Moments of Glad Grace
A Memoir
Praise
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Saturday
Dublin Airport
10 Bow Street
Turd Space Café
Trinity College
Sunday
10 Bow Street
Custom House Quay
Monday
National Archives of Ireland
National Library of Ireland
Tuesday
10 Bow Street
Corless’s Pub
The Registry of Deeds
The Elbowroom
Wednesday
10 Bow Street
Royal Irish Academy
National Library
The Liffey
Thursday
10 Bow Street
The Liffey
National Library
Nassau Street
Outhouse Theatre
Friday
10 Bow Street
Saturday
Seomra na Léitheoieachta
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
For my family,
both blood & soul.
Praise for Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter
“Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter had me in tears: first of laughter, then of sadness, then of wonder at life’s strange and marvelous fragility. It is a book both beautiful and true; about the longing for family and for home. Alison Wearing is a hugely talented writer.”
— Alison Pick, author of the Man Booker Prize–nominated Far to Go
“This exquisitely written and deeply compassionate memoir tells the story of a family and a nation at a turning point in their sexual and political awakening . . . This book is for anyone who chooses to live (and love) openly and freely.”
— Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of Intolerable and Brown
“Part memoir, part history book, part diary and all parts heart. Alison Wearing weaves a tale that celebrates the complexities of who we are and the families we hold close. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is painful, tender, poignant and — most important — beautifully honest.”
— Brian Francis, author of Break in Case of Emergency and Fruit
Praise for Honeymoon in Purdah
“One of the best pieces of travel writing it has been my privilege to read in this, or any, millennium.”
— Ottawa Citizen
“As with any good travel book, Honeymoon in Purdah is not a tour of monuments, but an exploration of a nation’s psyche, in this case a proud, generous, and enduring one.”
— Globe and Mail
“Bright and searingly observant, [Wearing] paints indelible moments from her honeymoon with Iran . . . The cumulative effect is like reading Alice in Wonderland.”
— Toronto Star
“This book is why we travel and why we read travel writing: to be transported, and to return transformed.”
— Jamie Zeppa, author of Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan
It seems only fair to offer anonymity to people who find themselves as characters in books. For no matter how hard writers might try to be accurate in our portrayals, the people we paint onto the pages of memoir are only ever characters inspired by real people, renditions that almost invariably differ from how those same individuals see themselves.
To some in this book I have offered the simple mask of a pseudonym, to others a slightly more elaborate costume: a wig, a change of birthplace or spouse. Sticklers might say that such smudges to the canvas are only permissible in the galleries of fiction, but rather than hampering the truth of a portrait, I believe these brushstrokes are sometimes necessary for it to freely emerge.
The one person who cannot be disguised is my father. I was as surprised as anyone to find myself writing yet another memoir that cast him as a central figure, but he has been gracious and generous in his understanding that inspiration is a mysterious energy, writing evolves with its own inner dynamics, and, in the end, books are as much crafted by the writer as they are birthed.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
— W.B. Yeats
The customs officer has the face of a merry alcoholic who also enjoys his pie. His friendly eyes flutter when I tell him the purpose of my trip — to help my father with some gynaecological research — but he doesn’t ask any further questions. Just stamps my passport and says, Welcome to Ireland, love, which feels like a moment of sanity in an otherwise crazed world.
I have come here to help my father with some genealogical research. He’s quite serious about it and has been at it for years, but a few months ago he mentioned a desire to revisit Dublin’s libraries and archives, adding that he would prefer to do it with the help of a research assistant. Count me in! I’d said immediately, though we both know I fall asleep at the mere mention of genealogy, a word I am forever confusing with gynaecology, particularly when saying it aloud.
Still, we’re here. And a bit of boredom in the archives seems a small price to pay for the chance to spend ten days in Dublin with my dad. He’ll be eighty in a few months — he’d say he’s seventy-nine and a half — and is so fit and active I have wondered if I’ll be the one scrambling to keep up. But he also has incipient Parkinson’s, a disease that has begun to possess and hammer him, and I jumped at a chance for time together now.
