Just back in Ireland for a lagged Christmas holiday. I get overwhelmed by the changing skies and social structure (though the Aer Lingus flight attendants are still timeless orange frumps). Mum presented Eggs Benedict on a bagel for my breakfast. McCambridge’s soda bread doesn’t cut it any more.

More entries to follow, now that I’m on vacation. Any volunteers for pints in Limerick or Dublin?

The B train carriage is papered with ads for Jameson whiskey. One shows a dry-stone wall sitting on what appears to be snooker-table baize.
“Maybe people just like things that come from Ireland,” runs the tagline.

I look around at my fellow passengers.

Maybe people just like things that come from Puerto Rico.
Maybe people just like things that come from Korea.
Maybe people just like things that come from the Dominican Republic.
Maybe people just like things that come from China.
Maybe people just like things that come from Belize.
Maybe people just like things that come from big drink conglomerates like Pernod-Ricard.

Or maybe, just maybe, they couldn’t give a rat’s arse.

Just before I left London seven years ago, my sister gave me a Stephen Pearce lamp as a wedding present. Rather than work out how to rewire it, I tracked down a store that sold European lightbulbs, the kind that are held in place by two small notches rather than screwed in. The lamp lacked a harp, so I balanced a shade on the bulb, singeing a small brown circle and risking fire. It has traveled with me through five apartments and spent two winters in a storage locker. Now it sits next to the sofa, its naked, emigré bulb a reproach to my slapdash ways. Yesterday I decided to fix it.

I walked down to Fifth Avenue, to the nameless hardware store next to Felix’s bike shop. Now that the rest of the country buys its tools in concrete boxes, this kind of store hardly exists outside Brooklyn, though there are several within ten blocks of me. It is dusty, higgledy-piggledy, and stacked high. The aisles are narrow canyons into which rolls of masking tape or paint brushes or garden hoses might topple at any moment. There are three possible entrances, but only one door opens. Inside, the staff was gathered around a 14-inch TV set, canted high in the corner. It’s the kind of place where you get helped, whether you like it or not.

I told them I needed lamp fixtures. The assistant who led me to the back was a dwarf on the large side. He wore a black beanie cap, a black shirt, and a studded belt that barely held up his jeans.
    “It’s Andrea Bocelli’s last night in New York,” he said. “They’re showing his concert. He won’t be back for at least two years. It’s so beautiful.”

He pointed out a few lamp things. Hardware stores make me feel foreign: even when I can name something, I’m not sure I have the right version of English. Is it a rawl plug, or a wall anchor? We worked by pointing and eliminating. Larger than that, but smaller than that other one. I came up with functional descriptions for the missing pieces:
    “I need a piece of metal that attaches to the base and supports a lampshade.”
    “A harp.”
    “That’s it!”
    “I guess you need a fother to hold it to the shade?”
    “That sounds right.”
    “How about a perlingham?”
He unlocked cabinets and fished for shiny bits and bobs. With an old grocer’s hook, he pulled down lamp sockets in smoky plastic bags.
    “That Andrea Bocelli, he’s an angel. Sad story. Sad story. You know he’s blind?”
    “Was he blind from birth?”
    “No, no! He told the story a couple of years back. When he was ten years old he wanted to play soccer. So his parents enrolled him in this soccer league, and one day when he was playing, he fell and hit his head. Whatever way he hit himself, he damaged his optic nerve, and he went blind.”
    “Poor guy.”
    “I got every album he made. My daughter loves him now, too. My son is maybe just getting into him, but he prefers rap.” He shudders. “I hate rap. Such angry crap. My nephews say it’s cool. It ain’t cool.”
    “What age is your daughter?”
    “She’s 21 years old now,” he said. “You know, I used to draw Stevie Wonder. I should draw Andrea Bocelli as well.”
    “What do you use? Pencil? Charcoal?”
    “I start with pencil, then I ink it in. Then I do calligraphy underneath. People think calligraphy is Roman, but it isn’t,” he said solemnly. “It’s an ancient Chinese art.”

We gathered my fixtures and the owner rang them up on an ancient cash register. He, too, stared mistily at the TV. “Beautiful. Nothin’ like it.”
Andrea Bocelli got ready to sing the final song. The assistant patted my arm. “This one is amazing. He cries. He always cries when he sings this one.” On the tiny screen, a pair of ice dancers made snow angels, then slowly twisted themselves upright. They swooped across the ice, as cheesy and compelling as a Jeff Koons puppy.
    “Now it’s time to say goodbye,” Bocelli sang.
    “You see that? The lump in his throat? You’re going to see a tear in a moment. My God.”
A gorgeous woman with an Afro walked in, carrying a chihuahua in a jogging suit. She wanted to fix her Christmas lights, and the third assistant sadly left the TV to help her. I stood and watched the end of Mr. Bocelli’s concert. It reminded me of the rapt way we used to watch the Eurovision Song Contest twenty years ago.

