“We don’t have the shields here like they have in New York,” says Joe. Not the plexiglass variety, anyhow. His arm is draped over the passenger seat and he keeps turning right around to talk to me, as if he’s backing up, or we’re having brunch. But we’re not backing up. Nor are we having brunch, though it’s Sunday morning. He’s driving me to work down Folsom Street, which is smooth as a desert highway at this hour.

“Driving cabs is mostly pretty safe,” he says, with his back to the oncoming traffic. Some years ago there was a spate of armed robberies, but they’ve had little trouble since the drivers took care of ten or a dozen guys, he says. I ask, cautiously, what that means.

“There was one guy, Blackie, he was a legend. He picked up a guy at the Greyhound Station once; guy was acting funny from the minute he gets in. They’re a few blocks away when he pulls a gun. Okay, okay, says Blackie, and makes like he’s getting out his wallet. But he has a clamshell holster under his arm.”

Joe slides his left hand across his chest, then cocks two fingers at the empty seat beside me. “Shoots the guy right through the seat. He drives round the block straight back to the Greyhound Station, dumps the body in front of the guy’s buddies, and stuffs the Red Cab receipt in his mouth. ‘Anyone else need that kind of a ride?’ he says, and they’re just sta-a-aring at him. So he says, ‘Tell the cops I’m at the Black Crow.’”

Blackie got off. Word got around that drivers would radio each other and hunt guys down. Word got around that there were easier pickings than cab-drivers.

“These days it’s quiet. We have the camera right here,” he says, tapping the little eye above the rearview mirror. “If someone gets in and they’re acting strange, got the hood pulled down over their face or something, there’s a button I can push on the door handle to take another twelve photos. Anything worse, I’ve got a panic button between the gas and the brake. We got GPS in all the cars now, so they know where I am.”

There are a lot more women driving cabs these days, he says. “It’s not a bad job for them, especially during the day. You get a run of good fares, and by that I mean in the nine- to twelve-dollar range, you can pull down four hundred bucks on a long shift. Flexible. Not too much trouble.”

“Your drunken Irish brothers are okay, colleen,” he says, craning around. When he smiles it’s plain our faces have borrowed features from the same drawer. “They just get in and say, ‘I’m drunk, mate, I won’t give you trouble, just take me home and if I have to puke I’ll let you know.’ You know where you are with them. It’s the Marina yuppies the cabdrivers don’t like. I won’t pick up anyone at Bush and Gough after eleven at night. First they’ll hold the door open and say their friend is on his way out—and you know he’s in there still throwing up his beer or hitting on some woman who’s not interested. Then they finally get in, and they want to go three blocks to an ATM. Then they want to go another two blocks to some pizza place with a line out the door. They want to drop someone off. And when they finally go home, it’s maybe six blocks total of a fare. They wonder why the taxis keep passing them by…”

I tell him about the rates posted in Dublin taxis. It’s $35 to go to the airport, and $75 if you puke up your paycheck. Typed up and laminated, though not in those words. The drivers shrug. It just pays for the cleaning, not for the loss of a night’s business, and so they hope the barfers and the bleeders stay away at least until the end of a shift. Nobody seems to think it’s odd that there’s a standardized charge for getting too pissed to hold your dinner.

He asks my favorite Irish bar, and when I can’t name one, he prompts. The Dubliner? The 32 Counties? The Oscar Wilde? Perhaps to make me feel at home, he starts a tangled story about meeting an old IRA guy and his sister in a raw juice bar on Haight, and I become convinced he’s talking about Jimmy Smits from Law & Order. It’s a familiar feeling, holding up a slippery conversation with smiles and nods, and for a moment I pretend I’m back on the road in Peru rather than heading to an office in SoMa.

“You know, sometimes people get in, and they have no idea where they’re going,” says Joe. “I picked up this one guy, he says, ‘I want to do a round trip.’ No problem, I say, where to? And he gets all mad. ‘Here, of course, where do you think, I said round trip.’ Well, I tell him, sir, I think you’re already here. “Oh,” he says, and gets out. Twenty per cent of the time, people act surprised to find themselves in a cab. I swear, it didn’t cross their mind until they saw a taxi that they wanted to go anywhere. And these are normal, ordinary people. Just acting on impulse.”

He’s been driving cabs for twenty-five years. “I love it,” he says. “People tell me stuff.”