My father does not appear in the collage of tired faces watching a slow parade of suitcases file past. We weren’t sitting together on the plane, having bought our tickets separately, and I didn’t see him in any of the lines at customs. I park myself in a visible spot and pass the time by trying to conjure a border experience which includes the phrase Welcome to the United States of America, love, but no matter how many times I attempt to lift that small kite of words into being, I am unable to keep it aloft.
When most of the bags are claimed from the belt and there is still no sign of him, I notice that when a parent is about to turn eighty, a child’s reflex changes from Where the hell’s he gone? to What if something’s happened? I walk and peer and swivel and conclude that he must have headed out of the arrivals area without me. And, indeed, on the other side of the exit’s automatic doors, I spot him looking bored. The moment I wave, however, he becomes animated, fluttering a hand to his chest and panting in theatrical, exaggerated relief while running through a breathless explanation: I didn’t see you in there so I came out here but then I realized you must have been back there but then I wasn’t allowed back in so I just had to stand here wondering how long you’d stay there waiting for me! He is giggling now, shedding so many layers of relief and excitement that I pause to wonder if the airport cleaning staff ever feel they are mopping up excess emotion in addition to casual grime. Relieved, my dad goes off to find the toilets while I stand guard over the suitcases. As I watch him disappear, I decide to begin our father-daughter escapade by creating a running list of qualities I adore about him, flipping to the back of my notebook and creating the heading Things about Dad, before printing How Often He Giggles.
A few minutes later, I look up to see him scurrying back to where I am waiting with the bags — he is not a plodder, my father; he has two speeds: Resting and Scurrying — and despite the speed at which his legs are swishing and padding along the shiny airport floor, I have time to add And the Way He Scurries before flipping my notebook shut.
This is my first time in Ireland. I’ve always intended to come, but other sunnier, more exotic places always seemed to win out. Now that I’m here, though, I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to arrive. I feel giddy, springy, can’t wait to get out and explore the city, the pubs, the famously green countryside, to fill my ears with jocular idioms, to lap up everything there is to lap. Our taxi driver is kind and talkative, effervescent with stories of weather, both typical and atypical, and the type of clothing he generally wears both winter and summer. I am delighted by his accent to a clichéd degree. He offers to take us sru de parrk on our way to our destination and I am so seduced that I tell him that would be a splendid idea, having never said splendid idea in my life and sounding ridiculous as I do so. The driver exits the highway, amps up his chattiness a few more notches, and drives a long arc through an unremarkable expanse of grass and trees while cheerfully doubling his fare.
But who cares, we’re in Ireland! On our way to an Airbnb, as about 75 percent of his customers are doing these days, the driver tells us. My dad booked the place a few months ago and while I wasn’t sure about it from the photos — I’m afraid there might be a black-and-white cow skin on the living room floor — I’ve found that few of these places actually resemble their photos, so we might be pleasantly surprised.
“Oh, dat’s a luvely area,” the driver assures us with a nice round u in luvely, adding that he believes we’ll be very happy there indeed.
He winds through a series of narrow cobblestone streets into a quaint, historic neighbourhood and leaves us at the front gates of the old Jameson Distillery. Which is odd, until we learn that the polished limestone building was recently remodelled to house a whiskey museum and a cluster of condos holding the echoes of three centuries of people saying cheers.
Indeed, I believe we’ll be very happy here.
The apartment is bright and spacious with a clever triangular addition to the main room made of floor-to-ceiling windows, the ideal renovation in a country not known for excessive sunlight. What looked in the photos like a black-and-white cow skin on the living room floor is, in fact, a black-and-white cow skin on the living room floor, but I silently name it Stephen Harper, which helps. Our landlord, or host, or whatever he’s called, John, does not smile as he shows us around, but he is immensely kind and sorry for everything: the fact that the plumbing is antiquated, the water only heats up twice a day, the wash machine’s sluggish, the economy’s a disaster, and there’s no government, but there is a good fish shop around the corner, and if we like, he can show us around.