As I left, Chris Hackett came in, still fierce and handsome even with his jaw pieced back together. So these were the dusty aisles from which the Madagascar Institute got the supplies for its condiment wars, Brooklyn bull-running, and welding parties. Fear is never boring.

“A last gasp of bush kicks before giving in to a life of making cellphones vibrate in new and stimulating ways: This afternoon I built a sledge out of a sheet of boat aluminum, scrap 2×2s, and deck screws. Tomorrow Chris & I will use it to drag the 350-pound cast iron Jotul [stove] across the ice. Rick assures me that this stove will make the cabin balmy through the bitterest Ottawa Valley winter weather, and I’ll be testing the supposition tomorrow night.”

Ranger Tim is moving from the Canadian woods to San Jose. There are few places less suited to a great explorer of wildernesses both urban and rural than that dreary valley of million-dollar bungalows, one-track conversations, and Porsches inching down Route 101. Still, if anyone can find life in sand, he can.

“The Oblivio Series is a bi-monthly reading and performance series hosted by Michael Barrish. It has no overarching theme or purpose.”

Since I have no overarching theme or purpose either, the lovely Michael Barrish, friend and neighbor, has invited me to read with him at Bowery Poetry Club this Sunday at 4 o’clock.

I’ll be doing a bad Canadian accent and cursing myself for using too much dialogue.

It would be fun to see you there.

At Thanksgiving with Andrew’s family, I was paired up with another stray cat, Illona,* herself a reason to give thanks. “I work in Brooklyn,” she said shyly. I pressed her a little. “I work at a school.”

To be exact, she’s the principal of a bran-new public high school in Brooklyn, somewhere in the housing projects that loom between DUMBO and the lost village of Vinegar Hill. It welcomed its first hundred freshmen last September, and will double in size with the 2005 intake.

The theme of the school is Law and Justice, and she’s persuaded a fancy Manhattan law firm to help fund it. In the richest country in the world, public education depends in increasing part on corporate charity, and her kids are lucky to have a scrappy Bryn Mawr-Brooklynite to hustle for them. The law firm gives money for after-school programs, lends their contract movers to haul donated desks, and sends along their caterers and balloon-printers for the opening party. They book their senior staff for the monthly Lunch With Lawyers program for the kids.
    “Is that a treat or a punishment?” we asked. Last month they sent Bill Gates’ dad.

I’d joked about my big fat Italian Thanksgiving, but in fact, Andrew is a Connecticut charmer, preppy enough to wear a blazer to Thanksgiving. (In high school he sang in an a capella group hired to produce angelic noises for Martha Stewart’s Christmas party. To avoid clutter, she tucked them into the attic above the party room and forced them to sing into the floor vent. Then she tried to give them credit in her book instead of the cash they’d been promised for their choir’s trip. “They’re high school boys!” said their choirmaster, “They don’t give a shit about your book!”)

Now he’s a theater director, and his latest project is a production of Antigone with Illona’s freshmen students.
    “Antigone?” I asked. “With Brooklyn public school kids?”
    “Well, the text turned out to be a bit hard. So we’re doing it as improv. The chorus is a bunch of taxi drivers and deli owners, whining about the mayor.”

He and Illona swap stories about the kids. She seems to know every single name and family history. She’s very young, but not to a fourteen year old. “I’ve got the stare down. And the tone. If you don’t have the stare and the tone, you don’t make it through your first year of public teaching.”

She looks happy but exhausted, and glad to get decent food.
    “I eat crap,” she says cheerfully. “Pizza. Chinese.”
When she got the job in February, she started working 12 to 14 hour days to plan the school. Through the summer her work days stretched to sixteen hours while she set the budget, hired the staff, and recruited the students at school fairs. She still doesn’t know where the school will live next year; there’s a chronic shortage of space in New York. “If we could just stay with a hundred, I’d be so happy. I love these kids. It’s the thought of doubling that scares me. And again the year after.”

The day before she’d taken them all to a sister school in the Bronx for a bring-a-dish Thanksgiving. It’s a little secret, she says, that the MTA will give schools vouchers for free travel on the subway. She takes her kids all over the city, uses it so much that she’s afraid they’ll tot up at the end of the year that her hundred kids have taken 7,000 free trips or something. The Thanksgiving was a great success. The Bronx school hired a DJ, and the kids got real friendly. She had to walk around and separate them.
    “Are you joking? Or do you really separate them?” We have visions of Ferris Bueller’s principal.
    “Yes! We have to! You should see ‘em. At least during school hours, we’ve got to watch them. When they misbehave, they get sent to the wall. They can still dance, but they’ve got to keep at least one hand on the wall.”
Like the Hays Code. I grew up in a family of teachers, and in Illona’s splutters, I hear the giggles that sometimes escaped stone-faced puritans of my youth, when the other students weren’t listening.

