That extract is from Elena Lappin’s chilling account of being detained in LA for entering the country to cover a story without a journalist visa—a requirement that has been dormant since 1952.
    ‘The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American.’

Even as I post this, I worry that any immigration officer who searches on my name during my next interview will turn up stories like this and take against me. Paranoid, but not unreasonable. Elena Lappin doesn’t even live here, but I do, and I’m afraid of their power in a country where I have no right to legal representation. What is happening to us?

Aidan Francis, 9 pounds and 12 whopping ounces, made an appearance on Sunday. In his honor, a great pair of photos from Flickr:

Babies have one-track minds.

I use postcards, flyers, letters, and photos as bookmarks, and tend to leave them in place when I’m finished. It’s a message-in-a-bottle to my future self, tying, say, a ticket stub from a film I loved to the book I read waiting in the queue. Stuck on page 173 of Toni Morrison’s Jazz is the US Embassy receipt for my first J1 visa application back in college. The combined artefacts make for found memories as powerful as songs or smells.

On Bloomsday I took down Ellman’s biography of Joyce to look for more pictures of my new love, Nora. “Dearbhaile Hanley Christmas 1992 Limerick” said the flyleaf, and out fluttered a small photo from long before that: my secondary school class at the end of our first year. Thirty twelve-year-olds, arranged in three rows under the school crest and motto, Crescentes in Illo per Omnia. I’m still not sure what that means.

Our classes were named for dead Jesuits, with each intake year given a letter. Briant, Bellarmine, Borgia, Berchmans, Bobola. Our class was De Britto. We never thought much about the man behind the name. Did he die of malaria in some equatorial swamp, doubting God in a sweat-drenched soutane? (This was before Google, which shows Blessed John De Brito—with one ‘t’—to be an interesting fellow, a Portuguese nobleman who became a Jesuit Swami in Madras, and was beheaded for his trouble.) I always liked the name, and more so when an unfortunate religion teacher snapped and rechristened us. He was a country farmer who came late to teaching, and our toxic behavior disillusioned him fast.
    “De Britto!” he yelled. “It’s De BRATTO ye are. De BRATTO! A shower of brats and no more!”

We don’t look like brats in the photo. The front row kids have hands neatly placed on their knees, and the back row stands on plastic chairs, arms hanging down like Riverdancers. Our faces have the unformed blurriness of going-on-thirteen. Every single one of the girls has cut the long hair we started the year with. None of the kids is fat, not even the one we thought was at the time. Our shoulders are narrow in navy, crested jumpers. The girls wear kneesocks and navy skirts, the boys wear grey pants. (We all wore tackies, as Limerick called trainers/sneakers. For some reason we weren’t allowed to wear proper shoes. They’ve reversed that rule now, just as arbitrarily.)

I feel like God, holding this photo from the era of Live Aid and moving statues. I look at the formless little faces of my classmates and know their futures. I see which of them will marry each other and what their children will look like. I know who will get religion, become an actor, come out, or move to San Francisco. At the end of the front row sits the sweet and quiet girl in whose bedroom four of us compared notes after our first class party that same month. (The girls a head taller than the boys, and Phyllis Nelson lowing at us to “Moooooove Closer” while Fr. McGuckian read a book…) Her squishy white boot tackies are as familiar as my own scuffed Dunnes’ Stores efforts, and in the wisdom bought with twenty years, I see her future. “Don’t worry about kissing Frosty,” I want to whisper, “You’re going to grow up to be a sound engineer, and you’ll meet Peter Gabriel.”

In 1984, we hadn’t yet seen the great Sledgehammer video on Vincent “Fab Vinnie” Hanley’s MT USA. But reader, she married him.

This opening to Brenda Maddox’s wonderful biography of Nora Barnacle made me check the publication date. The book is just sixteen years old, but her ferry port description—confirmed by my own memories—meshes more closely with Nora’s Ireland than today’s. It is rooted in a time of Donnelly visas and IDA ads pimping Irish graduates at Shannon Airport. From one-way Sealink to Ryanair jaunts, Ireland has travelled a ways.

My college flatmate, Pádraig, had scheduled the arrival of a second heir on my birthday, but the little divil didn’t show. Yesterday I asked Jason if he’d heard any news.

“Sarah is a week overdue. If it hasn’t shown up by Tuesday they will induce,” he writes. “The
Francis family were never known to rush anywhere. I pointed out to Pádraig that now at least it has to step outside when it wants to start smoking.”