I like John.
Before we go out, my dad asks about the political situation and if there is any sign of a government being formed soon. I join the conversation by nodding, though I have no idea what they are talking about, being both ignorant of Irish politics (obviously) and shamelessly unprepared for this trip. I don’t know why, but I didn’t read a word about Ireland before I left, save a book of fairy tales by W.B. Yeats and James Joyce’s Dubliners, which I started on the plane.
John’s head falls back at the mention of politics and he lets it hang there a few moments before lifting it and speaking.
“Here it is, right here,” he says, jamming a finger at a small white box mounted on the wall. “People are more than stretched as it is, out of work and bleedin’ themselves to the banks, and then we’re told we have to start payin’ for water.” He slows down as he intones those last three words. “And then they start installin’ these things,” he sneers, giving the water meter a hard flick with his fingers on the words dese tings. “And the people just up and refused to pay. That’s what brought the government down. And they’ll not be gettin’ up as far as I can see. It’s a mess, I tell you. A mess.”
He throws up his hands before opening the apartment door. “After you,” he says and holds out his arm, though the hallway is so narrow there is barely enough room to get past.
My dad asks John a few more questions about the various political parties that might form a coalition government. I don’t follow John’s mumbled answers to that (something about incompetence and bloody eejits), but my dad responds by asking about Ireland’s economy, the effects of the devastating crash, and whether the slight upturn that has been reported recently is noticeable yet.
The moment we’re outside, John lights up a cigarette and takes a long, patient drag.
“Well, it was lunacy before the crash, I’ll give you that. Commerce absolutely exploded, buildings goin’ up faster than a guy could piss, banks loanin’ money to any muppet with a pulse. All of a sudden, the people had money. Loads of it. You never saw anythin’ like it before. Lads buyin’ houses like it was rounds at the pub, spendin’ money like it was a race to get rid of it. It was mad as a box of frogs.” He tsks the memory, then rolls his eyes so dramatically they nearly tumble off his face.
“And you know about the crash in 2008,” he says. De crash in too tousand an eight. “Well, you might know of it, but you can’t imagine it, the numbers of people turned out of their homes, out of work, homeless. It was deadly. You hear about a property bubble burstin’, but it’s millions of people’s hearts that burst. Diabolical. We lost everythin’. And the debt,” he says, with an airy clip on the final t. “Figures the mind can’t even begin to comprehend.”
He pauses, takes a long drag on his cigarette, squints up at the tops of buildings.
“The Irish people’s gonna spend the next seventy-five or one hundred years payin’ off that debt. Not the banks who were tossin’ it out like candy, mind you, the Irish people. And it’s not like we did anythin’ wrong. We just worked, for chrissakes, but it’s like Ireland’s just come out of a war. And lost.”
He takes a quick puff and yanks out his cigarette.
“And then the IMF and the EU forced our heads into a bucket of austerity shite and I’ll tell you what they shoulda called it: Ireland’s Treaty of Versailles. Cuts everywhere, no jobs. It’s been the worst damn time Ireland’s had since the Great Hunger. We might be startin’ to pull out of the worst of it, I’ll give you that, but it’s only ’cause America and Britain’s bounced back and we’re exportin’ again, not ’cause the Irish people’s sufferin’ paid off.”
John exhales a long plume of smoke before guiding us through an alleyway at the back of the distillery. We emerge in a large public square, a cobblestone pedestrian area lined with shops and restaurants. It’s attractive and welcoming, clearly in the process of gentrification, though not in an overly boutiquey way, at least not yet. For the time being, it feels balanced, with blocks of spartan working-class townhouses on one side of the long plaza, and cafés, restaurants, and a grocery store on the other.
