Jaywalking with the Irish (2 page)

For Ireland, the morning sky was a strange canvas of blue peace, the day before the most fateful September 11 in history, and the world felt at once fresh and familiar as I entered the Turkish barber on Cork’s MacCurtain Street.

A swarthy fellow with a long black ponytail and hefty gold neck-chains motioned me into the chair. He tucked a bib under my chin and began clacking his scissors.

“What’s your name?” I asked companionably, looking out at the pedestrians ambling on the street named after a lord mayor who was shot dead by British irregulars eighty years earlier.

“Ahmad, I am called. And you, you are not from here?”

“No. The States.”

“America?” he asked, clipping and chopping with a vengeance.

“Yes. And yourself?”

“I am from Iraq.” Pause. Snip. His scissors suddenly flew into overdrive. “We are at war.”

Gulp. Being trapped in a foreign barber’s chair before a hulking figure who deems you his blood enemy is not reassuring, especially when the man in charge has a variety of razors at his fingertips and is commencing blade work close to the jugular. Psychologists refer to the “Stockholm syndrome” when captives develop an inordinate desire to befriend those in control of their fate. I embraced it.

“But we are not at war. It is our governments that are butting heads, and the Iraqi people don’t exactly love Saddam Hussein either, do they?” I tried, scarcely imagining what engines of destruction were wheeling forward at that moment.

“Saddam a great man,” Ahmad insisted, curling a length of string into a curious noose-like configuration.

I considered bolting out the door then and there with the bib
hanging pathetically from my neck. But then, any rash movement could have proved terminal. So I instead meekly asked, “Have you been here long?”

“Two years,” he said, his fingers ominously tightening the looped string. I nodded, having just commenced a second one in the Irish bedevilment boot camp myself. Weren’t we merely fellow sojourners in the end?

“Is your family still in Iraq?”

“Yes, my father a pilot,” Ahmad fairly spat as he leaned over my straightjacketed self. Without warning, he cinched his miniature noose around a stray facial hair and yanked the ends with all his considerable might, sending the errant follicle flying in the general direction of Baghdad. It hurt.

“Oh, he flies an airliner?” I struggled for composure.

Whoosh went another hair.

“No, a fighter jet. He is captain in Iraqi air force.”

This was getting bad. Friends of my deceased fighter-pilot brother had probably lined Ahmad’s dad up in their sights more than once. Dim recollections of UN sanctions and jump-jet-enforced no-fly zones burst into my head. Better not mention the brother, I decided, as the Barber of Baghdad dipped a Q-Tip into a jar of oil. This he set on fire.

“Do you like Ireland?” I tried, then watched openmouthed as he drove the tiny torch into my ears, ostensibly to burn off more errant hair there, or maybe just to keep me in line for an official Baath Party stiletto knife tucked in his apron.

Ahmad, eyes going adamantine, had the look of a man gleefully at one with his work. “It is far better than America.”

At that point, I shut up. Happy to get out unmaimed, I in fact tipped Ahmad generously and limped off, nursing a head full of questions. Outside, the incongruous contrasts of Irish life lay rampant – purveyors of tin whistles, curry and “free poppadum,” New Age potions, Baptist bible services, adult entertainment, country house heirlooms, and black stout stood side by side, while a pig farmer I’d once met began his day’s lurch toward a dark den favored by local musicians and poets. Here lay the curious sweep of the Republic’s second-largest city or, more accurately, the biggest
village in Ireland, about to be celebrated as the European Capital of Culture for 2005. But could it ever be home? The security implied by that humble term was poised to go up in flames. And, at least temporarily, countless American transplants on foreign shores were destined to lose their deepest bearings, whether in plumbing the Irish end of the rainbow, or any other Shangri-la the globe offers.

But at that naive moment, all I knew was that the simple act of getting a haircut had grown at once sinister and comic. Ahmad had seemed a pro. Knowing Cork as I do now, I’d consider betting a tenner he was simply winding me up. But the story must begin at the start, with a fascination with Ireland that reached back through decades.

“I’m not going!” our six-year-old son, Owen, shouted when, eighteen months earlier, we had announced our plans to drop everything and move to Ireland. Then he crawled under a coffee-table, squeezed sheets of newspaper into balls, and furiously flung them out in all directions. His parents, the people he trusted more than all others, were destroying everything he treasured, so he now barricaded his small fortress with cushions from the couch.

Why a comfortable family should suddenly pack off across the seas to a rain-lashed chimera in the Atlantic is a question that confounds us still, as does the very essence of this brooding island that inspires, baffles, and wounds with equal sport. For nearly thirty years, wanderings to Hibernia had been a peculiar constant in my life, with the wife led by the hand through more than half of them. The place’s siren call captured her spirit as well.

We had hit that time in life when an inventory of achievements, possessions, and responsibilities revealed that certain intangibles had gone missing, ingredients like adventure and renewal. So, crooked roads being the paths of genius, we would take the family off for the biggest expedition in our lives, a safari to Ireland.

“You’ll love Cork City,” Jamie promised, which was a stretch, because she’d been there for only a couple of hours once. But the
compact bustle of the place had grabbed us at first sight, just as the wild beauty of West Cork had done, when we had recently visited at length; Dublin, on the other hand, felt like exactly the kind of frantic sprawl we had spent years avoiding. “You won’t have to be alone so much because we’ll be surrounded by other houses with all kinds of new kids to play with right outside our door.”

