I asked my dad what he thought about turning sixty.

“I feel fine about it,” he said, “mainly because I don’t feel one bit different inside than when I was twenty-five.”

He lived in Zambia then, with a bride of twenty he’d met at a céilí dance in Cork. He had a contract to teach in Africa, and UCC Commerce and a convent dormitory were not enough to keep her from following him. Together they walked into the Allied Irish Bank on Patrick Street to close his account. “Sixteen shillings and sixpence!” my mother mocks. “That’s all he had when I married him.” They were married on a snowy day in Silvermines not long after they met. I’m biased, of course, but they were lovely: both wide-eyed, dark-haired, and fine-boned. They got taken for brother and sister as often as not.

Zambia was newly independent, and had money from copper. Ireland, with a forty-year headstart as a republic, had just turned out the first generation of kids to go through free secondary schooling. Africa was hopeful, and so were they. Many of that first crop of Irish peasant graduates took their engineering, teaching, and nursing degrees to the bush and the mines; a paddy Peace Corps without the confident zeal of the Americans who had grown up in Eisenhower comfort.

My father was one of them. He had parlayed the first Leaving Cert in the family into a degree at University College Galway. He paid for college by working the building sites in London, mixing cement with Connemara men who spoke no English and pined for a home they rarely saw. They were not too different from his own Roscommon family. On the Kelly side, my granny was the only one to marry near home. George took his tuberculosis to Australia, and didn’t forgive Ireland for forty years. John worked in the M&M factory in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Pat and Charlie stayed bachelors, maybe for want of money, or maybe for want of brides in a part of the country where the women left young.

It was Pat and Charlie Kelly who fostered my father and his sister for a few years while his own father fought off a cancer of the nose and mouth. His mother kept the farm running and cared for the two toddlers left at home. They had given grandad up, more or less, when some quack gave him a caustic poultice to wear on his nose for nine nights. It melted the flesh away, a terrible agony, but he survived to ride his bicycle into his eighties, probably in spite of the quack. The parish priest advised granny to take up smoking to calm her nerves, and it was she who died twenty years before him.

Once the schoolteacher came up to the house. “John is bright. He should have books,” he said. My granny bought him two, and he read them in an afternoon, like a starveling. This made her decide books weren’t good value, and he didn’t get any more. Time enough for cutting turf, saving the hay, and thinning turnips, without books to bother with. (But is this a family legend, told by Mum, I’ve wondered since—a bogeyman story for a bookworm girl? Granny always seemed so kind, though I’m sure money for books was as scarce as Mercedes.)

The nearest town was Strokestown, where the grocer’s shop shared our last name, and the hotel is named for Percy French. The wide and stately main street seems to belong to Regency Bath rather than to a place where the old and the very young outnumber the breeders. Strokestown Park House is now the country’s famine museum; a small, belated restitution for the cruelty of the local landlord, Major Dennis Mahon, who evicted two-thirds of the tenants at the worst of the hunger. A few years ago, on holiday in Sicily, Dad met his English descendant, a Pakenham-Mahon who wanted to bond over memories of boyhood holidays at the family place in Roscommon. They had held onto it until 1979, and Dad remembered them, with no fondness, as leaving the gates open on his father’s land as they galloped through on their hunters.

He went to Mansa as a small farmer’s son, taught first by a drunk in a pink, two-room schoolhouse, and so perhaps he arrived at Mr. Elias’s brick secondary school as an equal rather than a missionary or a mercenary. I like to think he felt the frugal, country kinship that Dervla Murphy brings to her books, where the traveler’s eye alights on chickens scratching in the dirt and sees eggs rather than postcards.

For me, Zambia is pressed in an album. I’m there, a dusty baby with an infected vaccination scar, with my stand-in godmother who was later eaten by crocodiles. (Or did I make that up, too?) On another page, the football team my father coached hangs out of the back of a truck, hooting. They are beautiful young men in knee socks and soccer shorts; many are probably long dead. There are tigers and elephants; a snake or two; and my mother on a motorcycle. (Though not all in the same photo.) Fragments.

