Trinity College Library (via thillythenny)
One of my alma matters and even more stunning in person.* It’s not in use as an active library — but there is an impossibly romantic stone staircase at the far end that leads to special archives, where I researched my dissertation. Sometimes I think I should have skipped the M. Phil. and come straight to New York. But then I remember everything that experience gave me, and I’m grateful.
* Also inspiration for some Start Wars thingy.
I always remember you as having a really fancy handbag with books by Proust and Yeats inside it.
I always remember you as having a really fancy handbag with books by Proust and Yeats inside it.Something one of Cian’s old friends said to me last weekend. Spending money, reading books — yup, me in a nutshell. (Pity it hasn’t been less of the former, more of the latter.)
A few more Dublin moments (the trees were already beginning to blossom there).
I’ve said before Fiona has an artist’s spirit and it comes out in everything she does. Each morning, after waking me with hot lemon-water (imagine me smiling as I type that),* she made me a little snack of unusual ingredients. One morning it was thin corn cakes topped with the thinnest spread of crème fraîche, mandoline’d green apple slices, and crunchy flakes of sea salt. The other it was whole wheat pita, elegantly torn, topped with homemade beet relish, crème fraîche, roughly chopped parsley, and a drizzle of good olive oil.
The thing I appreciate most about this is that it’s true soul food. She peeks into her fridge and cupboards and then just listens to her heart.
I saw it again on display at a Sunday dinner at her home. Where I always worry about not having “a protein,” she simply made what would taste good and please the eye: bagna cauda with winter vegetables (she used Jamie Oliver’s excellent recipe — a total keeper, as both she and I have been burned by bad bagna cauda recipes before), mandoline’d fennel drizzled with lemon juice and sprinkled with salt, French lentils, beet salad with a dollop of crème fraîche, and my — meager — contribution, my signature feta dip.
It was such an inviting meal, the kind you must engage in, the kind that has no rules (mix together whatever you want), the kind that fairly demands long conversations over wine that turn into long conversations over port.
I can’t wait to recreate it for a decidedly more low-brow pursuit: The Bachelor finale. #shameless
* Oh and she put me to bed with a hot water bottle tucked into the chilly nether regions of the bed. I’m shocked I ever left.
Lest I gave you the impression last night that Dublin is hopelessly quaint, on Friday Fiona took me to lunch at a cafe called The Fumbally, named for the rather improbable-sounding lane upon which it sits.
With seasonal ingredients, filtered water spouts, designer crates of local kombucha, and hipsters watching sloth videos on MacBooks, it felt just like home. (Actually, Fiona’s company designed that kombucha packaging. So there.)
When I arrived at Fiona’s home in a neighborhood of Dublin 8 known as The Tenters — a neighborhood of identical low-slung brick row houses and street names that change from block to block, as though designed to confuse — it was just after 11 am. Her flatmate answered the door.
“You must be Nora!”
She explained that the electricity had just gone out — while Fiona was in the shower, no less — “and so I can’t even offer you tea,” she apologized, really quite put out by it.
Tea! I thought. Tea, of course!
And then: It’s great to be back.
Fiona, she explained, had run off to her gym to finish her shower — for you see the shower runs on electricity, as does the stove and everything else. We waited and made small talk, and as we did, I took in the details, the things I had forgotten: good Irish butter on the table, clothing hanging from the line in the back, an in-your-bones chill that I know from experience won’t let up ‘til spring.
When the repairman arrived, I listened in from the next room.
“My flatmate was after taking a shower,” she explained, “after” being Irish slang for … well, not really for anything. It’s just a filler-word; a bit of that trademark musicality, perhaps. Because she really just meant “my flatmate was taking a shower.”
“Ah, showers on Fridays,” the electrician replied. “Sure, it happens all the time.”
Did I hear that right? I had to laugh. Only in Ireland do showers on Fridays cause mass electrical outages.
Whatever the problem, they fixed it quickly, Fiona came home, and we had our tea.
I had been staring at the array of butters, honeys, and jams on the cheery yellow table.
“This looks so lovely,” I said, “though we’d never do it the States. Too afraid of not refrigerating everything.”
Fiona laughed and replied, “I’ve always aspired to this, I think.”
Come again?
“It’s a Protestant thing,” she explained (her family is Catholic, although none of them practice now; as I’m sure you know, though, you can never not be the religion you were, not in Ireland).
“I think it comes from the great English country houses. They keep all their fancy jams and mustards out on a side board, and it just seemed the thing to do.”