At this point, two pillows parted and Owen’s blue eyes glowered suspiciously from the floor. The next thing I knew, a fresh wad of newspaper went flying over my head. Then the wall of cushions closed again.

Jamie, on her knees now, kept searching for words of solace. “It will only be a year,” she whispered. “I promise we’ll make it fun. You know how much you love trains? They’ve got them all over the place there. And lakes and waterfalls and . . .”

Myself, I started passing photographs into the sarcophagus, showing Owen grinning on glorious Irish beaches, on boats and mountaintops, all of these from a vacation a year and a half before. Then Jamie slipped a plate of cookies through a gradually widening gap in the pillows. Suddenly, a shriek of hysterical laughter erupted from within, Owen’s nature being far too sunny to carry the protest on any longer.

The ten- and eleven-year-olds, Harris and Laura, looked at us as if we’d flipped our lids. And perhaps we had.

When my father was my age he’d gone off and, without telling anyone, purchased a yellow convertible – which I eventually drove into a creek. My mother’s father, on the other hand, had dropped everything to buy a pair of steeds and a pistol to ride off to the Yucatán for a go at silver mining with my grandmother.

“You’re moving where?” asked our mothers, their faces drooping in dismay. They knew something about Ireland. Its quicksilver was in their genes, its hot and cold running emotions and doomed aspirations and pirouettes of talk and dream were handed down to them in buckets by their forebears and passed around in endless measure by their husbands now dead. Ireland to them had another simpler identity – it was the starting point for a flight to a better life elsewhere. Inexplicably, their offspring were turning straight back into the vortex, heading the wrong way down history’s highway.
It was no help that thousands of seekers from all over the world had recently done the same, and lived to tell the tale.

It had all started in May of 1973, as I prepared to study at Trinity College in Dublin, after having dabbled at similar pursuits for the previous year in London. In search of experience, I took a train to Holyhead in Wales and the ferry across the Irish Sea.

Cement-stained laborers milled about in tweed caps and ill-fitting coats, invariably smartened by a threadbare but neatly knotted tie, a hand-me-down tradition perhaps from the English aristocracy who had ruled Ireland for all but five decades of the last eight hundred years and now employed the scorned Paddies on every British building site. With fascination, I listened to my fellow passengers’ soft murmurs and watched their faces brighten as the burden of exile lifted. Through the night of that sea crossing, I drank dark pints with country folk from Galway and Tipperary, with returning masons’ helpers and a poet and a priest. The language was the same English I had always spoken, but suddenly it had run wild, with twisted weeds and gorgeous orchids blooming in the midst of what should have been ordinary sentences. Sleep was unthinkable.

In the course of a life one sees countless dawns – and forgets most of them. But my first vision of Ireland will never be forgotten. The rising sun over Dun Laoghaire was only a whisper behind the haze, a vapor above dark mountains. The ship’s passengers surged toward the rails, anticipating the embrace of their waiting loved ones. Ireland’s lost daughters and sons, its no-hoper husbands banished to the factories and sewerage schemes of London, Manchester, and Birmingham, its arthritic old men, its reeling alcoholics, and eager nannies and virtuous nuns – they were all leaning forward, almost hurrying the ship’s pace with the pulse of their quickening hearts. Down the gangplank they stumbled, clutching battered suitcases, satchels of presents, and above all their nostalgic vision of a place that was to them as boundless as legend. Their heartfelt embraces, their sobs of joy, and excited
outbursts cast a magnetic circle of emotion around that pier. I was transfixed.

In that first Irish year, the lines between fantasy and reality blurred. Mountains caressed by mist, farmers who would put down a hoe and talk about the soul as if it were a moth struggling to fly from the wet grass, a Dublin full of bearded rogues who looked as if they had slept on a park bench and had pints and tobacco-wheezing laughter for breakfast – the island became raveled in my soul. Hashish would have been safer.

Onward flew the years, and I built a respectable life in the straightforward world of America, transmuting the instability of the freelance writer’s life into a career producing specialty publications; marriage, children, and houses followed, as if one was punching in all the requisite points on life’s time card. Yet plans for the Great Irish Escape continued. Jamie’s grandfather was born in Roscommon, giving her an innate connection to the country as well as direct access to Irish citizenship. She passed a number of test visits, including our sublime month with the children in West Cork in 1998 when daughter Laura and I stood along scalloped coasts and, when luck was with us, hauled mackerel in one by one, each glistening catch landing like a sign. With the right lures, it seemed one could alter time.

At dinner parties in the U.S., everybody talked about wanting to cast aside their dreary obligations and do something fresh with their lives. Middle-aged couples indulge themselves similarly everywhere. Yes, yes, pass the wine. Well, we were two fools who actually decided to do it. People said Ireland had the best educational system in the world, that the pace remained slower, the life richer, the society ideal for raising children. Why not find out? Why not muster one great adventure before we were worn down with age or savaged by school tuition bills?

“You’re so brave, we envy you,” people in our tight-lipped little town of Cornwall, Connecticut, began to offer when it became clear that our scheme would actually happen. Some even swore they’d soon be doing something similar themselves, just wait and see, but they really thought we were nuts.

We planned and we packed. I had a regular feature column
and wrote for a corporate-backed publication, and both felt like they could be produced from anywhere, so why not find out? And didn’t Ireland hold the promise of new tales for the writing?