There’s his schoolmaster colleague, an English former public school boy, who jolted the three of us around Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe in his Volkswagen when I was six months old. He spoke only to dad, my mother complains, though from time to time he tried to teach me Latin verbs. That was the trip when they pitched camp in the path of the hippos’ watering hole, and only the rumbling approach gave them time to dive clear. Hippos were rare in Roscommon. Camping was unusual.

I have to look up the Wikipedia to see where it was they really lived. Mansa is an imaginary place that exists in the dimensions of time and stories, not space. Several friends have gone to Zambia over the years—Ranger Tim kayaked down the Zambezi, and my old college flatmate oversaw Ireland’s AIDS mission to Zim and Zam—but I’ve stayed resolutely ignorant of news outside those little square, white-bordered snapshots. Sometimes little details click,like when I read VS Naipaul’s stories of Asians in Africa and realize how it was that dad came to like saris better than miniskirts. But it’s only writing this that I study the population, the geography, the climate, and the forty years that have betrayed the hopes of independence and mineral wealth.
“Do you remember, in Zambia, the Russian engineers would drink tea out of jam jars…Do you remember, in Zambia…”

Dad taught school there for three and a half years. He read Ulysses. He helped deliver me, though that was the end of his New Man efforts for two decades. They went home when his grandmother fell ill, and thought they would soon go back. They still talk about going back. Instead, they moved to Limerick, and added more small girls to the family.

When my sisters fought in the back seat, Dad would stop the car outside a church. “Go inside and pray for each other,” he’d order, “And don’t come out until Baby Jesus knows you mean it.” We never disobeyed him, though he didn’t go to Mass, and we were fairly sure he never consulted Baby Jesus on anything. They’d slam the car door and in they’d stomp, torn between enmity and a common enemy. “It’s important to give them something to unite against,” he’d say, as we watched them march back down the gravel path, friends again but scowling at him. It took us years to realize that he kept his stash of private jokes in plain sight.

I see how good his life is these days, and that he’s made it so. He squabbles with my mother over who got more wine in the last top-up. He has taught for thirty-five years, thirty at the same school, and when we walk around Limerick together, he is greeted at every corner.
“Howrya, sorr,” say kids from 14 to 45. “How’re you keeping, Seán?”
“Jesus, I can’t put a name to that fella,” he’ll say, shaking his head, but I’m amazed at the number he does remember—and their families, life histories, and temperament, too. Those who care enough to pay attention can appraise us pretty well at fifteen, before we lacquer adult polish over our essential natures.

Even here in San Francisco, I meet people who remember him and are grateful. Though he sends me hopeful text messages about Dublin job openings at Google, it’s his work that I envy—how it has woven him into the fabric of his community, and still left him time to have a rich life beyond it. He’ll spend his birthday in Pompeii, with my mother and good friends. Now that Ryanair has opened up Europe, they go to a different city every mid-term break—Rome, Palermo, Dubrovnik, Prague… Over Christmas, he took a group of schoolkids skiing in Italy, as he does every year. For Easter, he’ll visit my sister in Ottawa. They might come here in August, though I tell them over and over that San Francisco has a summer only a toad could love. He isn’t daunted.

We bought him a birthday bicycle, a fit present for a man who doesn’t feel one bit different inside than he did when he was twenty-five. We say that he has mellowed gracefully, all the same.

1. Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia?
“Foreign visitors are flooding in – 690,987 paid entrance fees last year, up from 451,046 in 2004. And while there are no official figures as to how much each spends in Siem Reap, the town’s dizzying array of luxury hotels – at least 10 by my count, ranging from the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor to quirky boutiques like Hôtel de la Paix – testifies to the emergence of a new generation of high-end travelers, who not only demand round-the-clock Khmer massage but are also willing to pay $400 a day to hire a BMW L7 or $1,375 an hour for a helicopter tour.

