A Reunion in Ireland
Every time I come down with a case of the common cold, I invariably find myself, a few days in, when I’ve resorted to various folk remedies (hot water with lemon, hot water with salt, hot water with 1000mg of artificially-orange-flavored vitamin C from a foil packet), straining, and failing, to remember what it’s like not to have a cold. To not wake up in the morning and not feel as if my throat has been rubbed raw, to go about my day alert and refreshed, without that dullness, that fog-on-the-brain of a cold.
That’s how it feels, now, in the times of the virus.
What is it like to get into the office early, when the sidewalks and streets and building lobby and elevators are calm and unhurried, so that you have time to yourself to read the news and collect your thoughts and build your to-do list? What is it like to be in an airplane, feel that thrilling thrust of the high-bypass turbofan engines hurtling you down the runway and toward your destination: a work trip, a wedding, a vacation, home for the holidays. What is it like to meet up with a friend after work on a Friday in a crowded bar, after you’ve fired off that last email and satisfied yourself that, hey, that’s enough for this week, when the tension of working gets washed away in those first few heady sips of a crisp beer, of a crisp cocktail. What is it like to see those friends and shake hands or embrace — without thinking about it! as if it’s the most normal thing in the world! as if this was a greeting stretching back in some shape or form to antiquity!
It’s strange to think back to the Before Times, and perhaps nothing feels more foreign and exotic now than the trip I took to Ireland last summer with my family, for the Lombard family reunion.
Arriving in Ireland
My fiance and I arrived in Ireland, the country of my ancestors, on an Aer Lingus flight from a quick weekend in Paris. It had been hot and dry in Paris, having breached 100 degrees. Then we landed in Ireland. Ireland of the cool green hills rolling through deep fog.
Our first stop was in Cork, Ireland’s second largest city which had been my home for four months in the fall of 2008 while I was studying abroad. It had been eleven years. Looking back, the experience holds an outsized place in my memory. I remember the long walk from my student apartment to the university, which variously ran along the Lee River, past Saint Fin Barre’s cathedral, through a working class neighborhood, and finally to the iron-gated, meticulously mowed campus of University College Cork. I remember on Saturday mornings — if I wasn’t otherwise traveling — I would head over to the English Market, order an Americano at the little coffee bar, and chat up the Eastern European woman working there. Then I’d buy a loaf of hearty bread and head back to my flat where I’d dip it in olive oil and read a book. That semester I read Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I read American Psycho. I read a handful of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. At the time this all felt very European. At night we usually went out to divey bars where we exclusively drank Beamish — a Guinness competitor that I’ve only seen outside of Ireland once — because it was the only beer we could consistently find for under four euros. Sometimes, in an idle moment, I would pull up a map of Ireland on my computer just to read the names of the places and marvel at their musicality: Wicklow, Clare, Meath, Donegal, Kildare, Armagh. The last month I was in the country it rained every day and I was so cheap that I never bought proper rain gear or even so much as an umbrella. I showed up to class every day with wet socks. My parents were horrified when I told them about this later — they would have sent me some money! But it just didn’t occur to me for some reason. Maybe studying abroad felt, on some level, so self-indulgent that to ask for more felt obscene. And for ten years I’d wanted to go back.
On our descent into ORK I could see nothing of the place. It was heavily blanketed with low, lumpy, ferrous clouds. When we finally broke through the cloud cover it was unmistakably Ireland: every slice of the green color spectrum expressed in irregular blocks of pasture separated by ancient hedgerows, cut through by sinuous black asphalt. Apparently the part of the brain responsible for processing scents is closely linked to that of memories: when we stepped onto the tarmac I breathed in that brackish, peaty, damp air and, for a moment, I was twenty again. We took a cab into town to our Airbnb and ate dinner at a restaurant that I formerly had only gone to when someone’s parents were in town to visit. I went to bed excited for what the next day would bring.
That next day was perfectly pleasant, but if I was expecting to feel stirred somehow, to sustain that brief time-traveling I’d had with that first whiff of Irish air at the airport, I was headed for disappointment. In the weeks before the trip, whenever I felt myself especially stressed at my desk at work, I looked forward to the pastoral calm of a small Irish town, imagined myself perfectly at ease walking the streets, stopping for a pint of stout in a pub, perhaps reading a book in a cafe with some tea and toast and sweet Irish butter and jam. Instead there was that same vague disappointment that I wasn’t being charmed by the place. And of course — what should I have expected? My halcyon days studying abroad were the intersection of time and place. Cork will always be there as it has been for over a thousand years. The time, of course, is long gone.
In Self-Reliance, Emerson writes about the pitfalls of travel:
At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
I love that line: “I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions…” If only he could have seen an Instagram feed.
Now, I’d hardly describe my trip or myself this way. I didn’t wake up next to my “sad self.” I didn’t have to affect to be intoxicated with anything, because that’s not why I traveled here. I was here to see my family and meet my far-flung relatives. Still, it is an instructive reminder: in the end, it’s always the people that matter isn’t it?
The Reunion
Lombard is my mother’s maiden name. We hail from the area around Kilcockan by River Blackwater, an area just north of Youghal (pronounced “y’all” as if you were at a Clemson tailgate) which is itself on the southeast coast of Ireland. The reunion would last the weekend: on Saturday would be a mass at the local church, a visit to the local graveyard, and drinks and lunch at the family pub. On Sunday there was a big dinner at the Sir Walter Raleigh hotel. There would be about 50 of us.
