Valentine’s Day has become an elementary school tradition. Every kid has to make a card for every other kid, so a seven year old is faced with composing twenty or thirty ‘I like you because…’ messages in a form of early training for Performance Review torture. At least no one gets singled out as they did in the old Canadian system Mark described. You made Valentine cards only for kids you especially liked, and then gave them to the teacher, who doled them out so that popularity could be measured publicly. Those who got nothing watched stacks pile up on other desks.

I was a plain little girl. Straight brown hair and glasses were as good as invisibility shields in Limerick in 1983. So when I got three Valentine cards the year I turned eleven, I accused my parents of playing a joke. They goggled. I waved the cards’a homemade number, a pink-flowers job, and a fancy red one with a silver heart. The red one was inscribed with a poem in neat capitals:

‘LAST NIGHT I DREAMED OF SOMEONE
WHO WAS LOVELY AND KIND AND TRUE
WHOSE SMILE IS AS BRIGHT AS THE SUNSHINE
AND THAT SOMEONE DEAR DERVLA IS YOU’

My parents found this hilarious, but they denied everything. I told my friends I didn’t know who’d sent them’and enjoyed the cachet of a good V-Day haul’but secretly I believed my parents had roped one of their friends into a project designed to embarrass me. After all, they lived for that.

The following year, more cards arrived. Same neat blue capitals and heartfelt poetry. And the next year, and the year after that, all the way up to sixteen or so. Even my father wouldn’t stretch a joke that far.

Paul Hickey was small and pale, and had curly brown hair. He was eager with answers in class, and he liked Maths and spellings. The grey v-necked sweater he wore every day looked boiled and itchy. Paul was from the Care House. We vaguely knew this meant he didn’t have a proper Mammy and Daddy, that he lived in foster care with a house mother, Mrs. Kite. The Care House boys were supposed to be wild’his older brother Dominic was the terror of the school’but Paul was gentle. When I was seven I sat in behind him for a whole year, and he loved to turn around to chat. The Care House taint was enough to turn most of the kids off, but I liked him more than the other boys, who lobbed mysterious insults at the girls. ‘Mammy, what’s a prostitute?’

The Pope’s visit to Limerick in 1979 may have the best thing to happen in Paul’s life. People came from all over Munster’from all over the country’to see His Holiness. Two kids were to be picked to present flowers to him. It was our First Communion year and Paul was one of those poor little Care House boys, and this was enough to get him the nod. Some little scrap of a girl was his companion, presumably from a foster house of her own. He talked about it for weeks beforehand. He was going to be on TV! He was going to present flowers to His Holiness the Pope! He was going to bow, and say ‘God be with you, your Holiness’ in Irish. Maybe he would kiss the Pope’s ring. He would be right up at the front of the crowd and he would meet the Pope!

He wore his Communion suit, which he’d inherited from one of the older boys in the Care House. It was brown. We saw him briefly on television. The pope kissed the ground, two small figures thrust a single bouquet at him, and then Paul’s shining moment was over. But he felt special for months.

The following year, when we were eight, his fate was sealed. We were doing Arts & Craft, a rare treat, when Paul started to squirm in his seat and whispered urgently to the teacher. She grabbed him by the elbow and marched him out of the class. He was hotfaced when he came back a few hours later, and the other boys taunted him.
‘Paul Hickey made a chocolate banana in his pants!’

Four years later, he wrote about his big day in the annual parish magazine. ‘The Day I Met the Pope, by Paul Hickey.’ I had a piece on the next page, a short story about an inexperienced alien who crash-landed in our village and ended up playing hurling for Mungret. By that time, Paul and I had long since sat at opposite ends of the classroom, and we didn’t talk much any more. He was growing lonelier. The other kids didn’t want to have anything to do with someone who was unlucky. I still smiled at him, but I’d found my own spot as that scourge of the disco, the prettiest girl’s plain best friend, and I wouldn’t risk it by being too kind to a spa. At eleven, it’s hard enough to survive without carrying someone else.

