41 Not Just a Postbox

When Ron and I were in Cork a few weeks ago, we stopped on one of the city’s main streets to take a photograph of a postbox—what we call a mailbox in the US—when a couple about our age, laden with shopping bags and obviously walking home with their groceries, stopped to talk to us. As I moved around to get just the right angle on the postbox, their bemused expressions pretty much told me what they were thinking. “Excuse me,” said the man kindly, as one might talk to an old lady doing something embarrassing in public, “but it’s just a postbox.” We laughed. We’re used to people staring at us incredulously when we take pictures of postboxes in Ireland; I have a folder full of such photos on my computer. “Actually,” I said politely, pointing to the V R below the mail slot, “it’s not just a postbox; it’s a postbox that was put here during Queen Victoria’s reign and painted green in 1922.” “So it is!” they exclaimed, suddenly interested. “We never noticed that before,” said the woman, wanting to make up for her husband calling us out. I explained that my husband collects stamps, and so we are interested in postal history. “Thanks for showing us something about our city!” were their parting words. No matter who you are or where you live, you can always learn something about your home from outsiders who see it with different eyes. But the story of Irish postboxes is a particularly interesting one, fraught with political meaning, as so much on this island tends to be. In January of 1922, after a two year War of Independence with Britain and a six month truce during which treaty negotiations had taken place, the twenty-six counties that today make up the Republic of Ireland abruptly found themselves to be an independent entity that would be called the “Irish Free State.” The British army and government officers immediately started the process of pulling out, leaving the new provisional government to manage the transition. The Irish were eager to prove their ability to run a state and made a number of adaptive moves while more long term plans, including a new constitution, were in the works. But while other governmental activities could be hammered out over the coming few months, the mail had to be delivered day in and day out without interruption....
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40 Bursting Fetters, Striking Off Chains

Though I didn’t realize it until later, earlier this year I stood on the spot where two of the world’s greatest human rights leaders, Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass—one an Irishman at the end of his career, the other an American at the beginning of his—met and conversed for the first and only time on September 29, 1845. In an earlier post, “38 Waiting in Line To Be Legal,” I wrote about the day Ron and I spent at the Irish Immigration and Naturalization Service (IINS) office on Burgh Quay in Dublin trying to straighten out our visa situation. Located in a choice spot overlooking the river and only a block from O’Connell Bridge where the statue of Daniel O’Connell, known as “The Great Liberator,” presides, the ugly modern building with its subdivided structure and cheap materials was clearly built for bureaucratic purposes. I didn’t think much about the building at the time, but I did notice that the adjacent structures, clearly Georgian in style, were much nicer. Then a few weeks ago I made a discovery after reading Tom Chaffin’s book about Frederick Douglass’s 1845 trip to Ireland, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary and digging around in some online archives. It turns out that the IINS building, the very same building where visitors and immigrants come to seek legal status in Ireland, stands on the site of “Conciliation Hall,” erected in 1837 by an organization dedicated to repealing the Acts of Union. The Acts of Union, passed by the British parliament in 1800 and put into effect on January 1, 1801 in retaliation for the 1798 Rebellion, closed the Dublin based Irish parliament and placed control of Ireland’s affairs with Westminster, far removed from the country’s problems and needs and further disenfranchising the country’s largely Catholic population. O’Connell was the leader of the repeal movement in 1845 and was speaking in Conciliation Hall on September 29 when Douglass–a former American slave and author of an account of his life under slavery (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave. Written by Himself) who had arrived in Dublin a few weeks earlier–walked in. I had known about their famous meeting for a long time–Willie Tolliver and I always discuss and commemorate it with the Agnes Scott students we bring to Ireland–but until recently I had not known Dublin well enough to grasp the details of where it actually occurred. Compare the two images...
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39 The Gray House with the Yellow Door