Cambodia is not alone in its luxury revolution. Since the mid-1990’s, the former French colonies of Southeast Asia have made enormous leaps in catering to tourists who prefer plunge pools to bucket showers. From the forests of Laos to the beaches of Vietnam to the ruins of Cambodia, you can find well-conceived, well-outfitted, well-run hotels that will sleep you in style for hundreds of dollars a night.

Change has come at an amazing pace. Take Luang Prabang, in Laos. This tidy hill town feels like a Hollywood set, with painted lamps glowing in French restaurants and brick walkways brightened by a yellow glow emanating from knee-high terra-cotta pots. Even the bare fluorescent tubes draped over lonely late-night streets do their part to make visitors feel as if they’ve arrived at the end of the world.

But it’s not mere atmospherics they’ve found: Luang Prabang has high-end hotels to house a legion of W-worshipers, with enough bistros and boutiques to keep their credit cards on the verge of meltdown. There are spa treatments to succumb to, and Veuve Clicquot to toast with. This town of just 60,000 people is, almost all of a sudden, a luxury getaway.”
—New York Times

2. How To Write About Africa
Some tips: sunsets and starvation are good

“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.”
—Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta (via RileyDog

3. From “Questions of Travel”

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
what childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
…

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?
—Elizabeth Bishop

Los Gatos used to be a farm town, prosperous enough to raise fine 19th century brick buildings. Now it’s home to some of the most materially successful people on this planet. It’s northern California, not Manhattan, so you can’t tell who’s winning by Blahnik shoes and Chloe dresses, but those are probably Marc Jacobs bags that the yummy mummies swing from their Australian strollers. “Win a trip to London!” say the posters advertising a black-tie library fundraiser, and it’s hard to square the cheesy prizes—interpretations of cats by local artists—with the casual, unassuming wealth of Los Gatos.

There’s a shop for “Metaphysical Needs,” where Feng Shui for your Kitchen and Numerology for the Teenage Soul jostle with the I-Ching, Sufi truths, and the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha’s head is also for sale, along with crystals, Tibetan prayer flags, drawstring pants, and inessential oils. None of it comes cheap, except for the stack of secondhand books just inside the door that are sold to raise funds “For Nunneries,” according to the sign. Los Gatos is a big market for spiritual accessories. Also haircare.

I walked around a branch of Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenwares store that seeks the same dollars as Smith & Hawken and Sur La Table down the street. After twenty minutes’ consideration of pie weights and estate-crystallized sea salt, I wanted to congratulate someone on how quickly they had sold me discontent. It wasn’t really the Riedel glasses, the sugar-almond toasters, or the German chef’s knives I wanted; it was the fantasy of well-bred children and friends laughing in my sunlit kitchen. But if you make the money to buy the life they box up so neatly, you almost certainly don’t have the time to live it. In Silicon Valley, no one works harder than the people who don’t need to.

At the traffic lights in the main square, a boy racer turned heads in a Lamborghini. The thing growled like a caged beast. “Doesn’t the noise bother him?” I asked, missing the point as usual. Perhaps he was taking it to the nearby valet carwash place, which offers a cleansing car mud-mask followed by a waxy massage for just $120. Los Gatos doesn’t support an independent bookshop or a record store—this is Amazon country—but the car dealerships are right in town, a block down from the beautiful French wine store. One sells Jaguars, Aston Martins, and Bentleys. Another, Maseratis, Lotus Elises, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. (Business looks slow for the Hummer dealer.) Anyone can walk around and stroke the M&M-colored sports cars—even a shy and scruffy woman with a learner’s permit is a prospect around here. Who knows what venture capitalist boyfriend might be paying my way through psychology grad school, or what Web 2.0 pixie dust I just flogged to some behemoth up Route 85?