John gives us a quick history of the neighbourhood, Smithfield, noting that even a few years ago it was still pretty dodgy but it’s now on the up and up. They’re even planning to relocate one of the big colleges here, along with housing for thousands of students. Tousands of ’em.
“You’ll find the fish shop on the other side,” John tells us, pointing to a block of tenement housing. “Everything’s fresh every day, o’ course. And then over here’s a café, nice place, coffee’s grand, and there’s newspapers, even wifi. There’s a couple of other cafés along here too, but Turd Space is the best,” he says, gesturing at the window as we walk past.
I glance up at the sign — Third Space Café — and turn to my dad, who winks and smiles. At the end of the square is a pub that looks grotty from the outside, but John assures us it’s a wonderful spot.
“Live music every night and not the tourist shite you’ll find in Temple Bar. Here’s the real thing, just local people bringin’ their instruments. It’s mighty.”
John guides us to the neighbourhood grocery store and goes so far as to tour us through some of the aisles, pointing out the prepared meals he can recommend at the butcher’s counter, the corner where the wine can be found, the various beers we’ll want to try, the local cheeses. As we’re leaving the shop, a young woman approaches us asking for money for de Lewis and John reaches into his pocket and puts several coins in her hand.
“You get a lot of that around here,” he tells us quietly once she’s thanked him and moved away. “But what are people supposed to do without work? The economy’s in bits. Here,” he says, pointing to the other end of the square, “I’ll just show you where you can catch the Lewis she was talkin’ about.”
The Luas, as it turns out, is the local tram and there is a stop a short spit from our building.
“It’ll take you right across town above ground. It’s grand. Or the river’s right there and you have a lovely walk to town, shouldn’t take you more than twenty minutes,” he says, quickly scanning my father, assessing his fitness.
And it’s at that moment I realize that we’re turfing John out of his own flat. Of course we are. I feel a hollowing in my chest, a combination of guilt and immediate attempts to mitigate same with comforting thoughts of the but he must be happy for the income variety, none of which help.
John leaves us at the entrance of the distillery and wishes us a wonderful stay, gives us his cell number, and asks us to let him know if we have any problems.
“And best of luck findin’ the ancestors!” he says, shaking our hands and smiling for the first time.
We thank him for his help and drag our jetlagged jelly-legs back up to the apartment, where we spend five minutes being audibly relieved at how nice the place is, John, the neighbourhood, before — zonk — performing face plants into our pillows.
An hour or so later, my dad knocks softly at my door.
“It’s eleven a.m.,” he says quietly. “We should probably get up now if we want to adjust to local time.”
I lift the polished round limestone that is apparently my head and say “good idea,” before crashing back onto my pillow. A few minutes later, I hear him scurrying back down the hallway towards my room. I am just about to shout “I’M UP! I’M UP!” when he apologizes and asks if I can help him make a pot of coffee. Something’s happened.
I can hear the wrinkling in his voice, a crackling that’s crept in recently. Most of the time I don’t notice it, or I ignore it, but as I lie here bulldozed by exhaustion, with my eyes closed and my guard down, I cannot help but hear the rocky bed beneath the river of his voice. And how shallow that water has begun to sound.
We gave up trying to make coffee and came here instead.
John has one of those stainless steel espresso makers that heats up on the stove and while it’s a simple enough contraption, my dad had never used one before. It can be fiddly twisting it apart, figuring out how much water and coffee to put in so that it boils up properly (every pot seems to have its quirks), but the main problem was that my dad’s arm kept shaking while he was twisting it all together, and somewhere in the shuffle, the entire package of coffee grounds ended up spilling all over the floor.
He was good-natured about it, mildly frustrated, perhaps, but only briefly, suggesting we go out for breakfast instead. We could try the Turd Space Café! he said cheerfully. And after spreading the coffee grounds around the kitchen with a broom as effective as a giant paintbrush, we did.
We have.
