eleanor; now I say farewell to the house, haunting in the distance, that brought me here three summers ago. Finally, I say goodbye to Nodlaig. Although she won’t discuss it, she turns 90 this year at the time of another Celtic festival, the forerunner of Christmas, for which she is named. It is ironic that, with all the huge houses that surround me here, I leave most of my belongings in the very small bungalow of a woman who has the least chance of being here next summer. Maybe we both feel that the boxes of stuff in Nodlaig’s spare room is insurance that we will be sitting next to the turf stove in her kitchen next summer, drinking tea and talking about nothing, really, but in the most profound way.

Live Times 2

Eden is a play about Edenderry, the depressed midlands town with the long main street that I have made my home in and around for the past three summers. Edenderry has a sad reputation. Once a strong center of Quaker industriousness along the Grand Canal, then a cattle trading hub, and later the site of optimistic and furious development during the Celtic Tiger, the place suffered more than most small market towns in the Tiger’s bleak aftermath. The hulking presence of a semi-built hotel at the edge of town is a looming symbol of current difficulties.

The play is written by Eugene O’Brien, the son of a local man whose family has survived better than most through what is invariably called the economic downturn. O’Brien fils went on to become a successful TV writer after Eden was first produced about ten years ago. The play was a Dublin success, making it all the way to the Abbey Theatre, the most venerated of traditional Irish theatre venues. This summer Eden is playing in far less rarified surroundings. A small production company has ambitiously brought Eden to the abandoned bistro space of Larkin’s, the bar about 200 yards from where O’Brien grew up, the same bar that O’Brien used as the central location in the paly. It is known as Flanagan’s. The play is a two-hander, as they say here. The set consists of two stools placed opposite the bar in the old restaurant. The two characters enter from two different doors. The husband and wife never interact during the play, each telling their own side of the story of their marriage.

Billy is a drunkard who sees himself as a stud; he spends the play lusting after Imelda, a much younger woman, a central character who never appears. Breda believes the fact that she let herself go after the marriage is the reason for Billy’s lack of interest. Now she has lost weight and found a hesitant belief in her newly reborn self. The play takes place over the course of one night, the night Breda decides to get dressed up and go to the bar for the first time in several years. Besides the unseen Imelda, there is a salesman who is in town. Eoin peddles fold-up putting greens. He meets both Billy and Breda over the course of the night, with consequences for each of them. Eoin is of course the snake in the garden, only he brings the contemporary garden, the golf course, with him.

The play is hilarious and poignant. It is difficult to imagine how the 60 or so chairs in Larkin’s bistro are going to be filled each evening for the month of the run, but the acting and the writing would be worth a drive from Dublin, although very few people, given Edenderry’s low-caste status, are likely to make the trek.

Cairbres is a legendary pub in the town of Drogheda, close to the northern border and near the home of Matt and Geraldine and their family. I met Matt and Geraldine last summer. Matt, who is American, was a high school buddy of the husband of a very old friend of mine. He and Geraldine are medieval archaeologists who have written extensively on early Irish archaeology. They live in the village of Julianstown in a cottage full of wonderful chaos, with people and animals coming and going at a frenetic pace, chickens and ducks running around on the lawn and a big overgrown garden on one end of the property. At one point they built a little shed for Geraldine’s office along the back hedge, which serves mostly as a guest bedroom for overnight visitors.

 When Matt turned 50 he bought himself a stand-up bass and returned to his love of live music. Now he has a band, Slowfoot, that plays blues and classic rock with a bit of Irish trad tossed in, on Sunday nights in Cairbres. Matt claims he and Geraldine moved to Julianstown to be close to the pub, and his older daughter Nora has mentioned being named for someone there. The pub recently re-opened after the death of the longtime owner, Mrs. Cairbres. She appeared to be loved by all and sundry; the tributes to her from pub regulars went on all evening as I listened to Matt and his band play. Three people described to me how her body was laid out in the pub for the wake, how many people were there, how much music was played and Guinness drunk. Now her two mad daughters are running the place. I never quite understood in what way they are crazy, but the gist of the discussion seems to run that the customers now come in spite of rather than because of the sisters.

Only one sister was there when I went to hear Matt play. The other was in the hospital, evidently a result of a diet that consists largely of raisins. Matt’s band, whose members have names like Plummy and Willie, consisted of mostly guitars on the night I was there. We picked up the drummer on the way. His kit consisted of a snare drum; he used the drum case for the bass drum. Willie, who sounded like one of the leaders from the descriptions of him by the other members, was gone, and so were a couple of other key members. The very pregnant wife of one of the guitarists never left his side the whole evening. She drank down several Cokes and stepped outside with him every half hour or so to join him in a smoke.

 The music they played was catching, but whatever era it was from was evidently an era when I was listening elsewhere. A couple of times one of the regulars walked over to the corner where the band was set up and started to sing. One man had a lovely Irish tenor voice but got lost in the lyrics and finally apologized and walked away. The other man sang a nostalgic ballad about leaving and death, familiar themes in Irish songs. Matt told me later that he sang the same song every week and evidently knows no other. A blonde-haired man in a wheelchair recited a couple of his moving poems at one point in the evening; I forgot to ask if the poems he spoke changed every week.

The bartender, who was struggling without her sister, cut off the band about 1am. With some grumbling for the early stoppage, everyone packed up their instruments, downed a final Guinness and headed home. Matt crammed the bass back into his small car, the drummer squeezed into the back seat next to it, and we drove back to Matt’s house in the deepening, star-soaked night.