The cafés see more action than the bars. Coffee is excellent, and Saturday morning is brisk. You can sit with a macchiato and watch the weekly quality-time appointments with the stroller-bound bosses for whom everyone works. They are sweet, mostly—and wouldn’t you be, with so much trouble taken to please you? They seem glad to have their mommies and daddies around in daylight. Little blonde girls skip in and out, flouncing their ponchos and sucking on smoothies.

The laptop jockeys stay hunched and focused. I like to think they’re polishing sestinas, but TPS Reports are probably closer to the mark, or perhaps business plans. In 2006, big money has come out to play again, and venture capitalists hear out supplicants over eggs and cappuccino. If you tune your face to a vacant expression, you can pick up a choice of pitches in any Los Gatos coffee shop. (iPod earbuds, with the sound turned off, work well. So do the large mirrors in the Los Gatos Coffee Company.) Entrepreneurs exist to convince you that their dream is your dream, and since I’m susceptible, I prefer to sit a safe distance away, now that I know for sure their dreams aren’t mine. They can imagine a different world; I want the imagination to be content in this one. Still, the casual passion of a Valley pitch draws me more than gossip.

Successful VCs wear their brains and money lightly. They’re so assured, so genial, so enthusiastic, that you believe they couldn’t imagine anything more fun than deciding where to place their bets. Most are charming—and wouldn’t you be, with so much trouble taken to please you? It’s a game. It’ll be fun. Silicon Valley is predicated on the belief that nothing is more fun than work, and that progress is good.

On the peaceful Santa Cruz Mountain trails that start on the edge of town, few people stroll. They run, in CoolMax, or they huff up on mountain bikes and careen down. Even at their leisure, well south of all the cubicles, they subscribe to Paul Graham’s belief that you can cram a lifetime’s worth of effort into a few years, if you’re smart enough. After that, it’s voluntary—but why stop? As the CalTrain conductor says, “Don’t forget your belongings, and have a productive week.”

Santy lives deep in the Aillwee Cave in the Burren, which is in the North Pole. When Kevin went to see him it was cold in the cave, and without the lightbulbs it would have been dark, because caves have no windows. He was surprised, really, that Santy didn’t live somewhere nicer. It dripped, and the walls were slimy. The stalactites looked like snots hanging from the ceiling, and if Terence was there they might have laughed at them together. Greeners! Big frozen greeners! Greener ice pops! But he didn’t laugh, not when he was visiting Santy. He didn’t touch the stalactites because you aren’t allowed, and he wasn’t going to do anything that might put him on the Bold Boy List.

His thoughts spun, hot and tangled like knickers in the dryer. He couldn’t wait—please please please make the time go fast until Santy came—but at the same time he was afraid. What had he done and forgotten that might put him on the Bold Boy List? What did Santy know about his sulks, and the time he wouldn’t get into the car to go to granny’s like he was told? And the time he shouted that he hated mam because she made him go to bed instead of watching The Little Rascals again—had Santy moved his name to the Bold Boy List? His face got hot as he pictured Santy shaking his head sadly, in front of Joe and mam.

And then he thought about his own list, the things he had asked for. The feeling of opening the box under the tree and finding a Nintendo DS was so real that it made him shake. Thoughts of Santy made him giddy and sick. He couldn’t stop them, nor did he want to, so he squeezed mam’s hand, and sucked his free thumb to hold himself in one place.

And when he finally sat on Santy’s lap, he forgot to breathe. He stared at the red velvety knees.

“Ho ho ho,” said Santy. “If it isn’t Kevin Scully. I must check my book, Kevin, to see what it was you wanted this year.”

“In-TEN-do!” said Joe, who was only three and didn’t even know what it was.

“Nintendo? Is that right, now? Well, that’s a big present. We’ll have to take a look to see where you are on the list, Kevin.” The brown leather book almost covered the small table on which it rested. Santy opened it nearly to the middle. “GOOD CHILDREN,” he read out loud, though Kevin could read it too, and it made his heart thump. Santy ran his finger down the page, then down the next one, then halfway down the next. “And here you are. Kevin Scully. And he’s on the right list, right enough, so he must have been a good boy this year. Were you a good boy this year, Kevin?”