Paul, of course, was my Valentine. The cards continued to arrive, never fewer than two, often three. By secondary school, we were in different classes and never saw each other much. I suspected Paul, but preferred to nurse the possibility of a more dashing suitor. Finally, at sixteen, we walked out of school at the same time one day.
‘Was it you who sent me the Valentine cards?’ I asked. He nodded mutely, vigorously. He blushed. So did I.
‘Thank you,’ I babbled. ‘They were really nice. It was really nice of you. To send them. How did you know my address? From the phone book?’
I don’t remember ever speaking to him after that.

My second winter home from college, I learned that Paul was dead. He’d somehow got out to Cratloe, up in the hills near Shannon where my parents dragged us on Sunday walks. Maybe he took a taxi. He brought a rope. In the middle of the night, in November, he’d tried to hang himself from a tree. He fell, crawled away from the tree with the rope still around his neck and died before morning.
‘He made a right bags of it, the poor divil,’ said the teacher who told me, shaking his head.
He was twenty when he died. I don’t know if he was in college by then, or working, or drawing the dole. I don’t know who mourned him’Mrs. Kite? He must have felt ferociously alone and worthless. I remember him as a chattering little boy, brighter than the Mungret merchant princes who were attached more firmly to the earth. He needed very little, I think, but he got less.

I think about him more as I get older and the horror of sitting in a class watching some kids get a stack of cards from teacher while others get nothing seems less like an inescapabable rite and more like a sadistic, engineered system. Dear Paul, this year you are my Valentine.

‘It is sadistic love I have for you Fisher said to his possessions. All I want in life is my violin. And the Three Essential Pens. I want you naked! he shouted at his apartment.’
Just finished Todd McEwen’s Fisher’s Hornpipe. I left my bike at home deliberately so that I’d have extra subway journeys to finish it. If you’ve seen Withnail & I, about which I can be very tedious indeed, it may be enough to know that eponymous Fisher is a cross between Withnail and, well, I. It also reminded me of Beckett’s Murphy, which contains my favorite opening line:
‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’
Fisher’s Hornpipe is out of print (I have a borrowed copy). As I raced through it, I made mental lists of friends to press it on once I buy my own. I have to be careful; it could damage the friendship if appreciation is insufficient. Jason can take it, certainly. Claire is mordant enough. Mark lent it to me, so he’s in the clear. Caitriona, Dan, Joy, Paul, Liza: you have been warned that a book report will be due.

THE SEVEN STAGES OF DRUNKENNESS
I All topics found humorous
II Linguistic play
III Overcompensated daintiness
IV Shouting sadness
V Out of body experiences
VI Severe inert reverie
VII Passage into the epiphanic stream

Here is Fisher’s assessment of my race, formed as he is tossed out of a Boston bar midway through stage IV.

’God the Irish thought Fisher drifting up and down the frozen boulevards. With their Guinness their Jungian music their raven haired white skinned colleens and their soft lilting voices they are put on this earth to put us to sleep and lull us toward Death! To charm us into a stupor and then hit us over the head.’

Suddenly my life has meaning.

A rose by any other name
In Tibetan Foothold, Dervla Murphy mentions a female Boddhisattva, Pol-den Lha-mo, Abbess of a monastery on the shores of Lake Yamdrok. Her Sanskrit name, translated into English, is ‘The Adamantine Whore.’
I’m sure that’s just what our own lovely St. Kevin thought of St. Bridget when he flung her off a mountain for tempting him.

I owe my soul to the company store
On the long subway tunnel between the A train and the N train at 42nd Street someone has hammered white placards on every sixth overhead beam, like a morose Burma Shave ad.

Overslept/
So tired/
If late/
Get fired/
Why bother/
Why the pain/
Go home/
And do it again.

Who did this? It’s a Sixteen Tons for a generation of slack, glazed office workers.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
This month’s In Style has a breathless piece on how romantic all those young couples at the Golden Globes were. Bah! Young Hollywood, all hormones and glowing skin, is in love with its own reproductive potential. Where’s the romance in that?

