It’s a blown-up snapshot from 1980. The print has a reddish tinge.

A dozen eleven-year-olds cluster on the steps of a pebble-dashed estate house. In the middle, two sit with arms around silver trophy that stands as high as their scrawny shoulders. One is Gareth, whose dad has just captained Waterford to victory in the FAI Cup soccer league. The other is John.

They’re all skinny, with skim-milk Irish skin and the slightly hunched posture of a rained-on tribe. It makes them look cold, though the sun is shining. Several wear identical tracksuits, navy-blue with red and white stripes on the arms. John says it wasn’t a soccer team strip; that’s what Dunnes Stores was selling that year, and so that’s what the Dooradoyle mammies bought.

You can see the excitement of the day in the way the boys tamp it down—the smirks that bite back smiles. The faces are blurred, partly because of camera shakes, partly because they’re too young to have taken shape yet. The best-looking boy does smile broadly. “Well, his dad was English,” explains John.

Whenever I go to John’s house in the Sunset District, I look at the picture on his living-room wall and ask him to tell me again who each kid is. Twenty-five years on, a core of them are still best friends in San Francisco, and he is still in the center. Armed with Morrison visas, they reassembled here a decade ago, drawn by surfing, mountain biking, and a technology boom. It wasn’t planned. John and Conor sold their hoopty and crossed the country when winter took their jobs as landscape gardeners back east. A few weeks later, their funds had almost run out when they saw a face from the St Joseph’s Boy Scouts on Market Street—Kevin, who was well-established enough to share a roof when they needed it. Later, Gareth showed up from Chicago. Then they they added a Dublin chapter to the tribe. Each will tell you that they never set out to find an Irish crowd. They’re sleeker altogether than the drunken nostalgics you’ll find in the Sunset bars. (And I mean that literally. I’ve heard them reel off their body-fat percentages in Limerick accents.)

They’ve hiked, biked and backpacked together; shared apartments and survived; married, bred and babysat; carried each other’s boxes into new houses; taught each other how to drive on the San Francisco hills; started companies and weathered wealth and layoffs. They meet for Christmas pints at home, and weekly pints in dive bars in the Lower Haight or the Mission. “We’ve known each other since we were three,” says John, as his own three-year-old son sing-songs his ABCs. It’s love.

On the Sunday morning phone call, Dad asks what I did last night. For ten years I’ve lived too far away for him to have much sense of my daily life, but now I can tell him I was out with the Dooradoyle boys, who first knew me as Seán Hanley’s daughter. That’s how I think of them, though they’re nudging forty. I remember these guys from school; my friends’ big brothers, lanky fellows in navy-blue uniforms, playing guitar or hanging out by the Sixth Year radiator in the Central Area. Dad remembers them too. “Oh, yes, and wasn’t he a brother of Maeve? Did he go off to UCG?” he says. Teachers with a generation of experience have sharper memories of students twenty years gone; it’s the recent ones that blur.

Growing up, I dreamed my parents would relent and move us to Dooradoyle, the little housing estate where everybody lived. We lived three miles out, facing a farm whose tang of slurry and silage assaulted the Hanley sisters’ metropolitan ambitions. In Dooradoyle, you could hang out under the street lights—there were street lights!—until way past dark. Adolescence is about waiting around for Things to Happen, and in Dooradoyle, there existed the slight possibility they just might. But how could anything happen in a place called Mungret?
“Town mouse and country mouse,” my mother would tease, and though she would drive me anywhere, any time, being collected just wasn’t the same.

So they’re glamorous to me still, the Dooradoyle boys, the big brothers. Their circle reminds me of home because it is home; an Irish outpost based not on banding together against the new culture, but on hundreds of years worth of banked friendships.

Bonus musical link: John and Gareth play “Outside Looking In.”

Doc Watson, Steve Earle, Robert Earl Keen, Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Dolly Parton…they’re all playing, with dozens of others, at the free Strictly Bluegrass festival at Golden Gate Park this weekend. Richard Thompson is in town at the Fillmore, too.

Indian summer in San Francisco makes up for a lot of fog

My email address attracts crud like a Swiffer. Every day, the spam filter sweeps hundreds of messages into a Junk folder. Because I often get genuine messages from people I don’t know, I flick through it once in a while, and whenever I rescue something from a real person, it makes me wonder about the ones I’ve missed.