Kevin said that he was. He saw the letters K-E-V-I-N in the heavy book. Through his relief he noticed that Santy had a wart on his Peter Pointer finger, and that his beard was yellowy.

“And I have on my list that you are looking for Nintendo DS, or a Power Ranger Mystic Force and a selection box and a surprise.” Mam had helped him with the letter last week. He had picked carefully. You couldn’t ask for too much, because that was greedy, and greedy was bold. But Santy always brought more than you asked for, and a surprise could be two things, or even three, so if the Nintendo was too much he might still get something good.

“Well, Kevin, we’ll see what we can do for you. And remember to keep being a good boy. Do you know how I know you’re a good boy?”

He shook his head.

“The robins work for me, Kevin. They’re my little spies. You know the little robin red breasts in the garden? Well, they tell me what’s going on with all the little boys and girls in Ireland, and all over the world. They peep in the windows and they know all about what’s going on. Very good workers, the robins. I depend on them almost as much as I depend on Rudolph.”

Robins!

He was quiet the whole way home to Limerick.

On Christmas Eve, mam and dad wouldn’t stop visiting. They called up to Granny Neville, and then to Granny Scully. They called up to Aunty Deirdre, Aunty Laura, and Aunty Claire. They called to Sheena-next-door. Everywhere they went there were Marks & Spencer’s mince pies and smoked salmon, and wine for mam and dad. And prawns.

“Do you want Coke, Kevin? Will you have a bag of Taytos?” the aunties kept saying, and after a while he didn’t even want more Coke; he wanted to go home and wait for Santy, but mam and dad wouldn’t go even though he pulled on their arms and legs.

“And what’s Santy bringing you, Kevin?” they all asked.

“Nintendo DS or Power Ranger Mystic Force and a selection box and a surprise.” He knew they didn’t really know what he was talking about. To them it was no different than saying how big he was getting, or what class was he in now, but still he wanted to say the list out loud so that it would come true. Our Father who art in heaven hallowbee die Nintendo DS or Power Ranger Mystic Force. Just saying the list made him bounce.

“Mam!” he said, “Mam! I want to go HOME. Stop TALKING.”

“Kevin, don’t be rude. We’ll go in a minute. Don’t you know Santy’s keeping particular watch on little boys on Christmas Eve?”

It was dark already. Santy could come any minute and they might miss him if Mam wouldn’t finish her bloody wine, but she had him caught.

“They’re talking about Santy on the News, Kevin,” said Sheena-next-door.

They were interviewing an air traffic controller at Dublin Airport, who said they cleared the flightpath for Santa Claus. Generally they did that just to make sure, he said, though of course they didn’t have exact knowledge of the sleigh’s flight plan. However, the radar did pick up some unusual northern activity that suggested Santa and the reindeer had probably left the North Pole around 4pm…

“Mam!” said Kevin, “he’s already gone! We have to go home!”

“And now over to Professor Michael Nolan of Trinity College, who will explain just how Santa Claus manages it,” said the newscaster.

Of course, it was very difficult to visit every single good child in the world in just a single night, said the professor. He looked cold standing outside in his anorak, waving at the sky. “Santy makes the most of it by crossing the international date line, which turns 24 hours into 36 hours…”

Gráinne Seoige wished all the good boys and girls a happy Christmas and lots of toys from Santy, and said good night.

“I suppose we better go home, so,” said Daddy, putting down his glass. “There’s a boy here who seems awfully anxious to get to bed. Very unusual.” Kevin was so relieved he didn’t mind being mocked. He didn’t even mind when the nerves and Coke and Taytos made him get sick on his pillow because he knew that Santy was coming.

They moved to the new house the following August. He stood in the back garden with Joe, watching Daddy hammer the swingset into the ground. This back garden was much bigger than the one at the old house, and he didn’t fully feel like he owned it yet. He still ran in circles small enough to have fitted in the old garden. Joe didn’t care; Joe ran everywhere.