But oh, I swooned to see a shrunken old couple shuffling down 30th St on Valentine’s Day, still holding hands and laughing together in the big city.

Oompah, Loompah,
Doopity-do
First day of Lent, 11.56 a.m. Plagued by Willy Wonka fantasies of plunging into a great pool of molten chocolate.

I drank weisse bier with Mark last night. A pedant in an ugly sweater complimented my correct pronunciation of of ‘weisse’, but I was probably just saying ‘Vice, uh, beer?’. When it comes to drinking, I am a big girl’s blouse, a big pink skipping rope, a wuss. After two measly pints, I had feverish dreams about drinking cool water all night long.

Brace yourself, Bridget
Today is Shrove Tuesday.

I have Catholicism in the same way that I have an appendix. It’s vestigial, risks flaring up occasionally, but mostly gives me no trouble. Still, I like to observe some of the old rituals that give shape and rhythm to a year. Tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, I’ll make eyes at firemen with crosses on their foreheads and I’ll give up both the demon dhrink and chocolate for Lent.

I never accept that I drink very much, but then I grouse through six weeks of deprivation. Forsaking chocolate is even worse. By Friday, my loved ones will roll their eyes and yawn at my pitiful mewling. Others will avoid me altogether, sickened by the sight of a grown woman sniffing at the office candy jar.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, though I won’t get shriven, I will drink beer and eat pancakes with chocolate sauce.

Kissin’ Valentino by a crystal-blue Italian stream
This morning I dreamed that I went for a long walk in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Pleasingly, it was on the Carribbean rather than the East River. The handsome residents sat at outdoor bar tables and waved as I paddled with my college friend Lisa. We explored beachfront brownstones and found a ramshackle three-story place I liked. I went upstairs and into all the bedrooms. It looked like Red Hook hipster-artistes had lived there recently. Large, splotchy paintings hung on the walls above old fireplaces. The colors were warm.

I tried to work out if I could afford the $125,000 price tag as I walked back to Manhattan across the dunes. I was wary that this deal was too good to be true or that I would screw it up somehow, and I woke up with a vague feeling of regret.

So why wasn’t my house ten bucks? Or ten million? Or made out of chocolate? My dreams just tweak reality, or worse, the Times Real Estate section.

I’m so excited. Leelila is coming to town in ten days. She left us for LA a year ago, and among other things, I have missed the sheer pleasure of saying her name. Leelila Strogov is one of the all-time great glamour names, and she lives up to every syllable.

Vice
I’ve fallen into another bad reading habit, now that I’m taking the subway more regularly. Fifty pages from the end, I realize that there isn’t quite enough left to get me through a day’s commute. So I start another book. In the last month, I’ve cliffhangered:

A Cook’s Tour
The manuscript of Max’s new novel
Lolita
The Art of Happiness
On Writing

I’m not counting the books dropped less than halfway through:

The Hobbit
Adventures in the Screen Trade
No Logo
The Blind Assassin

This is a poor show. Each of these books was enjoyable: I just got panicked at the thought of anything less than an abundance of pages remaining (and, okay, I got excited about the next one). As a child, I skipped to the end of each book halfway through to find out what happened. It was a disappointment to learn that not all stories ended with a thrilling climax that tied up all the plot points. But that doesn’t justify abandoning my charges so recklessly now.

Tibetan Foothold
I did manage to finish Dervla Murphy’s Tibetan Foothold today, however. My namesake and countrywoman deserved no less. In 1963, she cycled from Ireland to Delhi and from there made her way to the Tibetan refugee camps of Northern India, where she pitched in for several months. She fell in love with the ‘Tiblets’—cheerful, uncomplaining, affectionate children. We romanticize Tibetan Buddhism so much that her skeptical but loving perspective brings balance. I’d just finished (ahem) The Art of Happiness, which was interesting but somewhat unsatisfying for being ‘as told to’ an American shrink, whose new-agey style made it hard to get to the Dalai Lama’s twinkly wisdom underneath. Dervla Murphy met the Dalai Lama in 1963, and her impressions show a very different man:

‘Where someone of His Holiness’s stature is concerned, there are probably as many different versions of the man as there are people who meet him; unavoidably one has one’s instinctive personal reactions. One also has certain preconceptions and it would be untrue to say that I met the Dalai Lama with an open mind; all my conversations with those who knew him had led me to expect an outstanding individual—not necessarily likeable, but certainly a Personality. Instead, I found myself talking to a simple pleasant young man, who has the gracious manner and lively humour of the average Tibetan, but who failed to impress me by any unusual qualities—apart from a total lack of egotism, which by our standards is remarkable enough in the circumstances.

