Ireland 10

August 7, 2012
“An Extravaganza of Traditional Music” at Hawk’s Well last night was spectacular, an extravaganza. Steve Wickham of the Waterboys organized it for the Yeats festival. There was a woman from Leitrim named Dee, who looked like a ditz, like Lisa Kudrow in Friends, but when she played the music she had composed in the Irish mode, I was ravished. Some of the most beautiful work I’ve ever heard, and of course I left without sure information on how to find it again. Happy Spanish kid beside me, swiveling around to take everything in. My knee was cramped and I couldn’t stay to the end. The things that interfere with art! One woman came in very late, to the front, carrying her wine past the “strictly no drinks in the auditorium” sign. She wasn’t that beautiful anymore.

Ended the evening on the hotel patio with three women and a man from the North, who were here for I forget why. We shouted over the roar of the plunging Garavogue. The Northerners are great smokers. They bought me drinks which I eventually carried to my room and did not drink.

I have written less here than I intended to write, but more than I have in the past. The day is roofed with gray, fissured here and there by paler gray. On the river path yesterday people greeted me with “A fine day at last!” when in fact it was dark, drizzly, cold. I think they meant it was not an outright hailstorm.

What a little town Sligo is! From the hotel windows I can see all corners of it. I can see the holy mountain, and where the river snakes into the harbor.  If I were taller I wouldn't have to stand tip-toe.