A bird landed beside Daddy and looked up at them with bright little brown eyes.

“A robin!” said Kevin, “A robin red-breast, Joe!”

Even as the robin’s little head strobed, he looked intently at Kevin. Joe cocked his head just like the bird.

“He’s Santy’s little spy, Joe. Robin red-breast. He’s looking to see if we’re good boys.”

“God, Kevin, you have a very good memory,” said Mam. She was smiling. “Mr. Robin Red Breast is here just to check to see if you’ve settled into your new bedroom, so he can tell Santy where to go next Christmas. He’ll make sure Santy finds you.”

“Mam,” he said urgently. “Will he know me with my new glasses? Will he know it’s me?”

“Well, I suppose he will. Santy knows you fairly well, doesn’t he? Remember how he recognized you in the Aillwee Cave?”

But why take the chance? He pulled off the glasses and knelt on the grass.

“Robin,” he said. “It’s me. Kevin Scully. I used to live in Ballinvoher and now I Iive here and I have glasses. So tell Santy. Okay?”

The robin appraised him, and flew off. They were both satisfied.

Sundays should be like that more often: sunny enough to warm your bones in January, and to make California’s distance from Brooklyn seem like a good idea.

Up above Twin Peaks, the red-tailed hawks were randy. I saw them dancing in the air with their legs cocked like landing gears. They swirled, so intent on each other that the field mice were safe in the heather. It is almost hard to watch a freedom we clodhoppers know only in our dreams.

Eventually, the female folded her cinnamon wings and nosedived straight to a perch on the radio tower below. She was poised. He continued to swirl, legs tucked back in, less purposeful now. Then he aimed himself, a little feather missile, at the spot next to her. For a moment they were like strangers on a bus. Then he mounted her, clinging to her bigger back. She sat quietly until he finished fucking, which took no more than ten seconds.

There’s something ridiculous about a male half the size of his bird, and perhaps it was regret or a sense of inadequacy that drove him to the other side of the tower, where he perched with his back to her, observing the rowdy ravens on the other peak. She continued to scan the ground impassively. For mice? For nest-building sticks? Well, they were together now, and it was nearly spring. It’s a rare day when you can hunt on Twin Peaks.

“Do you know where I can buy clean socks near MacWorld?”

Michelle banged on the triangle, ding-ding-ding, but they chatted on.
“Are we supposed to move to the left or the right?” someone asked.
“Can we stay where we are?”
“Can we talk to more than one person at once?”
“They don’t want to follow the rules,” someone hissed.

Stone Yamashita was hosting a small conference, billed as an anti-conference. There was a Broadway producer, an Eames, several designers, a sprinkling of entrepreneurs, the head of children’s TV network, and some ballsy marketers, who sold food, technology, soda pop, or education. Everyone presented, and they were engaging enough that those of us who weren’t on the project team lined up for transcription duty. By the time it came to “speed-dating,” on the third day, the participants were getting on so well that they wanted more than their allotted eight minutes with each person.

My colleagues consulted in the kitchen on the rules for keeping them moving. If any of us had taken part in real-life speed-dating, no one would admit it. Were they supposed to confide in us if they wanted to swap business plans at the end, we wondered? The problem, someone suggested, was that we had seated them at a long bench. In The Forty Year Old Virgin, our main source for this exercise, the speed-dating took place at separate tables. That way they had to get up and move.

Do you know speed-dating? We’re busy people, in this culture, and the efficiency experts have addressed themselves to our mating habits. Speed-dating companies hire a venue and gather singles; they seat half at numbered tables, and the other half shuffles from eight-minute date to eight-minute date, moving on when the organizer rings a bell. After an hour and a half—and seven dates more than I’ve ever had—each participant tells the organizer who they’d like to see again. If interest is mutual, phone numbers are released. If not, face is saved.