Andrew has read about this thing in the New York Times, where the girls grind their butts into the boys’ crotches…
    “It’s called ‘dubbing’,” says Illona wearily.
    “Is that where the girls touch the floor at the same time? Or is that some other thing?” he asks. He says that his Connecticut high school pretty much stopped at Stir the Pot and Running Man. We speculate on whether Dubbing wouldn’t be a better theme for a high school than Law and Justice. Might go down better at the student recruitment fairs.
    “Let me tell you,” says Illona, “when you walk around, and they’re doing that stuff, and you’re saying, Alright, alright, get some daylight between you, you suddenly think, How did I become this person?”

She hasn’t yet turned thirty, but she’s a frazzled, proud mother of a hundred babies; newborn teenagers. All through the turkey, I kept thinking, why isn’t someone making a documentary of this woman’s work?

*Real name hidden from Google

Dear Liam,

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and you’re six days old. I haven’t met you yet. In fact, my belief in your independent existence still wobbles a bit. You came two weeks early, and we had to shift the world to set an extra place for you this Thanksgiving. But you’re the most welcome guest we can imagine.

And so here you are. A boy. Not just a bump any more, elbowing corners into your mother’s belly, but a boy, with a name of your own.

(You’re going to have to teach me how to be friends with little boys, Liam. My world was always full of small girls—sisters, neighbours, and cousins. I know them well, even now. But my friends grew up to bring boy after boy into the world, of whom you’re the latest and the most dear.)

Your first choice was a good one. Those are lovely parents you found for yourself, and they’re ready for you. I wish you could remember them as they are now. You’ll see photos of them from this week: your drained and blissful ma, your dad babbling with pride. Their hair is still brown. What can I tell you about who they are now, at the beginning of your life?

Your daddy’s long and pensive Huguenot features are at odds with his enthusiasm. He still has a kid’s joy. When he’s caught in some wild exaggeration or some giggle at the wrong moment, he still ducks his head like the youngest brother he is. He is lovable, crusading, and generous to a fault. A note-perfect mimic who slips on characters to make your mother laugh. He’s forever tweaking his own Orange County WASPiness.

He gobbles information—people, books, events, opinions—and finds unexpected connections within them. When he comes back from long runs, through Holland Park or Dupont Circle, he is restocked with global theories.

He’s often outraged. Like your mother, he wants to make the world a better place for you, and right now, it’s not co-operating. You should have heard him sputter and speechify through this past election, his focus sharpened by a dozen years of absence. Maybe you came early just to cheer him back up.

Your mama is a different character. She’s always been more serious, which is why so many people love to make her laugh. She draws them to her and draws them out like Oprah. The titanium plates that once braced her spine have been removed, but a steely core remains. This is a mother who would slug a mammoth to get food for you, Liam, and she’d endure a thousand years of winter to keep you warm. She is smart enough, and persistent enough, to invent the wheel for your MacLaren stroller. And she has a genius for human beings. When you go out into the world, you’ll learn that she’s a rare listener, with rarer compassion.

The first time I spoke to your dad, your mother put him on the phone to me from Bosnia. She’d fallen in love, she said, and she wanted me to talk to this guy, who worked in Sarajevo. He had a radio announcer’s voice. From 4,000 miles away I liked him immediately.

The second time I spoke to him was at six in the morning, six weeks later. He was calling from The Hague, where your mother had just moved to take a new job at the War Crimes Tribunal. He had joined her for the first week, to help her settle in. Just before he left for Sarajevo, a car hit her bike and tossed her over the hood and onto the ground. Her back was broken. They knew no one in The Netherlands.

He never went back to Sarajevo. He stayed with her, spending every day at the hospital. He found a ground-floor flat for her to move into when they let her out of hospital. He fed her, talked to her, held her hand, supported her first steps, told her she was a babe in her blue surgical corset. (This is encouraging news for a person who can’t yet hold his own head up.) To keep her dignity, he invented Bruce, a camp and gossipy hairdresser who bathed her and clipped toenails.

She told me later that even with all that pain and fear, it was one of the happiest times of their lives. What a love story you come from.

