My lower lip is bruised from biting down on the cannibalistic urges that Liam De Luce brings out. That fat, sweet arm would burst like bratwurst, if only I could get at it. Caitriona watches closely to make sure that doesn’t happen, but she admits she wants to bite her son too. Only women confess this to her, she says. Apart from Swift, men don’t seem compelled to bite baby flesh, even though it’s as silky and springy as kneaded dough and smells better than baked bread. At least this strange love is reciprocated. On Saturday morning, I was jolted by six sharp teeth nipping my big toe, and a cross-eyed, adoring smile.

At ten months old, Liam tiptoes delicately if someone holds both fists, and he can stand alone for a few moments, swaying on magnificent columns of pudge. His eyes are such a dark blue that they look brown in indoor light. As soon as he wakes, he gets down to the business of playing and singing, and banging on his Fisher-Price music table. Nothing would please him more than to hurl himself off the bed, but he’ll settle for the fun of being hauled back from the brink over and over. Loud, farting belly-raspberries—given and received—also entertain him. He eats like a farm laborer, and has better table manners than me.

Feelings colonize his face. He throws his being into each dramatic emotion, then lets it pass. I wish I were as wise as Liam, who trusts the universe to provide, and finds that it does.

I have a co-worker who owns a sewing machine. He makes a new jacket nightly, like a fairytale tailor. They hardly vary. Sometimes they’re charcoal, occasionally they’re white, but usually they’re black. He moves the seams, plays with the placement of a collar, or tweaks a zipper. He adds headphone holders into the neck, or a pocket for his Leatherman knife. Maybe he adds different closures. Once in a great while, he shocks us with a scarlet jacket.

He stays so true to his vision, like a Broadway actor who finds new insights in a part he plays night after night, or a jazzman riffing on a few sweet notes.

Cian Surinder McDermott arrived yesterday, the latest addition to the Dooradoyle boys. (That’s KEY-en, for readers who aren’t Irish.)

    “You think your heart is a certain size, but when you have children you realize it can get so much bigger,” my friend Andy told me last year. We don’t all get to visit that country, but there’s a postcard from it in Natasha’s eyes.

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.”

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.

Ten years ago, I experienced the internet only through paper. It was reverently capitalized back then, like the Electric or the Motor-Car, and for those who visit but don’t yet live there, it still is.

I was working at Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dublin while my future ex-husband finished his thesis on delivering video through noisy channels. I’d had little chance to use computers, and was hazy about his post-graduate research. When I found the first issue of Wired, it didn’t occur to me it might have any connection to his work. Wired burbled with the promise of this World Wide Web, and I pored over it with the fizz of discovery, even though the typography was maddening. More than once I had to trace with my finger some distressed fuschia font as it wobbled from a lime-green background to the purple overleaf. I felt like a dyslexic with a treasure map.
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Another valentine to engineers as writers: today I got my favorite-ever subject line for an email birth announcement, and a photo that didn’t topple my mailbox. Welcome, Milo Smith! Live long and prosper.

As a kid, I worried about Santa Claus’s feelings. For weeks—months—he was all we thought about and talked about. We laboured over letters with our tongues stuck out, explaining that we would please like a Ballerina Sindy Clear Casters a selection box and a surprise please. We listened to the radio on Christmas Eve, dying to hear Santy read our names. That night, excitement edged towards panic as the hours refused to get out of the way. Then—sandy-eyed after bad sleep—the breathless unwrapping. What is it? What is it? Strap-on rollerskates. Here’s the Sindy. A Timex watch! And Clear Casters? No, the selection box. (Disappointment.)

And as the wrapping paper piled up, Santy disappeared from our consciousness, like a porn star after the money shot. We stood ready to catalogue our swag: “Was Santy good to you?” the aunties would ask. “What d’ya get?” said the other kids, jostling to compare. But beyond that, we didn’t give him a thought. No reports, no thank yous. No more being-good-for-Santy. Stupid old stupidhead forgot the batteries again, anyway.
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From the eulogy my dear friend Joey and his sisters wrote for their father, Edwin, who died on May 19th.

I tried to ignore the Dave Eggers cult when it began six or eight years ago. Our shared Gen X-ness made me too queasy to read his big hit, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and his success made me sullen. I didn’t care for the footnoted cutesiness of most things he touched: the magazine excerpts I’d seen, the McSweeney’s website, the superhero supply store.* At a time when I was writing instruction manuals for a living, I didn’t want to pay to read them in his memoir.

But last week I got a free ticket to “An Evening With Dave Eggers and Friends” at Stanford. Stanford is about an hour south of San Francisco, and in the parallel biography of my fantasy life it’s where I went to college. I’d driven by on tradeshow trips, but never visited the campus, so I offered to be my coworker Monika’s navigator in exchange for a ride.

Eggers had brought his filmmaker pals Spike Jonze and David O. Russell along, as well as a stand-up comedian from the King of Queens. He had to explain himself to an audience that was half gray-haired season ticket holders and half Eggerheads, and he managed it with charm. He told the story of his brush with Homeland Security, after he’d left his notebook on a plane on the way to cover the Republican Convention (where his brother worked as a Republican advisor). He pitched the shop he had opened when the landlord insisted his after-school tutoring center should be a store:
“We are the only independent, full-service pirate supply store in the whole Bay Area, and I encourage you to give us a try. We have eyepatches, hooks, booty, casks, glass eyes, lard—-whatever you need, we can supply your pirating requirements. Some of the local Palo Alto pirate places will try to compete on price, but they just can’t match the quality and the choice. Just take planks. Their planks are plywood. Now, that’s fine if you’re just looking for a one-time-use thing, but if you count on your planks, you need to come to the full-service specialists…”
He explained why he thought politics mattered. He’s older than me, but he’s still the kind of fine young man who sends my precocious old-biddy side off into daydreams of my-son-the-novelist.
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