June 4, 2024

Worst conceivable weather. A day and a half of this whole journey has been fine. It’s all right. The parking deck across the street shivers with gray water. I’ve checked twice since waking to insure I fly tomorrow rather than today. It’s the sort of mistake one makes. Supped in unnecessary splendor in the hotel restaurant last night, then spent the inclement night working on my play. It had been more than four years since I traveled, but my customs came back to me. What an odd little man I am in many ways. 

As Bank Holiday is over, it became museum day. The Limerick Museum across the street is a noble building but otherwise useless. Dioramas do not a museum make. Hauled up to People’s Park to go to the deeply-remembered and much-loved Limerick art museum, to discover that the bounty of AEs and visionary masterworks of the Celtic Twilight in their hulking frames are gone, replaced by a forgettable contemporary one-man show and an austere, modern, parsimoniously curated selection of the permanent collection. Great disappointment. The boy at the desk had no idea what I was talking about until I showed him photos in their own museum book of the same white, empty room stacked floor to ceiling with curiosities. It hasn’t been THAT long since I was last in Limerick. . . surely. . . Consoled myself with a walk in People’s Park, where the roses are in glory. Found the People’s Museum of Limerick, which is a Georgian mansion filled up with random furnishings and curiosities. The lad at the door asked if I wanted the guided tour or if I preferred to go about alone. “Go about alone,” I said, and immediately got a twenty minute summary of late Tudor to Georgian Limerick anyhow. Irish tour guides will not be daunted. Sat in the formal garden and contemplated their mulberry tree. A drawstring from my yellow raincoat had worked loose, and I dropped it into a phonograph on the top floor, as my contribution to the randomness of it all. Someone will find it tomorrow or it will lie there for the next fifty years. Wandered to the Crescent, north of which I stayed a couple of times, once with Nick, and below which I had enjoyable times at the theater. The theater endures. I might have altered travel plans if I’d thought of it. The gallery where I bought paintings once is not. Poured my coins into the case of a street fiddler on O’Connell Street. This journey lasted, perhaps, one day longer than it ought to have. Good to remember for the next time.