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.”

Vicious Circle, by Arlene Hunt.

From last week’s Irish Sunday Independent:

Arlene is from the same town as the two sisters who were among my closest college friends. Their little two-up, two-down house in Ranelagh was, and still is, headquarters for the kitchen-table chats over red wine that take up so much time in college. Arlene wasn’t a student—she had a baby to look after—but she spent many hours there too, her elbows on the yellow check tablecloth. At nineteen, she was unadorned and extraordinarily beautiful. Her life had no safety nets.

I heard occasional updates about her in the years between. Things went badly. Then life seemed to work out. Her relieved hometown friend told me she had found a job on a stud farm, made plenty of money to take care of her daughter, had found a lovely bloke. She moved to Spain. Later there were rumours of a book deal.

Back in Ireland in December, I heard that her name turned up in one of the hard-boiled crime reporter’s books that sell so well there. This one took a prurient look at the Dublin sex trade. In Hodges Figgis, I flicked through the chapter on Arlene, and it was clear the writer admired her business sense as a self-employed sex worker. Though the writing was flat, I heard the earthy girl from the Ranelagh kitchen table in the tale of the gárda sting operation that finally busted her.
    “Ah, go fuck yourselves,” she said to the guards. I laughed out loud. A stud farm. How she must have enjoyed that little private joke on her double life.

Now Arlene is back in Ireland too, doing interviews to promote her first novel. She’s telling her own story, reclaiming it from the mouths and pockets of the journalists. Though I hardly know her, I feel proud of her. She made it. She’s telling the truth. That’s not easy.

Bernie Goldbach on the new smoking ban in Ireland:

“It seems that smoking has given way to a festival-style mood that mixes outdoor smokers with door staff, tourists, and regulars in search of a good party.”

From The Dubliner magazine, a rant on why foreigners are starting to think Irish suck, which overlooks our tendency to rant on why foreigners think we suck.

10 Great myths about the Irish

“We” do self-hatred pretty well though, it seems.

Remembered some grievous oversights when I woke up this morning:

• Gallarus’ Oratory—1200 year old classic
• Inis Tuaisceart ( an fear marbh )
• Mary Lavin
• Mary Robinson
• Flann O’Brien
• Beckett’s Murphy
• Ciaran Carson’s poetry
• Damian Rice
• Jack B.
• Lard-cooked chips
• Cool regional accents, especially from Ballymena, Donegal, Wexford, Kerry, West Cork, and Louth.
• Conor McPherson, in the Project and on Broadway

• The NMRC in the Maltings, Cork

But this is the list of an old fart. I’ve come up with hardly anything from the last ten years for this personal glad-to-be list (though plenty gets filed on my cranky list). Suggestions and outraged reminders welcome, especially from Bernie’s students at the Tipperary Institute, who were commenting away yesterday.

    “Please blog some Irish stuff … it is St. Patricks Day for CHRISSSSSSAKES! “ says Halley.

Tough assignment. The new job has made a serious dent in my faffing/blogging time, and I’ve been in a New York state of mind since I hit JFK. I’ve Netflixed My Dinner With Andre , Moonstruck, and On the Waterfront. I made weekend pilgrimages to Chinatown and the Knitting Factory, BAM and Sunny’s Bar. I’m even getting the edited highlights of this year’s dragging winter, which I thought I’d managed to skip.

But who can refuse Halley Suitt? So here’s a list, transcribed from my notebook in no particular order, of things that make me glad to be Irish on this St. Patrick’s Day:

• Old men on bicycles
• Seamus Heaney
• Christy Moore
• Women in fleeces marching for exercise
• Bob Geldof
• Phil Lynott
• Father Ted
• John McGahern
• True delight in a fine day
• Garry Hynes
• Bus drivers who shout your stop, and wink when you don’t have enough change for the full fare
• Nancy Blake’s pub
• Smell of turf
• Canal bank walks
• Dublin grafitti
• Irish bloggers
• Rashers and eggs
• Coffee with (proper) whipped cream
• Butter
• Fine teachers
• Wildlife shows on primetime radio
• Wanderly Wagon
• Dervla Murphy
• Taytos
• James Joyce
• Nancy Blake’s pub
• The Bretzel Bakery
• Irish aid workers
• Roddy Doyle
• Everybody’s Bono stories
• Phrases like “a mouthful of prayers”
• Dublin pedestrians advancing against the lights like centurions
• Grown men talking about birds
• Warmth
• Chatting on the bus
• Guinness
• McCambridge’s brown bread
• Mary Coughlan
• Milleens cheese
• Brian Merriman and The Midnight Court
• Liam O’Flaherty
• Frank O’Connor
• The Ulster Cycle and the stories of Fionn McCumhaill
• Countess Markiewicz
• The National Gallery—free to all
• Irish placenames
• Nuala O’Faoileain
• Van Morrison
• John Hume

• The winter sky

What would you add or subtract, on this day when anyone can claim kinship?

She’s right. We are prudes, for all our fondness for swearing. When my sister first moved in with the step-toddlers in Ottawa, we were startled to hear them in the bath calmly discussing each others’ bits in the grown-up terms that still make Irish adults stutter.

    “Why? What did you call genitalia at that age?” asked their father.
    “We didn’t call it anything!” I hissed. “We didn’t talk about it!”
    “It was all called ‘bottom’. We didn’t make any distinctions beyond that,” said Claire. “We didn’t know there were any distinctions to be made.”
    “Daddy,” said Aidan thoughtfully, “does Car have a bagina or a teenis?”

I am flying west to New York, stretching five bonus hours out of this bonus Leap day. This flight marks the end of my sabbatical from responsibility, and I am glad to have the privacy to absorb it. Tonight I see my Canadian sweetheart and my Brooklyn pals again. Tomorrow I start work.

Some friends are disappointed that I seem to be sliding back into the slot I left. They feel stifled in their own lives, maybe, and enjoyed my freedom vicariously. What’s the point of time out, they ask me, if you don’t make radical changes afterwards?

I understand their sense of betrayal. My new job is broadly similar to the one I left, and I’ll be living close to my old neighbourhood, seeing my old friends. But the changes are inside. This expanse of time and experiences has shaped me more than a token career or city shift could reflect. I had a privilege that is rarer than a college education, and, to my thinking, more valuable.

(It is very hard to write about this without sounding painfully earnest and possibly sick-making.)

I had the time to grieve a husband who is still dear to me, and to count the million billion mistakes I made.
I learned how to be by myself, and see for myself.
I learned how to sit still. I am bad at it.
I made friends from different lives. There are so many fine people out there.
I discovered how little I need to live happily. Fancy dinners and toys are no longer on the list. Nor is running water, if the lake is clean.
I learned how to pretend to be brave, which is nearly as good as courage.
I saw different ways of bringing up children, and I hope to make bolder mothering mistakes than indoor, anxious cossetting.
I visited old and new friends on two continents, and atoned for years of putting office work before them.
I fell in love.
I made up with Ireland. Now I have a place to miss, and go back to.
I had the time to read hard books.
I started to pay attention to politics and freedom.
I lost my puppyish infatuation with America. (But I still heart New York.)
I learned to be an ounce less than completely selfish. (Occasionally. When it suits me.)
I got to know my parents as an adult. I finally grasped that their lives as teachers are more valuable than any CEO’s.
I made memories of Lake Superior that that will feed me when I’m old.
I felt, first-hand, compassion, grief, love, outrage, anger, and gratitude.
I got the chance to write.
I faced some fears.
I found I had an untold number of assumptions and prejudices. Many more lurk, still invisible to me.
I learned how to trust people to be kind. They mostly are.
I learned that atoms trump bits. Nothing beats face-to-face contact, which is why babies don’t IM.
I accepted that I’ll never be wealthy. It still scares me, especially in America.
I earned some crows’ feet, and the conviction not to Botox them.
Somewhere along the way I woke up as a grown woman.
I want to find a way be a net contributor.

And oh, I will miss my freedom dreadfully. I will miss the space to read and write and think and talk. But we’re over Newfoundland, and a new life waits.