This one I couldn’t miss. The subject line read “Sorry to inform you that Pat died in her sleep 8-21-05.” It took me three days to open it, and three weeks to sit and write this.

When I was twenty, I went to Valencia for a year learn Spanish. That first week I huddled in a hotel above a sex shop, counting my traveller’s cheques for comfort. I had no idea how to find work or friends or a place to live. In the lobby, I met a Californian who had come to Spain to forget a Greek love affair. Debbie showed me the in-cup heating element she used to make tea in her room, and cried because, at 42, she knew now she would never have children. I pitied her, and decided I liked Earl Grey.

Debbie was moving on to Madrid, but said I should track down the woman she’d met in the Plaza Ayuntamiento the day before. She was a professor, here to supervise some college students on their Junior Year Abroad. She could probably introduce me to kids my own age.

And so I found Pat.

We met for hot chocolate and churros in the Plaza Ayuntamiento. She strode across the square like a Colossus, scarf flying, scattering the short-legged Spaniards. She was 57 then, and beautiful. Her voicebox was made in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and still boomed with the certainty of the wealthy, WASP midwest. She spoke the twangiest Spanglish I’d ever heard.

“Oh my GOD! He was such a CREEP,” she said of the landlord who had made a pass at her after she signed the lease. “I mean, picture this STUMPY LITTLE SPANISH GUY, thinking that just because I’m here without a man he’s gonna get a little action. I said to him, “Señor, USTED ES UN TROZO DE MIERDA.”

“A…slice of shit?” I said.

“A piece of shit,” she corrected.

“At least you used the polite form.”

“I wouldn’t have if I’d known the rude one, honey.”

She taught English Literature at a New Jersey university. At weekends I took the bus out to her house by the beach in Valencia, where she stacked piles of books beside me while she cooked. Carlos Castaneda. Tom McGuane. (“Now, there’s a man. Tall, real handsome… !Muy hombre! I met him in Montana while he was living with Margot Kidder, before she went crazy.”), Freud. Richard Feynman. Roland Barthes. Barthes I didn’t take to, but I liked Feynman and his bongo drums. I’d never been to the US, and was fascinated her books and by the giant plastic beaker of ice tea or Diet Coke that was always at her elbow, rattling with pounds of ice. Ireland didn’t do ice.

This November 13th Pat would have turned seventy. She never cared much about birthdays.

At twenty, she’d married a football player she met at Duke. “Because I wanted to fuck, honey, and in those days that was what you had to do.” In her wedding picture, with a sprayed cap of Tippi Hedren hair, she looked 35. She hosted elaborate dinners to help her husband’s career, and worked on her PhD on the side. But his character wasn’t as solid as his shoulders, and finally she left him when she was pregnant with their third child.

Little ever seemed to phase Pat. With two toddlers to look after, she decided the third labor would be a good chance to get her wisdom teeth out. Afterwards, when she didn’t speak, the doctors told her she was depressed.

“I told ‘em, I’m not depressed, for Christ’s sake! I just had my four wisdom teeth out, but I’m enjoying the rest.”

She had chafed in the Fifties, but the Sixties woke her up. She read the French literary theorists. “The scales fell from my eyes. Once I got structuralism and the stuff that came from it, I was never the same.” Students sprawled all over her house in New Jersey. They came for seminars, picnics, and parties. They talked about books they were reading and should read, about the papers they were writing, about Freud and French movies and the feminists. Some students she near-adopted. All of them she fed. At acid parties, she stuck to her Fifties’ hostess instincts; her eyes lit up when she talked about butter. She cooked from the Silver Palate Cookbook while she talked about Saussure. Students with the munchies got baked lemon chicken, Duchesse potatoes, and apple pies. They were in awe of her, and some visited for decades after they graduated.

I spent a half-dozen Thanksgiving days with Pat, basking in the buttery hospitality of her little Victorian house. Each year she laid a table from The Dead for me and her daughter, and for Stevo and Tony, ex-lovers who never ex-loved her. We hovered and listened; Pat’s lunch was a performance.