Here’s a link to a video clip of juggler Chris Bliss that gave me the three happiest minutes of my day. Via Tim Bray, who knows a thing or two about juggling, and was great dinner company in San Francisco on Tuesday.

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.

“In October, a schizophrenic homeless woman threw her three young sons into the San Francisco Bay. The mother, Lashuan Harris, had been living with her children in an Oakland shelter, and had stopped taking her medicine because she believed she was cured. But voices, she later told police, told her to throw her sons into the water. Relatives told the press that they had sought custody of the boys, but that social workers had failed to act. Less than two weeks later, a homeless man, Johnell Kirk junior, died after being set on fire by another drifter, who was said to suffer from schizophrenia.San Francisco has struggled to deal with the many homeless people who come to the city for its temperate climate and generous welfare programmes. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco�s mayor, has made the issue a priority. His controversial �Care Not Cash� initiative, which offers homeless people services rather than welfare cheques, took effect in May 2004, and there are signs of success. The programmes have reduced the street population by 28% and housed nearly 1,500 people…But the city has a lot more work to do.”
—The Economist

“You heard what she did? Three little kids. They struggled, man. She had to work to do that. That took hard work, harder work than she’d ever probably done before in her goddamn life. They found one of ‘em, but I don’t know if they’ll get the other two, tides and all. Filthy water. Can you imagine? She just walked away, pushing a fucking empty stroller like no big deal. Said she heard voices. Said the voices told her to push her three little kids into the San Francisco Bay and hold them down until they drowned.

“And you know what’s going to happen to her, right? You know, right? She’s not going to jail. She’s going to go to some psych ward and get the medication and the good food and the gym and the therapy. She won’t do a day in jail. And she’s going to sit there, her and her voices, you and me paying for her doctors, and she’s not going to pay for squat. Not for rent, not for her dinner, not for her occupational therapy, not for her doctors, and sure as hell not for what she did to those three little kids.

“Know what I’d like to do to her? I’d like take a manhole cover—nice big round one—and explain to her how the voices told me to chain it to her ankle and roll it off the pier, right there in front of the sea lions. Or—no, wait—I’d put her in a giant microwave. Rig it up in Giants Stadium so she could sit there in her chair in her giant microwave, and I’d set it to High for as long as it takes to drown three little kids. Multiplied by two. And I’d bring the whole city out to watch her cook, so they’d get the idea it’s not smart to listen to the voices. Or, know what I’d do? I’d stake her out, tie her down, so she couldn’t move a muscle, and I’d pour sugar syrup over every fucking inch of her. And then I’d bring out the fireants, man…Real slow, that’d go. Wide awake.

“You know they don’t even use the electric chair any more? Said it was inhumane. It took a whole five minutes to die. And they’re doped up with valium, having sweet dreams. Oh, what a crying shame, to take five minutes to die, after you probably tortured someone for three weeks. These people with the prisoners’ rights, man. You give up your rights when you take someone’s life, all right? I’ll give ‘em rights: hang ‘em with an American flag. That’s their right. It’s God’s job to condemn, not ours, but let’s just go ahead and arrange the meeting, you know what I’m saying? Fire up Old Sparky, cut the crap.

“I hear they tried to rape Scott Petersen already. I hope he’s getting it good, after what he did. Know what I’d do? I’d let five of the largest, strongest relatives into that cell, armed with baseball bats and let ‘em blow off some steam. Or maybe a very large, sexually-deprived silverback gorilla…”

The train slowed. A woman stuffed headphones into her bag, stood up, and excused herself. He jumped to his feet, head bowed, voice soft.

“No problem, ma’am.”

“You’ve been pumping a lot?” his friend asked when he sat back down. He pushed up a sleeve, examined a bicep and frowned. His scalp gleamed.

“Eighteen inches. But I want to get it to twenty. It’ll take a lot of work. A lot of focus._ I wanted to get to the gym tonight, but my little guy has a soccer game, and it’s important to me to be there. Sends a message. My dad never made it to my soccer games. I know he was working to put a roof over our heads, so it’s not like I mind. But I’m going to be there for my little guy at his games. It’s the kind of role model I want to portray.”

He squinted at his bicep again.