Spring has come to Dublin, first with the bevy of tour buses appearing in Nassau Street alongside Trinity College and the school groups from Italy and Japan gathering around the steps of the museums and encircling monuments like the Molly Malone statue in Suffolk Street or the Fusiliers Arch at Stephen’s Green. November and January are really the only months in the year when Dublin isn’t mobbed with tourists. Though the cold has by no means gone away, when I call up the “10 day” outlook for Dublin on weather.com, more 50s than 40s appear as the highs. In the shop windows on Grafton Street, the palette has changed from winter colors to the bright pastels of spring and summer, though it’s not yet time to wear those flimsy items of clothing. I’m still taking my wool scarf when I go shopping. Today The Irish Times reported that the rooks are starting to build their nests and showed one in flight with a beak full of twigs. In the last two weeks I’ve noticed the snowdrops, crocuses, primroses, and daffodils on every available patch of ground or flower pot. Especially the daffodils. Heads bobbing in the March winds, these graceful flowers don’t last more than a day or two in a vase and seem to live their few weeks in the soil just to let us know that spring is coming. The other day we were walking home from the grocery store in Sandymount when we passed by the gray house with the yellow door and daffodils in the yard pictured at the top. I grew up in a gray house with a yellow door on Kedzie Street in Evanston, Illinois. The ramshackle Victorian surrounded by a white picket fence was a child’s dream with its nooks and crannies, bay windows, stair landings, and magical attic. My brothers and I had special games for each of the two landings; the attic was where we played “the olden days,” a game that usually had me as the teacher in a one-room pioneer schoolhouse. There was a thrillingly scary “furnace room” in the basement and a walk-in “linen closet” upstairs that had great cupboards for hiding. My dad built a huge sandbox in the back yard that overlooked the yards of four different neighbors’ houses, so there was always someone to talk to or spy on. The house was gray when...
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38 Divided by a Common Language IV, PG-13 Edition

I have to confess that I am suffering from “language creep,” a term I invented that probably has an equivalent in the science of linguistics. I’ve been living in Ireland long enough that the line between American English and Irish English is starting to blur: expressions, usages, and pronunciations that sounded strange to me at the beginning of my stay are starting to seem normal and are even creeping into my vocabulary. People who spend a lot of time in both North America and Britain are sometimes accused of having an “Atlantic” accent, a ghastly hybrid of the two tongues, part eagle or beaver and part lion. I’m not quite there yet, nor am I in danger of “going native”—dressing in a long skirt and shawl and carrying a basket of turf as I stroll barefoot on the rocky shore. Women dressed that way were once held up as the image of Irish womanhood and today are derisively called “shawlies,” by the way. But the strange mixture of words and sounds in my head is unsettling. I am shocked when someone recognizes within seconds of my opening my mouth that I am American, which they always do, of course: to me my speech doesn’t seem that different from theirs, but that only shows how badly I am afflicted by language creep. A few weeks ago I met a lovely woman down in Kilkenny named Helen whose speech was a veritable gold mine of unusual and vivid expressions. Her conversation was so interesting and her words so perfectly chosen that I could have talked to her all day. She was telling the story of the long and complicated process of renovating her home when she began one of her colorful sentences with the phrase “Between the jigs and the reels” to mean “With one thing and another.” Jigs and reels are, of course, types of musical pieces with distinct tempos, jigs being faster than reels. The phrase also brings nice mechanical imagery to mind: without too much stretching, jigs and reels could be machine parts, and the expression would still work well to mean something along the lines of “I had to deal with many different complications.” Helen was the owner of the bed and breakfast where we stayed. We asked her if she was also the chef, and she said “Yes, I’m the chef and the slosher,” by which we...
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37 Cows in the Library

Those are Yeatsian cows in the picture above. They graze on the plain “Under Ben Bulben,” the same plain where St. Columba fought “the Battle of the Book,” on the other side of the stone wall from Drumcliff Churchyard, where the poet William Butler Yeats is buried (see “33 Under Ben Bulben”). On a brilliant sunny day last August, I found them there unwittingly adding to the peacefulness of the scene. When cows are not grazing, they do something else that’s important to their health and digestion: they chew their cud; they ruminate. From Merriam Webster online… Ruminate transitive verb 1: to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly 2:  to chew repeatedly for an extended period  intransitive verb 1: to chew again what has been chewed slightly and swallowed: chew the cud2: to engage in contemplation The other day at a lecture on Yeats and the National Library of Ireland, I heard a fascinating story about him, one he recounts in the 1933 preface to Letters to the New Island, a collection of essays on literary and cultural themes first published in 1933. The “New Island” is, of course, Ireland in the post-independence, post-partition, post-trauma era. Yeats remembers sitting in the reading room of the National Library—the same one on Kildare Street where I go to do research and to read—in the 1890s when he was twenty-six or -seven, day-dreaming over a book, when “some old man, a stranger to me” said to him, probably in a stern and peeved tone, “’I have watched you for the past half hour and you have neither made a note nor read a word.’” As Yeats explains, the old man “had mistaken…me for some ne’er-do-weel student.” Though the young and ostensibly idle Yeats was not yet the Nobel Prize winning poet of world renown, he was already writing, publishing, and editing poetry. Poems such as “The Lake Isle of Inisfree,”  “The Stolen Child,” and “Down By The Salley Gardens” and many others had come out in magazines and in books by this time. At the moment when the old man called him out, he was working on editing a volume of William Blake’s poetry for publication. Whatever Yeats’s distraction from a more visibly “appropriate” library task, there are critics and biographers even now who would love to know the substance and range of his thoughts as he sat there in the gloriously elegant...
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