And John was right: the coffee’s great. And it’s a good place for newspapers. We are both buried in them as we sip and chew and try to wake up before deciding how to spend our first Dublin day. My dad nestles around his newspaper covetously, almost predatorily, like a carnivorous plant curling around a dead bug, newsprint being as essential a nutritional component of his breakfast as coffee and toast. The newspaper is swishing and rustling loudly across the table as he turns the pages with a quaking hand. I watch it out of the corner of my eye, then I look away, because it’s easier, less heartbreaking, and because I don’t want him to notice me noticing.
I grab the Irish Times and do a quick read-up on the situation with the government — namely, why there isn’t one — and learn that since a vote of no confidence that brought the government down more than eight weeks ago, the country’s been left with a hung parliament, and more than 70 percent of those elected have no wish to be in power. Seems it’s easier to be in opposition until this whole water meter crisis blows over; or perhaps it’s the whole economic crisis the parliamentarians are waiting to blow over. (According to John, seventy-five years ought to do it.) Either way, no one appears to want to be in charge, a situation I’m not sure I’ve ever run into before.
I log onto the café’s wifi to look up Ireland’s debt and connect to the National Debt Clock, a website which offers the figures in “a clear and friendly way so that everybody can understand.” According to this site, the Irish national debt is about 200 billion euros (about $289 billion or $64,000 per person — more than twice Canada’s per capita debt), but, like the seconds on a digital clock, the numbers are constantly changing, going up by about 300 euros per second. In the few moments I’ve been on the site, in fact, the Irish National Debt has risen, in a clear and friendly way, by tens of thousands of euros. Watching the numbers flip and increase so quickly makes me jittery, so I scroll down to see what other information I can find.
Under the heading Interesting Facts are the following thoughts and exclamation marks:
You could wrap one euro bills around the Earth 896 times with the debt amount!
If you lay the debt amount in one euro bills on top of each other, they would make a pile 25,149 kilometres high! That’s equivalent to 0.07 trips to the Moon!
I relay these statistics to my dad, who is too focused on his newspaper to hear what I am saying. The U.S. primaries are in full swing and my dad, a retired political science professor, says following them feels like gawking at a train wreck, but he can’t help himself.
“Just when you think the Republican party can’t get any more pathetic, they get even more pathetic! WUUUUUH!”
That last word is his trademark shriek. It is the sound of someone getting goosed. The sound a human voice would make if there were a slide whistle attached to it. The sound vocal cords might make if they were shaken out and snapped like a wet towel. In my father’s case, it is a protean sound, capable of conveying surprise, horror, delight, or distress. He utters it as he has always uttered it: as if he were in a soundproof pod.
Which we are not. We are in a café. So the moment after the shriek has sounded — WUUUUUH! — every single person turns to face us. My dad is wholly unaware of the attention. He turns the page and begins reading something else, while I raise my eyebrows and smile around the room trying to convey reassurance.
It is a practised look. I’ve donned it throughout my life. But only today do I notice that the very things that might once have driven us bonkers about a parent can, over time, become sources of endearment. I flip to the back of my notebook and write That Outrageous WUUUUUH! Sound before pausing with my pen in my mouth to come up with something for a column I have created on the opposite side of the page: Smart Business Ideas. The column is there not because I am smart or businessy, but because I am the opposite and weary of penury. The only entry I have so far is Open a Tattoo Removal Clinic. To that I add, Buy Real Estate in Dublin before Economy Fully Recovers. But then I think of John, and of all the people I’d be trying to sell it to at a profit, people who are already bleeding to the banks, and I cross out the whole sentence. Also, less altruistically, I can’t afford to buy real estate in Dublin, or anywhere else.
My dad is wrestling with his newspaper now. It swishes and rustles across the table as he tries to turn the pages. His left hand has a life of its own, literally, as if it housed a demanding presence that is forever grabbing and tugging him.