She liked living by herself, but she also loved to cosset, and to talk. For her, company was a chance to disgorge all the thoughts that had built up. Her monologues unspooled over twelve or fourteen hours and started up again as she squeezed the breakfast juice. Over the years I heard about her childhood and her children’s childhood; and the men she had loved (“Wolf kept a gun under his pillow,” she’d cackle). She talked about the books she had written; this darling new show, Six Feet Under; her plans for gingerbreading the front of the house; plans to move to Costa Rica; her daughter’s wedding; her ailing houseplants and thriving garden; what the doctors said about this damned heart problem. I’d hear stoned, Homeric epics on her wonky teeth. She’d launch into Pirsig’s latest; her trips to Bisbee and the Keys and her year in Argentina. She’d ream the dullwitted students of the Nineties and the grim turn this new PC academy had taken. As she got older, she talked more and more about her kids, who roamed the other coast.

At Christmas, she would drive down to Key West in her Le Sabre convertible, pitch a tent and read through a stack of books. Sometimes, she said, she’d drop acid on the beach, and lie on her back to look at the stars.

Pat loved tall men, and hard books, and butter, and teaching, and nesting, and adventure. She loved solitude and company. She couldn’t abide bureaucrats. She loved and hated cigarettes with more passion than anyone else I’ve known, sucking the smoke in great gulps, then mashing the butts. She had no use for my generation, and I found her beloved “Sixties people” mostly painful. She hated technology. I couldn’t get through ten pages of The Sot-Weed Factor. We made peace with those differences.

The copy of Hotel New Hampshire she gave me is covered in her notes. It reminds me of Charles Lamb’s essay on lending his library to Coleridge, whose uninhibited margin notes made him value the books all the more on their return. On the inside flap, she wrote: “Let’s get this porcupine on the streets. Let’s dress this alligator up in gold lamé.” I don’t know what it means, but can’t imagine a better woman to wrestle an alligator into a frock.

I loved Pat. I loved her raucous frankness and good cheer, her stories and her brains. She showed me a way to live alone with zest and spirit, long before I ever thought I’d need to make my own way. And yet I didn’t visit her for three years before she died—or was it four? I’d felt swamped by her monologues, and sometimes resentful. I became wrapped up in my own disasters—a failed marriage; a few years floating without a home or a job—and slipped out of her world with no forwarding address. Months, then years went by, and I put off calling as guilt compounded. She sent warm Christmas cards to my parents’ house, and still I didn’t write. I’m ashamed. She was so very kind to me, and she deserved the loyalty she gave. She got it from Tony, the ex-lover who stayed with her to the end.

I’m among them. And Michael Barrish, who writes Oblivio, is in the top ten of my several billion reasons to miss Brooklyn. It was Michael I called whenever I took a notion to make coq au vin or plum cobbler on a Monday night. While I chopped and stirred and basted, he told me everything I needed to know about New York City mating habits.

Michael Barrish believes that the universe is made of stories, not atoms. I’m glad he’s writing again.

The 40 Year Old Virgin made me happy. Like the fabulous Catherine Keener, I endorse the obscure appeal of fuzzy men on bicycles.

It isn’t always easy to eavesdrop on how men talk when women aren’t around, but this has been a good movie season for it. Straight men’s affection for each other moves me far more than any Meg Ryan drivel. If only they hadn’t ruined the real love story in Wedding Crashers with a chick-flick ending.

“Ireland’s turnaround began in the late 1960’s when the government made secondary education free, enabling a lot more working-class kids to get a high school or technical degree. As a result, when Ireland joined the E.U. in 1973, it was able to draw on a much more educated work force…In 1996, Ireland made college education basically free, creating an even more educated work force.The results have been phenomenal. Today, 9 out of 10 of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies have operations here, as do 16 of the top 20 medical device companies and 7 out of the top 10 software designers. Last year, Ireland got more foreign direct investment from America than China. And overall government tax receipts are way up.

Ireland’s advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management – then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road – and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.”

—Thomas Friedman, New York Times

My Nigerian taxi driver tells me about the incredulous emails he’s getting from Lagos. Can this be America they see on the television; these pictures of thirsty, desperate people waiting for buses that don’t come?

They think it’s the land of milk and honey, he sniffs. As an American girl, I probably couldn’t understand how the rest of the world sees the US. It’s a fantasy to them, he says, this promised land where it all comes easy. But he had never seen homeless people until he came to America, and now Lagos sees for the first time what it’s really like to be poor in America.

I report this to Mum, back in Ireland. She tells me that the primary school where she teaches is filling up with immigrants from everywhere, but Nigeria most of all. The Junior Infants class is now about one-third Nigerian. It’s a big change after 25 years teaching plain Irish stock.