I wonder what will happen in the eighty or ninety years that stretch before you. You’ve already had an interesting life as a passenger: made in Tehran, gestated in Dublin, made your entrance in DC. By birth, you’re Huguenot, Celt, Brit, Nortsoider, So-Cal dude, and Beltway insider. You own this century more than we do.

We can’t imagine what thoughts you’ll think in 2044, or 2094. We can’t even imagine what thoughts you have now at you stare milkily at your new mother. In a few years you’ll probably roll your eyes as your parents apologize yet again. (They both say “Sorry” more often than the entire population of Canada combined.) You’ll roll your eyes as ma presses fancy sandwiches and pumpkin muffins on you as you head for the bus. (She does it to me, too.) Dad’s Ultimate Frisbee League can only be a tremendous embarrassment. And we won’t even start on cringeworthy letters from your mother’s best friend.

Liam, I’m appointing myself fairy godmother, and as you know, we’re in the wish business. So tonight I wish you this: may you be as brave, bright, and beautiful as your birthright promises. And may you have the gift of choosing to be happy, no matter what the big world deals you.

It’s the beginning of a great adventure.

With very much love,

-Dervala

P.S. Halfway through writing this, I saw the first photos of you. You have your daddy’s muzzle, ears, and eyebrows. And auburn hair! Your pricked heel is covered with a band-aid. You have long toes.

From my dear friend Andrew. Last names changed to protect the Catholic guilty from Google inquisition.

I’m trying to give up reading for a week. Last month I tried to give it up for two weeks, and failed, so I aimed lower. It’s an experiment in soft addictions. Three days in, after countless slip-ups, I’m at the bargaining stage. Does Slate count? Slate doesn’t count because it’s on the internet and I’m at work, right? Reading at work doesn’t count. Look, I have a sandwich in my hand. What about Apartment Therapy?

Slate counts. I stuck a Post-It on my computer that says READ in a big circle with a line through it.
“What’s that?” said Peter, who likes to catalogue my eccentricities. I told him my theories on soft addictions. There’s another Post-It just below it that says BITE with a line through it. It’s about chewing my fingernails, still a major food group though I’m 32 years old.
“And you’re not going to bite me any more, baby?”
“Bite me,” I explained.

I notice the text deprivation most on the subway, where some day I’ll get shot for staring at people. I get interested in certain faces, and I can’t seem to listen in properly without staring, too. A book is protection against this reckless habit.

Without one, I set my iPod to my Bill Clinton Makeout Soundtrack for the Q Train ride home. The other headphone clones don’t seem compelled into the little shuffly dances I do when I have private music. Not that it mattered. Last night no one looked at each other. They nosed into their books, or stared carefully into space. They all looked drained, and it’s only November.

The King is right. “We can’t go awwn together,” I wanted to implore them, “ With suspicious minds.”

Twenty one years ago today I cried because my sister Caroline turned three. I didn’t believe she could ever be as lovable again as she’d been at two. Three seemed so mature and unsilly; practically school-age. Oddly enough, I was wrong. That whole year I kept a diary of her doings, which I keep meaning to look for when I go home.

I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved Caroline when she was a small girl. She was such a great kid. Blonde hair, big brown eyes, and a nose so neat that Claire and I convinced her that, through a terrible misfortune, she’d been born without one. Her voice came from deep in her shoes, so that people sometimes looked over her head to see who had spoken. She had a taste for the dregs of any wine glass she could get, and a vivid sense of humour. She would hang upside down from the next-door neighbour’s climbing frame, her little pot-belly sticking out as her dress flew over her face. The bigger kids taught her tricks they couldn’t do themselves, and she was always game.

In the bath, she and Claire played at being Auntie Winnie and Auntie May. In their nineties, three of our grand-aunts had ended up in adjoining rooms in a Tipperary nursing home, and Claire and Caroline thought it great fun to imagine that we would end up there, too. They practised pouring bathwater tea, saying rosaries, and being deaf and senile.
    “Now auntie Winnie would you like some tea?”
    “What? What are you saying? What?”
    “Auntie Winnie would you like some tea and a biscuit?”
    “No. I’ll have jelly and icecream.”

Caroline was only ten when I left home, so we don’t know each other well any more. She’s less than nine years younger, but Ireland’s changes have speeded up generational shifts. I’m dim-witted about property and prospects, but Caro has just become a homeowner. This flipping of birth order aspirations seems symbolic of the mirror world Ireland has become, where home is richer than away. I’m fascinated by the glossiness of her contemporaries, and I want to know how they’ll turn out. Especially my sister, who still has a spark of the fearless, cheerful toddler on the climbing frame. May she always keep it, even when we get to that nursing home.

And another happy birthday to Brooklyn Amy, star of a few recent posts here. She turns forty today.