It was the swim coach who first pointed it out a few years ago, when my dad was still with a swim club at the University of Toronto, practising with them a couple of times a week. Being in his seventies, he was (by far) the oldest one in the club, and while I found it impressive that he was swimming as much as he was, he was also presented with the Most Likely to Be Chatting at the End of the Lane award at one of the club’s famously fun Christmas parties, so I don’t think it unfair to say that the practices were as much a social event for my dad as an athletic one.
“Joe, your hand is shaking,” the coach said after one of the practices. My dad looked down. To his surprise, it was true. But he felt fine. Normal. Rode home on his bicycle. Showed his partner. Went to the doctor, did a series of tests, was told he’d probably had a mild stroke, that the shaking might fade over time, and that it was definitely not Parkinson’s. Which came as a thunderous relief.
The shaking didn’t fade. And a couple of years later, a new doctor did another series of tests and told him that it definitely was Parkinson’s, albeit a slow-progressing version. Whatever that means.
“What does that mean again?” I ask over the newspapers.
My dad shrugs. Isn’t sure. Isn’t sure his doctor knows either. “But every few months, I have to go back and do a bunch of tests.” He looks down at the newspaper, then up again, brightening. “One of them is counting backwards from a hundred by intervals of seven. Try it!”
“93 . . . 86 . . . 79 . . .” I start.
“Yes, but I’ve found a way to cheat!” he announces. “You go down ten and add three. That’s much easier than subtracting seven.”
I start again. “100, 93, 86, 79 . . . wait . . .”
“Yes, you have to be careful!”
“79, 72, 65, 58 . . . 51 . . .”
“That’s right . . .”
“44, 37, 30, 23, 16, 9, 2.”
“Yes, that’s it. You’ve done it correctly if you end on two. Isn’t that clever?”
“Yeah.” I smile. Drain my coffee cup. “But wait, is it clever to cheat on a medical test?”
My dad shrugs. “I wish I could cheat on all the tests.” Returns to his newspaper.
I am about to return to mine, but instead, I take a moment to conduct a small ritual: the encircling of moments I wish to remember, moments I recognize as precious, ephemeral, worth gathering into an invisible mental archive, a psychic photograph album of sorts. The day my son created an oatmeal mural on the kitchen table with such boundless, limb-flexing, cackle-thick joy I wasn’t sure he would ever stop laughing; the sight of my mother’s sleeping face at dawn the day I realized she’d become an older woman, no longer the person — inexhaustible, capable of anything, available for everyone — I had held static until then; the view of my partner standing on the shore of Lake Huron in the wind with his arms outstretched, our son toddling up behind him and mimicking the posture, two creatures drying their wings together, baring their chests to the sky.
And this moment, here, in the Turd Space Café, not because there is anything particularly special about this scene — I wish I could cheat on all the tests — but because I know how easy it is to rush to the next distraction, hurtle carelessly past beauty, let life barrel past. I’ve done that for too much of my life: run ahead, kept one eye on the lookout for something more exciting, been so trained on future possibilities that I miss what is lying, peacefully and exquisitely, in front of me. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want take anything for granted, not even this small moment. I want to appreciate it all.
This is our first trip together, just the two of us, unless you count the time we spent a few days in Paris together thirty years ago, when I was a teenager traipsing through Europe in search of myself and my dad was at the end of an opera binge. By the time we met up at the Gare de l’Est, I had been on my own for six months and was deep into a project of reinvention that had involved shearing my head (on one side only), speaking with a bizarre accent of no traceable origin, and wearing long, flowing scarves that were forever either tripping or strangling me. My plan had been to step off the train Transformed and Together. Which worked, until I spotted my dad galloping the length of the platform, waving so excitedly that I thought his arm might detach and go hurtling across the station. I LOVE THE HAIRDO! he called, practically toppling over himself to get to me faster. The sight of him squelched all my efforts at sophistication and I relaxed back into my ragged, messy self, where I stayed for the rest of our time together.