My New York friends keep bequeathing their San Francisco friends. Ramón told me about Dan, a friend from his college days who had recently moved to Bernal Heights. It turned out we live on the same block, and so I invited him over for a glass of wine a few nights after the conference. Dan is a professor of computational linguistics down the road at Stanford. Linguistics geeks, he says, are even geekier than computer scientists, to which a low whistle is the only reaction. I tried to get a professional diagnosis of the Dublin Four accent, which arose, with its mystery dipthongs, as soon as the country got a sniff of money, roiysh, but mean-spirited accent dissection isn’t his field. He builds computational models of human language processing, and tries to figure out how we as a species deal with syntax.

Graduate students are always looking to date, Dan said, and so they took advantage of that with a recent experiment, in which they taped a speed-dating session and noted how each pairing had turned out. Then researchers analyzed the vocal patterns, independent of content, to see if they could predict the success of a meeting. Did vocal mirroring indicate mutual interest? If someone sped up or slowed down their vocal rhythms to match their conversational partner, was it the equivalent of leaning forward? (Dan speaks so quickly it’s hard to imagine him speeding up.) The answer, it seems, is yes—our vocal patterns modulate in response to others, and tell stories independent of our words, just like body language.

Eight strangers, eight minutes each: it’s hard not to smirk at speed-dating. And yet I don’t think we need eight minutes, nor do we need much in the way of words. When there is no recognition, you may as well talk for eight years. And when you’ve met before, in some guise, you know enough in an instant. Only the facts need to be unpacked. You know what this person needs to hear; what their heart longs for; what delights them. You know enough, and because that moment is such a perfect fractal, you even know how it will turn out—the ending is contained in the beginning. It’s no wonder we shield ourselves from such clarity. It gets written, I think, to the same part of the brain as those vivid morning dreams that dissolve by the time coffee is brewed.

The physicist Richard Feynman used to walk into lectures and announce, wonderingly: “I just saw a car in the parking lot with the license plate AMX 259. What are the odds of that?” I like to think that Feynman understood that even though coincidence of feeling is more common than it seems, love lies in the wonder, not the rarity.

Every so often, I check this site to see if I’ve written anything. It’s mostly while working on some presentation where the client strategy is stuck in my craw and no project manager has stopped at my desk to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre. I’ll huff and sigh, get coffee, check my mail—both Outlook and pigeon hole—tweak a header style, kneel before the kitchen altar and eat five two-bite brownies. Lapse into severe inert reverie. Move a sentence, delete it, stare and retype it. Eventually—all right, in minutes—I’ll alt-tab over to Firefox, and click the vain little Dervala.net bookmark, just to see if I’ve posted.

For months now, the same entry has greeted and disappointed me. Why hasn’t she written, this other me who shares my life but lives upstairs? I deserve some distraction, and she affords me none. Only the Propecia spammers add to a conversation that trailed off in November, a Caltrain rant on the way to…where, anyway? She doesn’t even say.

I look for those stories more to pass the time than out of real interest or concern. I was there, after all. At first I can remember the difference between the telling and what really happened, but as time goes on her version—tweaked, spun, ellided, and public—takes over. As my sister’s best friend tells her when she goes home to Ireland, “We talk about you all year long, but when you get here I realize you’re better in my head.”

So I’d like to hear about Christmas in Ireland, with three bad sisters back together. Even though I was there, I’d prefer to read the news shared by twenty-year friends in a flagstoned Liscannor pub than finish this presentation. I want not to write, but to have written, retellings of a few of Bernie’s caffeinated stories, and a few of John’s scéals, spilled over pints in Nancy Blake’s. I’m looking for the cautionary tales from a month studying Youth with a clipboard and a video camera. I’d settle for some bittersweet book report on the growing stack of Irish women’s memoirs—Nell and Nuala; Rosemary Mahoney—and the gratitude and hackles they raised.

Memories bob for a while, but then they sink beneath the surf. For want of writing them down, I might sink with them. I’ll keep checking, just in case.