Past Posts
52 Deoch an Doras
“Deoch an dorais” is a common expression in Irish pubs and homes: it literally means “drink of the door,” but a more idiomatic translation would be “parting glass” or “one for the road.” There’s a popular song about this idea: it’s not simply about downing one more drink while you can but more about marking the resolution that must accompany a departure that is not eagerly anticipated—far from it. As the song “The Parting Glass” says, But since it falls unto my lot That I should rise and you...
51 Woodbrook
Oddly enough, one of the best books about Ireland—a book praised by Seamus Heaney and Brian Moore among others—is a memoir by a Scotsman who lived in County Roscommon for just ten years during the 1930s. Woodbrook by David Thomas was published in 1974 and was instantly recognized as a masterpiece. Many writers and others talk about its influence on them. Des Kenny of the legendary Kennys Bookshop in Galway included it in his book Kenny’s Choice: 101 Irish Books You Must Read (Curragh Press 2009). Though I’m always...
50 The View From Here
June In June 2014 Ron and I came to Dublin for a week to find an apartment for our sabbatical year. Traipsing around the city we barely knew at the time, we saw several nice places where we could imagine ourselves setting up house, but when we visited 78 The Dickens at The Gasworks and took in this spectacular view from the living room along with the apartment’s other positive features (extra bedrooms, two bathrooms, lots of windows, and easy access to nearby shops, restaurants, and public transportation), we were...
49 To the Lighthouse
“England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.” For several hundred years Irish revolutionaries have clung to this equation—sometimes attributed to Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798)—as their slogan and as justification for the timing of acts of rebellion. If Wolfe Tone, a leader of Ireland’s Rebellion of 1798, did utter those words, he was referring to the French Revolutionary Wars, the spot of bother on the continent that linked the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars in a struggle among European monarchies that lasted a quarter of a century and then some. The rebellion...
48 My Medieval Stoner Friends
The last time I visited Jerpoint Abbey in Thomastown near Kilkenny, I found myself saying to Ron as he headed off to climb the tower, “I’m just going to say ‘hi’ to the Ormond Knight.” The “Ormond Knight” has been dead for over 600 years. A primitive carved effigy of him adorns one of the pillars in the cloister at Jerpoint, a Cistercian abbey established in 1180 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540. Ever since I first saw this carving twenty years ago, I’ve been drawn to it....
47 The Hedge School Culture
Since arriving in Dublin last June, I’ve often noted to visitors and friends my appreciation of the vibrant culture of lifelong learning not only in the city, but throughout Ireland. The array of courses and other educational activities scheduled throughout the year for adults—most of them free—means there’s something for everyone and for every question or mood. Thanks to being on sabbatical, I have been able to take advantage of quite a few of these opportunities. As my hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of photographs attest, I have...
46 Into the Night
A few weeks ago I spent a morning hunting down a dark, forbidding “pit” that is mentioned in passing in a poem by William Butler Yeats. As is well known, I’m mad to see places where literature or history happened and to “walk in the steps” of the people, the events, the images, or the ideas that came into being in a particular set of coordinates. Yeats’s “pit” or “cleft” or “Alt” or “Glen” has been on my mind for a long time. In “Man and the Echo,” one...
45 Divided by a Common Language V
The phrases “No problem!” and “No Bother!” (sometimes “bother” is pronounced “bodder”) come up a lot in Ireland. In addition to meaning “Don’t worry, you are not causing a problem,” these phrases can also mean “Yes, I’ll do it,” as in “May we have a jug of tap water?” “No bother.” To me, such responses exemplify an accommodating attitude that I encounter everywhere here, in public and in private. I don’t like to characterize groups of people—it’s a dangerous road to go down, and you often find yourself face...
44 Graveyards, Graveyards, and More Graveyards
During a Christmas trip to Dublin I hosted for my brothers and their families in 2001, they all accused me of only taking them to see “prisons and graveyards, prisons and graveyards.” I must confess that they were right. On that trip family members flew in from all over the US to meet for the first time at Kilmainham Gaol, a grim and very cold prison built in the 1790s that housed many political prisoners and that in 1916 saw fourteen of the infamous executions of the Easter Rising. Over the...
43 Ladies Who Sweat
As we move into the last three months of our stay in Ireland, I am conscious of the stories I particularly want to tell in this blog, as I only have eight or ten weeks or posts remaining. I’ve known since last summer that at some point I wanted to write about the remarkable women I’ve met in my water aerobics class “Aquafit” and in my exercise class “Active for Life” at the gym across the street from our apartment, SportsCo. You will have perhaps noticed that I mention...