Ireland Farewell

August 10, 2012

Twenty five hours of traveling got me back home. I left the lovely airport hotel at 5 AM Shannon time, and was getting into a taxi at the Asheville Regional at 1 AM our time the next day.  It is now 6 AM and I’ve slept the fitful sleep of the first night after return from the east. I can’t indulge in the calming ritual of laundry, either, as when last heard of my bag was still at Heathrow. The Yeats prints are with me, so the worst loss is my camera and my photos of the trip, but lost is not yet necessarily lost for good. The first of the three flights yesterday was handled by Aer Lingus and went fine. The other two were pure United and therefore cluster fucks. I thought I would outwit fate and pay to change my London/Chicago flight to an earlier, assuming that the time allotted would not be sufficient to get me through customs on onto my Chicago/Asheville connection. The flight on which I flew stand-by was itself delayed, losing 115 of the minutes I thought I’d bought, and the Chicago/Asheville flight was itself so delayed that I would have cleared customs in time anyway. I am meant by the gods to be in UA’s clutches. When, approaching midnight, I started to board the plane from Chicago–for which I had waited  then six hours–the little machine said it didn’t recognize my boarding pass. The system had canceled ALL my flights because I had changed one. I knew that could happen, quizzed the United desk lady about it at the time of the change, trying to insure that it didn’t, but it did anyway. The Chicago desk lady tapped away on her keyboard the way they do to “see what she could do.” Turns out there was ONE SEAT LEFT on the “full” flight. Perhaps she understood that if there had not been that one seat, I would not be writing from my desk now, but from prison, for I would have broken her neck where she stood. But, this time, we all survive. United’s incompetence is epic, burlesque, almost literally unbelievable, always worse than one expects even when one comes with dismal expectations. I don’t even know what to say. What credentials do people have to show in order to run an airline?

Sat for a while with a charming Greek-American boy returning from a visit to the motherland, and then for a while amid a British family headed for Jackson Hole, as their kids’ introduction to America. Good idea, actually. Drank at my "local" in O'Hare with a variety of businessmen trying to get home to a variety of places. Bought drinks for in-transit soldiers. The latest installment of Loquacious Asheville Airport Taxi Driver this morning told me all about the restoration and preservation of his 1966 Ford Fairlane, which he loves dearly. He wants it black and silver. His wife wants it cherry red. This thingummy had to be completely rebuilt, and that one was found in a car in which people had been murdered, so he got a real good price.

Dawn comes. I’m in a panic because I do not yet hear Kevin the frog. Returning home was odd last night. Something about the house was odd– things had been moved, the cats were freaky, as if they had been frightened by something. Circe found her way back, but Maud is still skittish. She looks thin, too, as if she had produced all by herself the gray mounds of cat vomit I spent my first hour here scraping off the floor. But I lit purifying candles, and the atmosphere was enchanted for a while. I imagined these rooms, all lit by flickering candlelight, inside the shell of an Irish cottage, and that made me happy, though it did not bring sleep. I had slept enormously on each of the flights, so perhaps that will be enough. Getting of the plane in Asheville, though, I was crippled with exhaustion and frustration, which seemed to center in my knees and forbid them to bear me up. Bear me up at last they did.

I did not see a heron in Ireland. Kevin is not yet singing his dawn song. Things could be worse than I expected.