Dublin 5

October 9, 2013

My dreams have not been especially Irish and my wakings have been so “normal” I thought at first I was in my own room.  Dream last night that President Obama came to visit campus, and I was put on the work detail to help build the modular house he would stay in rather than a hotel. An austerity measure, I think, though he never stayed in the house we built. It was a thrill to meet him. He was very matter-of-fact and businesslike, rather like a Scoutmaster, I thought. There was a lot of mud on the building site, and someone from the Foreign Languages Department had a pet moose that kept getting loose. Obama was very patient with all this, even once catching the moose for us. The moose looked like a big dog, but we were assured it was not.

When I returned from roaming yesterday I was prepared to cooperate with the maid’s schedule, but the superior maid, a French woman, saw me and assured me they would fix up my room immediately so I could have full use of it. She was very bubbly and polite, but there is an equal chance my tantrum was widely reported and her attitude was actually sarcasm. I didn’t care.


Hugh Lane yesterday, and various roaming on my increasingly sore legs and feet. The plantar’s wart I understand. The ache in the legs– is it new? Do I always get it and forget about it between journeys? It’s just a shade from debilitating, and I’ve used more taxis than I ever have before. Maybe it’s the shoes, as it nearly always is. I do get to talk to the taxi drivers who, to a man, confess to not having been to the theater for years and years, though they took the kids to a panto a while back.

The secret garden at the Hugh Lane is one of Dublin’s loveliest features.

Wrote in the fireplace lounge, watching three beautiful women and one clearly intimidated man run a business meeting.

I realize I do not know how to be served.

Late afternoon (by taxi) to the Peacock for Eamon Morrissey’s Maeve’s House, a one-man reminiscence based on the fact that Morrissey and the (evidently) famous writer Maeve Brennan lived, at different times, in the same house in Dublin. It was amiable and informative, but differed in no respect from an incredibly well-delivered lecture. I do like lectures, so. What struck me is that a theater here can expect to have sold-out houses at 6 in the evening. Flirted with a guy in the lobby beforehand, but lost him in the mass exit at the end.

Wandered O’Connell Street for a while feeling not exactly melancholy, but– something. I feel as comfortable in Dublin as I do anywhere in the world, and yet it is not my home. I catch myself digging for memories of my wild youth in the suburbs, and coming to O’Connell Street and hanging with my gang under the blue stars and the blue Spike, and of course none of it happened, and of all the people I know I’m the best at separating fantasy from remembrance. I do not have those remembrances of Akron, either. It is chilling. One cannot repair the past.

Returned here and had wine in a couple of locals. In the one where I met Mark and Grace I met a girl from California who’s studying Marketing at Dublin College, and her parents were with her, and we had a long and jolly talk. Their family had arisen in Swinford, Mayo, which I actually know. I was glad I had made the last effort so I could come back to the Merrion jolly. Two cabbies were having a fight in Baggot Street. One was white and the other black, but I’m not sure that’s what the fight was over. A “homeless” man that I’d ignored in front of Doheny & Nesbitt (though later I came out and handed his girlfriend a wad of change) came out of his apartment with a sandwich and beer in his hand, which he consumed before he took up his place under the ragged blanket again. “Say, mate,” he said as he passed.