Parsons

Parsons, late 1984 or early 1985.

This is a re-post from a previous blog of mine. It occurred to me to do this after receiving an email from Brendan Lynch, the author of Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin, 1949-1989. Mr. Lynch had read my piece after a friend of his had shown it to him. I highly recommend his wonderful book to anyone interested in the Dublin literary scene of that era.

I know where and when I bought Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds because for some reason I decided to inscribe the first blank page in the book:

Purchased from the old ladies at Parsons bookstore, where the bridge crosses the canal at Baggot Street, Dublin, 15 April 1983.

I have no idea what inspired me to write those words. To my recollection, I have not inscribed a book before or since.

When I read it now, "old ladies" strikes me as demeaning. I'm sure I didn't mean to be callous. I probably thought that the white-haired, soft-spoken women who ran the shop were quaint. At twenty-one, I often viewed people and situations, especially in Ireland, as subjects for my amusement. What I didn't know then was that these remarkable women -- Mary King, May O’Flaherty, and their assistants -- had actually known Flan O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan), and that he and one of my other literary heroes, Patrick Kavanagh, had been regular visitors to the shop during the heights of their careers in the 1950s and 60s.

I certainly did know of the significance of Parsons bookstore, and the role that its proprietors played in Irish literary history, when I returned to Dublin in late 1984. I had a small flat on Herbert Place, just down the canal from the shop, and I would drop by every morning. I liked the idea that I was walking the same ground as O'Nolan, Kavanagh, and other famous writers like Brendan Behan, and exchanging pleasantries with their old friends.

But if the women ever thought of me at all, it would only have been as the shy American who came in every morning and bought a copy of the Irish Times and a Cadbury bar. In the six months that I visited their shop, I never engaged them in any meaningful conversation. “Good morning,” “Thank you,” and comments about the weather were as far as I got.

I don't know why I didn't ask them about the old days, or divulge my passion for the work of Kavanagh and O'Nolan. I suppose that I had some silly notion that my dignity would be compromised, that I would appear to them like a typical American tourist. What a shame. They were gracious and kind, and likely would have given me anecdotes that don't exist in any of the biographies. Who knows, I might have learned something interesting or important I could share here. But that opportunity is long gone. So is Parsons, and so are those venerable women.

I learned of Mary King's death on June 25, 1995 -- ten years later and three thousand miles away from Parsons. I was in another bookstore, the Borders in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, near where I now live. I must have been feeling nostalgic for my time in Dublin, and purchased a copy of the Irish Times. Her death notice was the first thing I saw when I turned the front page. It read in part:

Queen of books dies aged 83
A landmark of Dublin's literary world has passed away with the sudden death of Mary King. Aged 83 she ran Parsons book shop in the city for 38 years and her knowledge of books was unsurpassed.

I clipped the notice out of the paper and it has been stuck inside my copy of At Swim-Two-Birds ever since.

The Wind in the Willows

I am going to visit my mother today, and thinking of her led me to think of this piece, which I wrote last year for another weblog.

The first book to excite my imagination in a lasting and profound way was Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. I was three or four when it first came into my hands, too young to read it myself, and too young to have it read to me, its language and themes pitched beyond my understanding. But I still loved having it in my possession. All of my other books were thin, with bright colorful pictures and simple declarative sentences. The Wind in the Willows was thick and heavy. The sentences were dense, the print tiny. I even loved the smell of it – dusty, like the attic of my grandmother’s farmhouse, which my mother and I had moved to when I was two years old. That meant to my child’s imagination that it was old, and like the artifacts I would explore when I snuck into the attic, mysterious and of a nature I couldn’t completely comprehend.

What intrigued me most about the book were the Arthur Rackham illustrations. Unlike the smiling, uncomplicated animals in my other books, these creatures were dark, even morose, with furrowed brows and hunched shoulders. Even when they were smiling, or engaged in some enjoyable activity, such as unpacking a picnic basket, there was a wistfulness in their expressions. In the background, gnarled trees appeared to be coming to life, and to lean in close to each other in secret conversation. I didn’t know the word subtext then, but I understood that under the surface lurked hidden meaning.

