Day 623 March 17, 2022

The Bee-loud Glade

For a summer when I was in college, I took classes at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and lived in the spare bedroom of the Maguire’s. Mr. Maguire was a milk man, and when returning home late at night, I would circle the housing development on the outskirts of the city until I found the house with a milk truck in the driveway. Mrs. Maguire only smoked cigarettes when out drinking at the pub and made the most delicious brown bread, which she fried up with rashers and egg. 

On sunny days, Mrs. Maguire hung the laundry out back and shooed away the blackbirds, that had pecked a hole in the head of the poor neighbor’s cat. Their son helped with the milk deliveries, and the oldest daughter worked in the city, but was hoping to get into one of the universities. She was dating a former lodger from America, and that made them all proud. The youngest was a ribald toddler, growing up around a lot of good natured cussing, but was most loved of them all. Also in the house was a spoiled American girl who ratted me out for throwing away Mrs. Maguire’s egg salad sandwiches because I didn’t like egg salad sandwiches, but was too embarrassed to complain, and a teenage boy from Spain who spoke almost no English. 

Mr. Maguire lost a finger, and maybe an eye, in a hunting accident with his son. They didn’t speak much of it, but it showed in their relationship. Always love, but also some strain there. Can a son ever redeem himself from such a thing? Occasionally, the son would get dangerously drunk, talk about what he would do if asked the join the IRA, kick stones in the fields of construction going up around the housing development, and then tumble off to sleep for a few hours before being roused for the morning deliveries.

I skipped my Friday afternoon classes, and with a frame backpack loaded with a sleeping bag and tarp, set off by train or bus, then hitchhiked to an indistinct destination I had underlined in a Yeats poem. I was once accompanied around the entire perimeter of Lake Innisfree by a particularly friendly corgi, who I imagined to be the embodiment of a spirit guide. He dutifully followed me even as I drew away from the lake and headed for a nearby town. I finally stopped at a house and told the woman there the dog had been following me for miles and I feared it would be lost. She recognized the dog and marveled how far he had traveled from home.

I loved the Irish accent, and it wove so delightfully into my brain that when I stopped at a monument and read the plaque, the voice in my head had an Irish accent. I could spend entire days smelling burning peat, or sheep, or a hot cup of tea, and that would be entirely pleasing. If the Maguires had a daughter of the right age and was unattached, I would have tried to woo her, if only to keep some kind of physical connection to the land and culture. As it ended up, my connection was only ephemeral, existential, and a metaphor for something I was searching for, but had not yet found.