The Ireland Dispatches

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After four years of visiting Ireland, I have crossed a threshold. I am dancing with my left brain disengaged. I am not anxious whether I know the next move. My body simply does it. I am even beginning to position myself in one of the top positions, where the better dancers congregate.

My thirst is slaked. Instead of an emotional catharthis, I merely have a fabulous time at a dance. It shows, unlike on the faces of so many of the dancers. "You look like you’re having fun," my partners often say, which is code for, my, you’re expressing yourself rather broadly. "Really? I thought I was hiding it," I answer.

There are about four people I’m trying to arrange things with, and nothing is going according to plan. This, though, is the general plan in Ireland. People are unavailable, can’t be reached, connections are missed. It’s the way things happen here. I respond by slowing my life down, wandering down roads without any particular destination during the day. I’m learning to live on Irish time, whereupon no social or music activity begins before 10pm. Rather, nothing is scheduled to begin until 10pm, which is a different thing entirely from when anything actually starts. This is not natural for a morning person like myself. My solution is a bifurcated sleeping rhythm. A deep nap upon check-in, then up until half-one like the rest of the country. I am learning, fitfully, to live a little less scheduled life, to not have a plan. Eventually, I meet the people I need to meet, and things happen on their own schedule. Or they don’t.

The weather is aiding this effort. I understand that it is making headlines back home. This is never a good sign. It does not seem so bad from this vantage. I take refuge in teashops during the deluges, and I see lots of rainbows. It’s not a bad life.

4 February 2002
Ennis, County Clare

PS. Ireland walloped Wales’ butt 54 to 10 on Sunday. My understanding of rugby now is that it is an unremitting series of tackles and brawls. Player are carted off the field at regular intervals. There appears to be nothing to interrupt the carnage—the ball is always in motion, the men are always in one pileup or another. A fan insisted to me that rugby fans are the most peaceable of sports fanatics, as all their violent impulses get expunged on the field of play. According to this theory, soccer hooliganism results from those frustrating nil-nil contests where no one cracks open an opponent’s head. The fans are just acting out what they wish they had witnessed on the field of play. I suppose extending this logic would make the Quakers the natural sponsor of the WWF franchise.