On meeting some High Lamas one spontaneously recognizes them as deeply religious men, yet with the Dalai Lama I had no awareness of being in the presence of an ascetic whose life centered on things spiritual. This is not to imply that His Holiness’s life is otherwise centered; it may merely be that he is as yet too immature to convey such a feeling to others.

However, half an hour’s conversation convinced me that here was a ruler whose chief concern would always be the welfare of his people—though unfortunately, he showed no sign of an intellectual ability equal to the enormous task of solving their present problems. But I was also becoming aware of a certain tension in the atmosphere. I felt that the Dalai Lama was constantly on his guard, that he was unsure of himself in dealing with foreigners, and that he was continually attempting to gauge my reactions to him. One can only pity the vulnerability of this sensitive young man, who is so often exposed to the relentless scrutiny of a world either politely sceptical or impatiently contemptuous of the values which he represents.’

Later, her attitude softens:

’And this morning provided another pleasant surprise when I had an audience with His Holiness and found him much more relaxed and approachable than during our last meeting sixteen months ago. He seems to have matured a great deal in that brief time and to have gained in self-assurance, as though he has at last been able to come to terms with his strange situation. The impression I had today was of an astute young statesman in the making—yet when we came to touch on religion he spoke with an easy sincerity that was immensely moving and quite unlike his tense, watchful manner at our previous meeting. He looks considerably older now, and very much thinner—but very much happier.’

‘Four decades have passed since the Dalai Lama fled to India, and those anxious and demanding years have not been made any easier for His Holiness by the Western media’s adoption of Tibet’s God-King ( in tabloid-speak) as one of their Cold War heroes. In this role, the Dalai Lama was all the more useful because of his appeal to young Westerners earnestly seeking ‘eastern wisdom’. This is not to suggest that His Holiness lacks wisdom, compassion and genuine spirituality. But what I wrote recently about Nelson Mandela could equally apply to him: ‘In President Mandela the media have an ideal hero, someone whose image needs no touching up. Yet every leader deserves some criticism and may be rendered less effective by a media canonization that stifles it.’

Doughty Dervla is sobering. I admit to being drawn to the Dalai Lama for a self-help fix more rigorous than Mars and Venus on a Date. I’ll also admit to wanting to pull back the curtain to expose the wizard. ‘But what’s he really like?’ The earnest shrink who relates The Art of Happiness spends most of the book reassuring us that for the Dalai Lama there is no Miller Time. When I mention that I’m reading the book, Paul, unprompted, writes:

‘The thing that interests me most about the Dalai Lama is his ability to live his role. There is no inner child, no thing he’d rather do. I asked Tom about it, whether the Dalai Lama was ever some guy and not the Dalai Lama, and he said that there’s no one that isn’t the Dalai Lama in there. He doesn’t seem to need to get away and play video games. That focus appeals to me; in a world of people trying to choose for their entire lives, the person who chooses and takes the consequences is indomitable. And probably happier.

Plus he eats Yak.’

Murphy quotes Carl Jung: ‘I have serious doubts as to the blessings of Western civilization, and I have similar misgivings as to the adoption of Eastern spirituality by the West.’ She speculates that her own ‘…involuntary hostility aroused by those who adopt alien philosophies is probably mainly due to a basic suspicion that they are guilty of attempting to escape from their inherited responsibilities.’

Well, she may be right. Or it may be that these days we inherit no spiritual framework at all, and must patch something together if we feel the need. And what’s so wrong with peace, love and understanding? Except that it doesn’t get your country back.