My mother read The Wind in the Willows to me over a succession of summer nights when I was five or six. This was before I went to school, so my scope and understanding of the world was gathered from my explorations of the farm – adventures that took me along the deep and winding banks of the Davidsburg Run which ran the length of the property, or to secret hideaways in hay mows, or the woods that crowded the margins of fields. The landscapes encountered by the characters in the book were similar in their strangeness and in the wonder they inspired, and soon the two worlds – the fictional one of the story and the real one of the farm – began to merge in my imagination, informing each other.

I felt that I knew the characters long before my mother began to read the book to me. For a year or two I had been turning through the pages and studying the illustrations. The well-fed, twinkley-eyed Rat reminded me of my Uncle Ed, good natured and mischievous. Toad looked like an old rascal from the neighborhood who used to buy eggs from my grandmother, loud, braggadocios, and not to be entirely trusted. And Mole, with his dark and foreign looks, and disheveled, out-of-place clothing, reminded me of myself – accepted and loved by the others, but always a little at odds with his surroundings.

My mother, a schoolteacher, read wonderfully out loud. She read slowly and deliberately, loving the language of the book. Early on in the first chapter, Mole decides to abandon his spring-cleaning in favor of adventure, and scrambles from his underground home.

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last pop! His snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the grass of a great meadow.

“I just love those words,” my mother said. “Listen to them,” and she read the passage again.

At twelve chapters and 190 pages, The Wind in the Willows was not to be rushed, and in my memory the reading of it, every night before bed, required the better part of that summer’s evenings. In my recollection, the main plot of the novel, which involves the adventures of the nefarious Toad, does not assert itself until well along in the book. The first chapters take their time establishing setting and letting the reader get to know the characters. Even after the plot takes off, there are wonderful moments of stillness where the main narrative is, for a time, suspended, and the reader feels as though he can recline with the characters and wonder at the world around them and him.

In the years that followed, my mother read The Wind in the Willows to me again once or twice, and then I was old enough to read it to myself. When I left the farm to go to college in Philadelphia, I took the book with me, and read it in its entirety for a final time when I was eighteen or nineteen. I thought that I would discover new meanings that had eluded me when I was younger. I was right. There was, for example, in rhetorical asides during the Toad adventures, a subversive subtext to the goings on, a critique of modern culture and institutional authority that appealed to my young man’s sensibilities.

In the twenty plus years since then, I have picked the book up from time to time to read a passage or even a whole chapter. But I have not read it from beginning to end. This year I will read it again from cover to cover.

Happy St. Pat's

Irish flag, my front porch, Sunday afternoon.

Last year around this time, on a weblog I no longer update, I posted a piece about a St. Patrick's Day from twenty years ago. I'm adding it to Wissahickon Diary, since that is now where I keep my thoughts.

With or without you

Saint Patrick’s Day came and went a week or so ago. We passed it in a civilized manner by having dinner with some friends in an upscale Italian restaurant down in the city. We ate good pasta and drank fine wine and avoided the crowded bars, which these days flow with imported Guinness. That’s okay -- the Guinness isn’t what it used to be.

I can’t help thinking about another Saint Patrick’s Day, however, March 17, 1987, twenty years ago. Twenty years ago. That was the day U2 released The Joshua Tree in the U.S., and I couldn’t wait for work to be over so that I could rush out and buy it. I was living in a tiny, dark, third floor apartment at the edge of Philadelphia’s Art Museum neighborhood. I hated that apartment and the one good memory from the year I spent living there was listening to that album.

I had just returned from a week in Ireland visiting old friends and falling in love with the sister of one of them. Her name was Maeve, and we met in the kitchen of her parents’ home outside of Wexford. Her brother Eamonn had brought me down from Dublin for the night to meet his family and go out on the town. She was tiny, with long black hair and pale blue eyes, and too young for me, being eighteen to my twenty-five. But I couldn’t stop looking at her as she moved about the house.

Too soon, Eamonn hustled me out the door. We attended an amateur theater’s production of “Da,” and then had dinner at his boss’s home. The dinner was conducted with typical Irish hospitality, including many courses and many drinks before and afterwards with lots of conversation. I kept looking at my watch with growing despair, realizing that Maeve would be asleep by the time we got back, and that I would not see her again.

