I had been there nearly forty years earlier, and the trip had confirmed the generally held high opinion of Irish verbal agility, wit, and garrulousness. “Are you American, then?” a butcher had asked me when I was buying a steak from him, in Schull, in the spectacular Southwest. “Yes,” I said. “Then of course I’ll be charging you twice as much,” he said. When I confessed to a little girl on a dirt road that the cows she was herding home made me, a city boy, a little nervous, she waited a bit until they were up the road and then pointed behind me and said, “Look out! The cows are comin’ for yeh.” And when I asked a train conductor on a platform if the train that had just left was the last one that day to somewhere or other, he said, “You’ll get no more.” (The Irish can be a little sharp, sometimes. Read William Trevor’s stories, if you haven’t.) I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to remind myself out of what lexical soil my heroes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney had sprung.
So off I went, with my daughter, Lizi—her spelling, I assure you—twenty-five, who served as my left-hand-driving navigator and conversational memory bank. We landed at Shannon at nine in the morning and picked up our rental car. At the Avis counter, while Lizi was away getting coffee, the reservations person asked me, “Will your…er, daughter is she…be driving?” Lizi is five feet two, blonde, and pretty, unlike me in every way. “I know she doesn’t look like me but yes, she is my daughter,” I said, “but no, she won’t be driving.” Then, jet-lagged, I sort of blurted, “She’s adopted.” The face of the theretofore crabby-looking agent next to my agent lit up, and she said, “We have an adopted child, too—from Russia. He’s ten now, and as sweet as a bun. Aren’t we the lucky ones, then, you and I? They are like Christmas every day, don’t you think?”
We drove off through a correspondingly driving rain to Galway, about forty minutes away, with me drifting left and Lizi quietly correcting me. We checked in at the Nile Lodge Bed and Breakfast, in Salthill, a strip of seaside houses abutting Galway’s City Center. Centre. The Nile Lodge had been open for only a month or so. Lizi had found it online—we did most of our booking online—and it was absolutely wonderful, run by its owner, Maura, whose family house this capacious and elegant white building sitting atop a small hill had once been. It has only four rooms but doesn’t feel the least incarcerational, the way many B. & B.’s do.
At breakfast—and this full Irish breakfast is very full—Maura played, quietly, CDs of the traditional Irish music I like so much. She told us about the cheeses she was serving, including one with “just a touch of smoke,” and another “as creamy as, well, cream,” and then when we told her that we would be driving around Connemara that day, she pressed some of her CDs on us, and was gratifyingly surprised at what I knew about some of the musicians. She kept on revising her listening-recommendation priorities: “You must hear this one—do you know De Danaan? No, for Connemara, maybe this one would be best—it would go smoothly with the landscape. And then there’s this one—this man’s voice is like a burr; you must hear it. But wait—your coffee must be quite chilly by now, anyway—let me get you a new pot. Coffee that isn’t hot is cold.”
by Daniel Menaker, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Martin Parr/Magnum