In Prospect Park, a caravan of families files down to the lawn. The men set up volleyball nets and barbecues. According one old fella’s chest, it is—ta-da!—the 2004 Sephardic Lebanese Community’s Father’s Day Barbecue. You can count on American t-shirts to tell you what’s going on. Where I come from, we lose that bold, unguarded quality along with the “I AM FIVE” badges.

Nearby, another father argues with two mid-sized children, who cry because they are forced to walk instead of being pulled in their red wagon. “It’s important that you get some exercise on the weekend,” he says. So they lie down on the path and refuse to get up.

    “Last year there were no chairs, nothing,” says one hefty mother to another as they push laden strollers down the slope to the barbecue. “We had to sit on the grass, can you believe it! Looks like this year plenty of people have brought chairs. I see sunshades too. And they rented PortaPotties, thank God. Last year the kids couldn’t even go, poor things.”

Dangling from her stroller, and from the crooks of her elbows, are folding chairs, a folding table, a parasol, a barbecue, blow-up balls, the Sunday New York Times, coolers, and several bags of the mystery gear without which American children cannot survive outside the home.
    “See, we learn more every year,” she says, huffing as she sets up a small living room on the grass. “It’s so important to bring the stuff that makes you comfortable.”

At work, we share a floor with a company called New York Dog. I love wild animals and human babies, but not New York Dog. That subculture—from pampered, wheezy pugs to matching, brainless Dalmatians—is as neurotic as their humans, with no wit to make up for it. (The exception is the pack of wild dogs who roamed Red Hook, whose descendants are as fierce, yellow, and sharp as coyotes. They scare me, but they’re worthy of their wolf genes.)

New York Dog, the company, makes outfits for hors d’oeuvres dogs. Mainly booties, sweaters, coats, and bags—accessories for accessories. The dogs ride in the bags, carried by the same slaves who scoop their poop and paint their toenails. The little pointy-faced blonde ones make me think of Sarah Jessica Parker being toted by Mr. Big in a giant Fendi baguette.

In a city with no sheep, the five or six working dogs across the hall earn treats by modelling. Several times a day they set up a frenzy of yips, barking their walnut-sized hearts out at the mailman or the UPS guy. They yap each other on in a passion of excitement, panic, or outrage. I wonder how it is possible to love a creature who makes such sounds—especially one who, unlike a colicky baby, will not grow out of it. Once, out of badness, I barked outside their door just to set them off, and to hear the staff squawk “STAWP IT!”

We’ve seen the dogs when they escape from their office and burst into ours, barking hysterically. As born-and-bred New Yorkers, they have no idea what to do with freedom. They scuttle back and forth like rats in the subway until their caregivers scoop them up.

My co-workers are all male and mostly geeks, and they blink mildly, feeling no need to throw an insincere “How cute“ at these blurred morsels. I say it, even though I think small, bald dogs are as cute as warts. While the doggies are dragged, toenails skidding, back to the world of oestrogen and expensive raincoats, I look at the engineers and realise I’m in the right business.

“And I ask you, friend
What’s a fella to do
‘cause her hair was black and her eyes were blue
So I took her hand
And I gave her a twirl
And I lost my heart to a Galway girl”

—Steve Earle, “Galway Girl”

A hundred years ago today, a Galway girl gave a Dublin boy a handjob on Dollymount Strand. It was their first date, and the grateful boy later turned the day into a secular feast by setting Ulysses on the 16th of June, 1904. It’s a fine thing to celebrate: carnal delight, first love, and a gift that augured a long and loving marriage. His Nora Barnacle turned out to be as loyal as her name, and I have extra fondness for a man whose love and art were real enough to hold as his muse an earthy wife instead of a goddess. (Centenary bonus: I just collected—a few months after it was delivered to a friend’s house—a biography of that Galway girl sent by a reader of this site. Thank you!)

Three years ago today, the bodacious Caitriona married Dan De Luce. He’s stoic about celebrating the day with his bridesmaid in New York, where he’s looking for a new gig, but he misses his wife—and her five-month pregnancy bump—back in Dublin.

And June 16th, 1972, on the feast of the Dollymount handjob, my 22-year-old mother gave birth to me in a bush hospital in Zambia. Gave birth. That’s some birthday gift, when you think about it. She was thousands of miles from home, with little medical help, and it was a hard and frightening time for her. Today I’m thinking about how brave she was, and wishing I could go back in time to tell her it would turn out fine.

Claire writes:

“Whenever you don’t update your blog I think of Adrian Mole after he meets Pandora: ‘Instead of reading about life, I am living it!’”

Instead of writing about life, I am unpacking it.