Mass was in a small church in Glendine. Google Maps has the address, appropriately, as “Unnamed Road, County Waterford.” Afterward, we visited the small cemetery where Lombards had been laid to rest as far back as 1784. What could have been a morbid, or at the very least solemn, affair turned out to be more akin to a history lesson or, rather, the challenges of constructing a history in the first place. The self-appointed family archivist talked us through the ambiguities of something as simple as who was lying under our feet. It was there that I found out, at least as far back as we can track, that I’m the 11th Garrett in the family.
Then we all went to ‘The Pub’ — an improbable mix between a home, a post office, and an actual pub — in the afternoon for lunch and beers. A guitarist and accordionist came to play traditional music. At that point the beers had started to loosen everyone up. The conversation came easy. An ominous looking cloud that promised to bring a bummer of a rainstorm had instead cut South and it was clear skies all around. The next day was our final one in Youghal and the banquet.
Driving
I’m a sucker for mist. I don’t know when this fixation took hold of me, but from Kauai to Torres Del Paine, North Carolina’s I-40 to Colorado’s Berthoud Pass, the Western end of Golden Gate Park where the Monterey cypresses are blown slanted from the Pacific winds, to the early hours at Machu Picchu, nothing captures my eye and stirs my soul like a downy front of low-lying fog weaving through windswept trees and mountains. Something about it creates its own mystery, nature platonically seducing you, alternately revealing and obscuring. It’s impossible not to wonder what must be up there. Somewhere back in the mind, in the part of the imagination where a child-like sense of wonder still reigns, maybe, you might think, there’s something else? An ancient gateway to ancient secrets?
That’s exactly what we got as we drove along R561 where it continues North to hug the coast of Castlemaine Harbor along the Dingle peninsula. From there you can look South to the Iveragh Peninsula, you can watch the fog curl about its mountains.
Looking back on the trip in sum, I think the driving around with my immediate family and aunt is what I’ll remember most about the trip: the scenery outside of the car, the conversation and laughs in the car, and the stops for tea and scones at the villages in between our destinations. I remember stopping at one small town for a tea break. As we were waiting in the parking lot for everyone to freshen up, my fiance started leading the group in different yoga poses.
From Dingle we went to Galway and then on to two nights in Dublin. Dublin was the single place that felt the most different from when I had originally studied abroad. It could be that I was last there during the Great Recession, which had hit Ireland particularly hard, maybe it was because I had little money to spend so I was drawn to the cheaper parts of town, but it seemed so prosperous now. I can remember in 2008 walking along Talbot Street. Everything was just a bit gritty. Now it’s nice shops and luxury apartments. On the bus ride to the airport to head home we crested a hill and looked back on the city and it was cranes as far as the eye could see. At the time the European Union was founded in 1993 Ireland was the poorest of its member states. Now it’s the richest.
The most remarkable part of the trip happened at our Airbnb outside of Dingle, a farmhouse without Wifi in the Gaelish-speaking town of Lispole, along the Owenalondrig river. We were sick of eating at restaurants for dinner, so we bought some salad fixings and cheap steaks at a supermarket. Alice and I cooked for everyone. It was my Dad’s birthday. Dinner was convivial and cheerful: simple but good food, simple but good wine, simple but good house. My Dad read us the elegy he’d written for their recently deceased shitzu, Trigger, a goofy little dog that my parents had inherited from my great uncle. It was so poignant I had to leave the room and go collect myself.
Family Tree
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” said the android, dying. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.”
The above comes to us from 1984’s Blade Runner, the slow, weird, trippy near-future science-fiction movie directed by Ridley Scott. The Tyrell Corporation had manufactured this example to present as an adult man, replete with a slug of procedurally-generated memories. Now, in his last moments, he is recounting those memories to a bemused Harrison Ford. We as the audience don’t know what these memories are. Are they something he actually saw over the course of his short life? Or was this illusory: some flicker in the code, a blip in the runtime, a race condition, a defect in their synapses, a speck of dust on the silicon?
When I think about my own version of this, what I might tell Harrison Ford as I sit there, my major systems slowly shutting down, I might think of Machu Picchu, Hanalei Bay, a snowy day in Amsterdam, but, most likely I think of Ireland. I’ve watched razorbills take shelter in the Cliffs of Moher, seen fog about the Black Stacks of the Iveragh Peninsula. I’ve hopped the basalt hexagons on the north shore of Antrim.
After recounting his memories, the android says “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” I always felt that that final line was a little too on the nose — it’s literally raining in that scene after all. But nothing makes you identify with the spirit of that final line — that our memories, no matter how powerful, are only alive so long as we are—like looking at your family tree.
When we look at our own family tree our chief interest is to find where we came from, to trace the lineage back as far as it will go, find the decisions — a marriage, having a child, emigrating to America — that cascaded down through the generations to culminate in your own flesh and blood. The eyes that alight on the tree’s lines, junctures, and names were built up with DNA that can be traced all the way back.
It boggles the mind to think of the stories contained in something that is, ultimately, so reductive. If you were able to somehow commune with the dead and asked them to recount something, the specifics of the family tree, in many cases the one physical thing that still bears their name, would surely be the last thing on their mind. Instead we’d hear about their own Tannhauser Gate, their own shoulder of Orion — the things that stunned them and stuck with them. The family tree captures none of those moments, the things that make us human: our traumas and victories, getting married, the birth of a child, loss and grief. And it also misses the times in between, the simple ones where nothing of consequence happens, but are significant in their own way, in the improbable mix of factors that combine into a perfect, surreal moment.
Like when you find yourself at a picnic table outside of your ancestral pub, with your parents, your aunt, your brothers, and your fiance, surrounded by your near and distant relations, the once threatening rain clouds retreating into the distance, a cold beer in hand, and laughing at something or other on a sunny and brilliant day on a hill north of Youghal.