The teachers are afraid that middle-class Irish families will abandon the school as the immigrants arrive. She sees it already. Ten of the five-year-olds who were registered to start school last week didn’t show up: at the last minute, their parents switched them to the Gaelscoil in town. Irish-language schools have long been chic among wealthy Irish parents, who don’t always figure out—or care—that their success comes from gathering the ambitious spawn of ambitious parents, rather than from the rigor of learning long division through a dead language full of inflected nouns. And now the gaelscoileanna have become something more: a way to delicately sidestep the dilemma of “them.”

Ireland’s free public education system is far from perfect, but as Thomas Friedman gushed in the New York Times, it has been effective. Because almost everyone relied on it, the whole country had a stake in making it work. In the 1970s and 1980s, they invested extravagantly to educate my baby boom generation, and that sacrifice has now made Ireland rich.

For my generation, I don’t believe there was a reason to pay for private education in Ireland other than snobbery and social connections. In a who-you-know culture, that was probably enough. To an embarrassing degree, the power class has always been dominated by the old boys from six or seven fee-paying secondary schools (which were also fully funded by the state, as far as I know). I went to college with enough Blackrock and Gonzaga boys to know that they weren’t brighter or better educated than the kids at my comprehensive school, but like Bush, they had a veneer of confidence that only comes from early cash investment. That certain je ne sais rien.

Ireland is so obsessed with academic results that it spawned a market for private exam coaching. First came hour-long individual “grinds,” then heavily-advertised group crammer courses. Finally, there has emerged a new generation of for-profit schools, very different to the old fee-paying rugby schools, that markets exam preparation above all else. Once people began to believe you could buy better exam results, widespread private-sector schooling was just another step. It’s human nature to value what you pay for more than what you’re given, and scrimping to pay school fees probably feels like a tangible way to share your child’s struggles with the Points System. Now fear of “non-nationals” has given an extra boost to private and selective schools.

But private education comes at a high social price.

There’s another population boom underway; the kids of my huge generation. I’m afraid the school system will break if the large middle class decides they’ll pay to make sure their darlings don’t have to sit beside poor kids, Polish kids, or Nigerian kids. If the most motivated, powerful, and ambitious parents don’t have a personal stake in public education, will they continue to fight for it? Who cares how the local primary school is doing if you and your barrister pals all send your kids to Sandford Park and Gonzaga? Might it even help your kids if the public schools start failing?

Here in San Francisco, my secondary school friend John and his wife Natasha are about to have their third baby. At their Labor Day barbecue, a squall of smallies yelled happily and bashed toy trucks into the grown-ups’ legs. One guest was pregnant with her second child, another with her third.
“How do they afford it?” people with six-figure incomes whispered.

In San Francisco, three kids means this: because of over-the-top child safety seat laws, you have to buy a car that’s big enough to flatten a moose. Childcare runs about six hundred bucks a week, I think. To pay for college, they tell you to budget about a half a million dollars per child. And if, for good reason, you decide you don’t want to entrust their futures to San Francisco’s crappy school system, you either move to Cupertino, where the lure of high-quality public schools has sent house prices out of reach of all but Steve Jobs’s direct reports, or you pay for schooling straight from your paycheck.

So Californians are in a trap of our own making. Public education sucks. Private education is exorbitant, especially when you start from the age of three. As a result, people like me, the wealthy overthinkers, dither like pandas, then finally squeeze out one precious offspring; a pair at most. It’s a risky evolutionary strategy, and so we throw all our resources at making sure this child pays off.

A friend who works for Yahoo spent Labor Day weekend at the Astrodome in Texas, helping displaced New Orleanians register online so they could find their families and friends. They were expecting to have to train people who had no experience with the internet, she said, but were flummoxed to realize how many simply couldn’t read.

“In America.” says my Nigerian taxi driver, when I tell him. “Can you believe that, in America?”

Ireland has moved from being an unthinkingly religious society to being an unthinkingly materialistic society, said Senator David Norris a few years ago. In the chase for wealth—fueled by a fear of sliding backwards if you stop—Ireland has followed America down many of her blindest alleys. I hope that White Flight, and the consequent dismantling of the public education system, isn’t one of them. What we have isn’t perfect, but it’s too good to destroy through fear and greed.