We had a good laugh about that.
Only in Ireland, I thought, for the second time in 20 minutes.
And: it’s great to be back.
The old woman, the old dog, and the sea.
On the anniversary of Cian’s death, his sister and the lads went for a swim in the Forty Foot, an age-old swimming hole at the southern tip of Dublin Bay. He used to swim in all sorts of weather, but that day was particularly bracing. Thick wet snowflakes falling hard and fast, bone-chilling wind, churning waves as cold as they’ve ever been … thank god for hot whiskey waiting in a thermos.
(Me? I watched from the sidelines, just as I did when he was alive. Helped myself to a nip of that whiskey though….)
Fiona and I — we had so much fun this weekend. As intense, sad, and surreal as the experience of returning for Cian’s memorial was, I think the part I’ll remember most is the laughter. Good god the laughter!
I mean, are we incredibly funny people? Should we, like, go into comedy or something?
Or is it only when we’re together?
Take Friday. I was exhausted and a bit delirious after the red-eye, and not entirely sure what it would be like, to be with her, in Dublin. We’ve had some adventures here in New York but the last time we saw each other was that surreal and horrible day we spent together just after Cian died. The world’s worst layover — yet strangely comforting to us both.
We wandered around Dublin and at 4 pm (the acceptable time to begin drinking, or so she told me), we planted ourselves at a pub called Grogan’s. Outside, under the heat lamps, even though it was hovering near freezing.
I had purchased a new wool blanket and planned to return to a shop for another on Sunday — fancy wool blankets being the souvenirs you apparently crave at the age of 31 — but I ran right back for it then, so we could sit outside with blankets on our laps like a couple of old ladies, watching the world go by and gossiping about the neighbors.
People kept asking us if we could spare some change — it happens all the time in Dublin — and we’d say no, and then as they left, turn to each other and say, “Do you have any idea how much I just paid for this blanket? I couldn’t possibly!”
Is this only funny to us? ‘Cause it was really funny to us.
Joined by several of her (totally delightful) friends, the night went on much like that, the inside jokes piling one on top of each other, my stomach muscles aching after so much laughter.
And I’m reminded of a quote of Fiona’s from the article about Cian:
“I do often have this feeling now, of the temporality of happiness. It’s not that it takes away from the feeling of happiness, but I can recognise it as a momentary thing. That makes me grab happiness all the more when it is there.”
Parallel lines
Yesterday I got drinks with a girl that was in my Anglo-Irish Lit Master’s program at Trinity in Dublin. There were only about twelve of us in the course and we sat in a room with tall ceilings, around a heavy wooden table. The building was not as old as the Great Hall, but it was older than almost any structure in this country.
I paid very little attention to anyone in the program. Through my boyfriend (whom I met during my JYA at Trinity), I had a ready-made set of very sociable friends, and I probably thought my fellow lit students were too nerdy for me.
No.
I definitely thought that.
I would have lost touch with every last one of them if it wasn’t for that boyfriend’s death this year.
The girl I met last night became friends with him in the intervening years and though she knew at the time that I had an Irish boyfriend, and she later learned that he had an ex “from New Orleans,” she didn’t put it together ‘til we commented on the same Facebook photo after his death. (I spent more time on Facebook in those two weeks than I have all year, easily. I read somewhere that at this rate, in year X, there will be more dead people than living people on the site, and I suppose someone will figure out how to make money off that.)
Dublin is a very small town. It turns out that she also knew his sister, though until his death didn’t know she was his sister.
Anyway.
I didn’t mean for this post to be about him. I have so much to say about him but I will never feel right doing it here.
I think what I wanted this post to be about was how interesting it was to talk to this girl — someone I honestly don’t remember, though she remembered me. (It could fill volumes, all that I’ve forgotten.)
She is also an American. She has lived in Dublin for the past nine years. She did what I thought I might have wanted to do — make a life in Ireland — and when she described her beautiful six week paid holidays every year, her travels in Europe, and the successes of our now-mutual friends, I admit I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It was a sort of Sliding Doors moment.
And the interesting part was that she was looking at me in that way, too. She is planning to move back to the States, to either San Francisco or New York (I hear rumors that there are other American cities but I find them hard to believe).
“But I’m 30,” she said. “I’ll feel so behind, moving here. Everyone gets started so young.”
Nonsense! I said but of course I know the feeling. Psyching yourself out before you even begin.
We really put ourselves through the wringer, don’t we?
If only we spoke to ourselves as we would our dearest friend, how much more confident we would be.
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