Greetings, friends. (LXIII)

Greetings, friends. Besha and I are in Ireland! Which is partly why I have not been writing much lately. The hard drop after getting home from New Hampshire was the other part.

On that note — we sold Mom’s house in New Hampshire already. The photos were taken on Thursday the 6th, and the house was put on the market the next day.

Saturday morning there was a kerfuffle with one potential buyer over the cellar drainage, which I already wrote about. Another plumber came and looked things over, again, the net result of which was that we decided to simply add the drainage situation to the disclosures, and let the new owners deal with it.

Sunday morning, I turned on my phone as our flight was landing in Dublin, to find a message saying “We have accepted a great offer!” Say what?

Three days. The house was on the market three days, and the offer we took not only waived any negotiations over the results of the inspections, but was 20% over our asking price, to boot. I did not object in the slightest to Adah making the executive decision simply to accept the offer. Fingers crossed, we close on May 21st.

You may recall that I have a half marathon to run in Brooklyn on May 20th. Next month is going to be interesting.

But it’s strange — that whole long odyssey to empty out the house, like water slowly swirling down a drain, trying to sieve out the things worth keeping — and then, boom, three days later, and it’s under contract. I am experiencing a kind of spiritual whiplash.

That sense of whiplash is not the least aided by having flown from Seattle to Dublin in an airline seat with the least pitch I’ve enjoyed in years. At least we both managed to sleep the whole way.

Dublin was interesting, I suppose. Our arrival was slightly delayed on the ground at the airport by the advance entourage of one President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. which was most of what any of the locals could talk to visiting Americans about when we arrived.

Anyway, the Irishman driving the cab that took us to our hotel in Dublin wanted to talk about it. The driver was, by turns, gregarious, cheerful, philosophical, and profane. If it had later turned out that he had been sent to us directly from Central Casting, I would not have raised an eyebrow. I made sure to tip him handsomely.

But I suppose it is more or less of note when the head of state of a country roughly 66 times the size of your own comes to visit. Especially when that dignitary claims yours as his place of ancestral origin, especially in the aw shucks down-home kind of way that Biden personifies in public, which seems to play awfully well here. To read the news, he gets a sentimental reception from a lot of folks here that is equal parts dazzled and self-conscious, landing somewhere between “prodigal son does good” and “sheesh finally we are friends with an imperial power that isn’t trying to occupy / colonize us.”

A visit to the Ireland Emigration Museum underscores, however, the extent to which the history of the Irish, and more particularly, of the flight from their homeland really has profoundly shaped the wider world.

First off, the proper name of the museum, which we visited in Dublin, is “EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum”. Why? Because the experience of the Irish emigrants was EPIC. No joke. That is why they call the museum that.

Goofy name notwithstanding, the museum was excellently done, enumerating both the tribulations that caused the Irish to seek greener pastures, as it were, elsewhere, and all they accomplished elsewhere.

I say “as it were” because, now that we are staying in Doolin in County Clare, I do not think that there are actually greener pastures anywhere else on Earth. But I digress.

Anyway, the noble and distinguished descendants of Irish migrants in the United States covers a lengthy list from Commodore John Barry on down to Kurt Cobain, in between touching on basically half of the past and present Presidents of the United States, obviously including Uncle Joe, but also somewhat less obviously Barack Obama, whose ancestral village of Moneygall proudly sports a sign by their exit on the M7 motorway to announce that fact. Nearby, Obama also has a motorway service area named after him.

All of which is to say, this tiny island nation of 5 million people, even when you add in the 1.8 million who live in Northern Ireland, still has fewer people than the 8 million it did when the Great Hunger began in 1845. Even so, the Republic of Ireland only just reached the 5 million mark for the first time since the Hunger about a year and a half ago.

And yet, according to EPIC, the total number of Irish emigrants over the centuries was at least 10 million. Across the world, there are an estimated 50 to 80 million of us, including a wide array of aforementioned luminaries, and also me and my family and Besha and hers. In that time, so many of us have accomplished so much in every conceivable field of human endeavor. What other relatively tiny nation-state in our world could make such a claim? It is not too much to say that our entire world would be almost unrecognizable without the Irish and our diaspora.

So EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum, as I said, was quite well done. Included with the ticket was a guided tour on the Jeanie Johnston, a tall ship which had been used to ferry migrants to Canada and the United States during the Great Hunger. These ships were sometimes known as “coffin ships” due to the terrifyingly high mortality rates in the cramped and unsanitary conditions during the six week passage to the New World. Jeanie Johnston was notable among these ships for not having a single fatality on any of her 16 transits of the Atlantic, mostly due to careful sanitation and proper feeding of the emigrants, both of which were otherwise unheard of.

Actually, the Jeanie Johnston anchored in the Liffey down the street from EPIC was a replica of the original, the latter having sunk on a return trip bearing timber from Quebec. Even on her final voyage, her crew and company were rescued by a passing ship before she went down, and thus Jeanie Johnston maintained her perfect record to the end.

Quite honestly, it is terrifying to imagine my ancestors cooped up, starving, and likely half dead of fever in a dark, stinking hold, with six adults to a bunk, for nauseating weeks on end, riding the swells of the North Atlantic, even in conditions as good as Jeanie Johnston, which as I said most weren’t. A single one-way ticket cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars in today’s money. I don’t know how they did it. I guess it beat the alternative.

Part of the delight of the tour, of course, was getting to listen to a native Irish person speak enthusiastically live for almost an hour without it being me and Besha creeping on the locals. We have been fascinated by Irish English and its intertwining with Irish Gaelic, which is on all the signage here.

Consider that. Irish is spoken natively by about 2% of the population, and yet virtually every public sign shows Gaelic first, and then English. It is a profound, almost wholly symbolic, and not at all inexpensive demonstration of national pride.

And the spelling, oh the spelling! Besha and I have tried to make sense of Irish orthography since we got here, with its grammar-sensitive phonology, its broad and slender vowels, and its lenition of mh and bh and fh and dh, none of which are read the way you would expect in English.

For example, Dublin is called Baile Átha Cliath in Irish, which means “Town of the Hurdled Ford.” It is pronounced something like byla-ha-clia which is not at all what you would expect and is of course why the Sasanach (and we) call it Dublin. I have taken to calling it Hurdleford.

So I think Besha and I have read a half a dozen articles or guides on reading Irish words, and none of it has stuck. Consequently, anywhere we go, walking or driving, we find ourselves compulsively reading Irish names off of street signs, and get them probably about 85% wrong.

Anyway, the aforementioned delightfully Irish guide on Jeanie Johnston wound up his 50 minute monologue by saying, “… and that’s the story of the Jeanie Johnston, and you’ll never have to hear any more about it ever again!”

Which I thought was an interesting rhetorical flourish, and one you will hear again.

I have to go to bed now. If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est. More tomorrow, maybe. Slán go fóill!