Once we’d untangled ourselves from the train station, we checked into a once opulent, now dilapidated pension near the Jardin du Luxembourg. I remember feeling the floral curtains and wobbly glass doorknobs before washing my undies in the sink and draping them, dripping, over everything. As I recall, my dad got annoyed and scurried around behind me, picking up panties as if they were the tails of dead mice, relocating them to the radiators one by one, and scolding me for not respecting the furniture. But after that, we got on famously. Ate, drank, and wandered for days, father and daughter on a lark.
The hotel policy was to leave breakfast on a tray outside the room, so every morning we would lounge in our pyjamas for hours, licking greasy croissant flakes from our fingertips, sipping milky lukewarm coffee, and discussing the mysteries of sex and sexuality.
It wasn’t typical father-daughter talk perhaps, but we were coming through an atypical time. My dad had come out of the closet five years earlier, he and my mother had divorced, and I had a new stepfather, four stepsiblings, and a fairy stepmother named Michael. My dad and I had talked about things as they were happening, of course, but there was something about being together in that elegant, faraway room, surrounded by foreign words and drying undies, that opened an intimacy we hadn’t found until then.
I asked the questions I had never asked before. He answered everything with an honesty that felt brutal at times but was generous, in the way that truth is. We both, as I remember it, wept. And then at last we got dressed and went out and linked arms and marvelled at the petrified music that is architecture, the sculpted love that is family, and at how being together like that made life seem possible again, manageable for a moment, rife with plausible beauty.
Thirty years later, when my dad invited me to travel with him to Ireland, I had imagined another sojourn like that Paris one, I suppose, though blessedly less littered with the shrapnel of divorce and shame. We’re both fairly settled in life and self these days, in as much as anyone ever is. He’ll soon be eighty and is still game for adventure, and I’m on the precipice of a half-century of living, in full knowledge of how precious this is, the time we have with people we love, this blink of time on Earth, this time in Ireland with my dad.
“Okay!” he says cheerfully, closing the paper and straightening up. “Let’s wander around and get lost and see what we find!”
After a quick joke involving our nickname for this café, I go off to find the toilet. When I return, my dad is standing at the till paying for our breakfasts. That’s the arrangement — he’s covering food and lodging in exchange for my research assistance — but watching him pick up the tab, as he has done virtually all my life, has an instantly infantilizing effect. By the time I join him at the counter, I am twelve years old. He is about to put his wallet away when he opens it again and passes me a fifty euro bill.
“Why don’t you take this?”
I laugh. “Why?”
“Well, just some spending money.”
I laugh again, awkwardly now. “It’s okay, I don’t need spending money. I mean, I have spending money, I have money . . .”
Neither one of us acknowledges that this is, kind of, a lie. I’ve just endured a killer year with two large gigs falling through at the last minute, one only days after the other, followed by a series of large and unanticipated expenses, coupled with, how do I put this, three decades of life in the arts and not much in the way of gargantuan economic prospects on the horizon.
“Well, why don’t you take it anyway,” he says, dealing the bill casually like it’s a bad playing card he’s trying to discard. “I don’t like to carry around too much cash.”
I smile, sort of. Feel equal parts grateful and mortified. Tuck the bill in my pocket, feel briefly nauseous, and hurry out the door.
Where it’s sunny. We are both actually squinting. The sky is a cerulean song. Which means, in a way, that this trip has already exceeded my expectations. I’m in a short wool coat with layers of cotton and wool beneath that, but it is balmy compared to the endless drizzle I’d been warned an Irish spring might have on daily offer.
After a few short blocks, we reach the riverbank and the water of the Liffey sparkles in such a way that it is impossible not to smile. My dad and I lean over the railing, inhaling our first long view of the city: the domes and spires, impressive Georgian buildings, bridges that arch over the water at regular intervals as far as we can see.
“Oh, Dad!” I say, threading my arm into his. “Look, we’re in Dublin!”
My dad giggles and pulls me closer. “Yes, and isn’t it grand!”