“Takes a lot of work to build up the right dimensions. But it’s fun to have the size. Especially in bars. I am not a violent person. It’s part of my credo. I’m very controlled. But I get some guy in a bar, someone inappropriate, maybe being a jerk to some woman, and you know what I say? I say, real quiet, “You’re going to apologize. Or I’m going to break your arm.” Total control, total calm, total polite. And my friends say, ‘Uh, yeah, he will.” And then you just get to watch this asswipe back down…”

He folded his arms in satisfaction.

“Only bad thing is it can make it hard with women. You meet these women who just like big guys, that’s their thing. Makes it hard to tell. They can be fine as a person, quality people, but they’re not necessarily candidates for a serious long-term relationship if they’re only with you for size. I’m seeing a woman right now, she’s a quality person, but she’s not over her divorce, she’s just getting used to dating. And she’s really into the muscles. Likes the big guys.”

“Not over her divorce? Fuck that shit, man. Get divorced, move ON.”

“Right. Move the fuck on.”

They looked out the window. Palo Alto passed.

“Karl Rove. You know what’s going on there? You been following it? Karl Rove is guilty of treason. He deserves to share a large, smelly cell with the most horrible inmate…”

Let the Nobs stay up on their hill and the hipsters stick to Hayes: Visitacion Valley is the most evocative name in the city, and as a neighborhood, it’s preserved, for now, by those nose-wrinkling write-ups. It’s the last stop before you leave San Francisco for the cubicles of Silicon Valley. Perched above it, on the San Bruno Expressway, a cocked martini glass invites commuters to stop for one for the road at a Russian cocktail lounge.

Some neighborhood history is written in the streets: the Mexican names, the boarded-up restaurants that used to sell Louisiana chitlins, the Indian Baptist Church, the Chinese and Vietnamese-language dailies in the newspaper vending boxes. It’s half Asian now, and most of the residents were born in another country.

On Leland Avenue—storefront churches, nail salons, and lunch shacks—I dithered over what to eat. Fried chicken or beef pho? It turned out that the Sunflower Blues Cafe, with its improbable indoor picket fences and yellow gingham table cloths, wasn’t opening until next week, though Marcus, the owner, was proud to show off how good it looked already. Everything made from scratch, he said, and healthy ingredients, salads and grilled stuff, though of course they’d do fried chicken, too; no sense being extreme. He’d started his family young and brought them over to Vis Valley from Bayview. They were grown now, though he didn’t look more than forty. He owned a few properties in the neighborhood, and his wife ran the beauty salon up the street. Julia here used to work for her, he said, and Julia was the best. Could I figure out how to get her to come on board with him?

Julia shrugged and giggled, not yet convinced.

At the Vietnamese place next door, my beef pho came with tripe and tendon, and a bush of basil leaves. The fish sauce was given out without asking. I ordered ca phe sua da and thanked the waiter in dredged-up Vietnamese. I was proud, but he was baffled until I gave in and pointed to the number on the menu. The broth was as good as Hanoi, and the decor very nearly worse.

A gnarled Chinese lady, bent low, haggled in the 99 Cent Store. I paid full price for a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, some Chinese birthday cards, hair clips, and a flashing bike reflector.

Up the road, in Portola, there’s an old cinema that’s a Baptist church now. I’m a lapsed-Catholic-aetheist-Buddhist, but even I’d go to a church with a drum kit behind the Hammond organ. A nearby diner looks untouched since the 1920s, apart from the laminated waffle menus in the window. But in keeping with the neighborhood changes, those red vinyl booths and swivel stools are now wiped down by owners who got here from Seoul four years ago. It was closed, on a Sunday morning, and on the store window next door, a poster warned residents to be wary after several recent attacks.

In the supermarket, frogs squatted in their tank, eyelids heavy. Sunday must be frog night, because they were stacked halfway up each other’s backs like toppled dominos. Three aisles over, you could choose from six brands of canned quail eggs, five kinds of canned rambutan, and a fridge full of sticky drinks. In the checkout queue, with an armful of mangosteen jellies and Vietnamese espresso, I almost wept at the sight of a box of durian fruit inside the front door. In deodorized America, it’s stinky, oozy, primal, pheromonal durian I’d like to offer instead of Altoids.

The other day someone asked me if I still had the travel bug. Truth is, I never did, even—and especially—when I wore a backpack for a year. I’m a homebody; at most a reluctant daytripper, and sniffing a durian on San Bruno Avenue is all I need before heading back to my rocking chair to look down over the city.

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.”