Dublin 6

October 10, 2013

Yesterday was my sad day. There’s always one on a longish stay away from home. The distance gathers, memories gather, ghosts appear who can neither be dismissed or assuaged. I sat in the café of the Royal Hibernian Academy and was as sad as I’ve ever been. I can say why now, what I was thinking of, but the dread power is gone and I do not want it back. I’d been to the Royal Hibernian before, but it’s modernized, now, and the displays perky and contemporary, the desk attendant so charming when he was telling me about them that it’s his face that’s before me, green-eyed, animated. The whole apparatus was lovely. The workers at the café were happy and friendly and distinctive, the short stocky red-bearded boy with a voice like the sea wind. The girl hugged him. Went to the National Museum for the dead bog kings and all the gold, to the Library for a dose of Yeats, and to see Michael Yeats’ bust, telling me he died in 2007. The institutions were full of beautiful children, the boys with the broad backs and long legs of men, but the mischief of children. Ate at an Italian restaurant, where I tried to chat with the waiter in Italian, and he said I was good. The man next to me was ill in some way and kept complaining about his food, but ordering more, quizzing the waiters on what was in it. The Japanese-American girl on the other side sat at the table without ordering–she kept telling the waiter “give me one more minute”– bitching out her mother on cell phone. She was brat sometimes, sometimes a needy child, with the greatest sense of entitlement discernible in a human being.

I lost my Jameson cap. It dies where it was born.

Met Linda again when we both left a performance of The Threepenny Opera at the Gate at the interval. I thought it was pedestrian and wasting my time; she was infuriated, taking its flaws as some kind of deliberate effort to undermine the theater. We ended up at Foley’s, drinking with some old woman from Pennsylvania until there was nothing more to drink. Linda is deaf in one ear and conversation in the bar, with the singer next to us and all, was interesting.

I have been rising early, as I do back home. The problem with “early” here is that it’s 1 AM back home. Have planned nothing for today, except to walk west, inland. I almost never go past Christ Church.