Eamonn and I rolled in at two a.m. He directed me to my room and went off to bed. I came out of the bathroom, toothpaste and brush in hand, and there she was, standing in the darkened hallway in her dressing gown.The conversation was whispered and short and not profound. How was your evening? How was the play? She returned to her room, and I went into mine and crawled under the blankets. I floated up into the darkness. She had waited up for me.

We needed to get up early to catch the bus back to Dublin, Eamonn and I. And Maeve got up early too. She and I ate buttered toast and played with the neighbor’s dog who had come into the kitchen to warm himself against the electric heater. We smiled at each other as Eamonn bustled about, sharing a secret, even though we didn’t know exactly what that secret was. There was a radio on the counter, tuned into the early morning pop music program. The host of the show announced that he was going to debut the first single off of U2’s as yet unreleased new album. Then he played “With or Without You.” We all got quiet. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

When The Joshua Tree was released on Saint Patrick’s Day I was still under the hangover of that vacation, still in Ireland more than in Philadelphia. I made two purchases that evening, the album, and a bottle of Black Bush, my favorite Irish whiskey. I remember sitting on the floor of my apartment next to the turntable. (This would be the last record I would buy before going digital.) I opened the bottle and poured myself a glass.

The music came tumbling out. And it was great! The first song, “Where the Street Have No Name,” set a rising momentum that went straight to the gut, introduced the album, and did not relent. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” the second song in the opening trilogy, established themes of irresolvable longing and spiritual yearning, mature themes that still resonate with me today. “With or Without You” is a song I will always be too close to to render an objective opinion.

Time passed. I wrote letters to Maeve. She wrote letters to me. I quit my job in early 1989 and went back to Ireland to be with her. We had our love affair, intense, full-blown. She came to the States. I went back to Ireland. In the end, I was not brave enough to make the commitment she clearly wanted. When she told me over the phone that she was getting married in the spring of 1993, I jumped on a plane to Ireland with the gloriously stupid notion of stopping the wedding.

Ireland is not the same. By the early 1990’s, if the Celtic Tiger had not yet arrived, you could surely hear him coming. When Maeve pushed me into the cab on the last night I saw her, she implored me to not walk back to the house where I was staying, the crime rate in Dublin having increased hand in hand with the country’s growing prosperity.

U2 is still a great band. I still buy all their albums, still go to their concerts, just like in the old days. We have grown old together, I like to think. But they will not make another album like The Joshua Tree. Being a culmination of all of their work leading up to that moment, it was an album only young men could make, a final furious gesture before the onset of middle age and its required compromises, good or bad.

In the narrative that each of us constructs with our memories, there are certain watershed moments after which everything seems to change. On the night of March 17, 1987, I played the album all the way through. I flipped the record over and started again. I kept playing it all night, pouring more whiskey as I went.

Six years ago

That's my Uncle Bernard. On the right, age fifteen, his high school graduation picture (he was the youngest in his class, having been advanced two years). On the left, age sixty-five, leaving for his fifty-year reunion in 1990. I took that one. My mother and I bought him those clothes, got him ready, and I drove him from his farm outside of the tiny village of Davidsburg, in York County, Pennsylvania, to the site of the reunion down in Emigsville.

Bernard died six years ago today in the fire that destroyed his house. When I went into the ruins of the house a day later, I found these photographs in the living room -- or parlor, as he would have called it -- the one room left mostly unscathed by the fire and the massive amounts of water poured onto the structure by the local fire department. They were sitting atop on old record cabinet. The rest of the house had been allowed to fall into an appalling condition over the years, but Bernard kept the parlor in relatively good shape. It was where he entertained visitors. The photographs must have represented something to him -- bookends, perhaps, of his life. In lieu of an open casket at his funeral, they sat on a table next to his coffin. Now they sit on the mantle in my living room in Philadelphia, a hundred miles away.

Two years ago I wrote a piece called Tom and Colleen for another weblog that I no longer update. Because it is largely about Bernard, I am including it here.

Tom and Colleen

Tom is fat. I tell him so all the time. He doesn’t care, having his own agendas. Colleen is not fat. She is Tom’s sister, though you wouldn’t know it to look at her.

“Go make the coffee,” I say to Tom in the mornings.

“He can’t,” Donna, my girlfriend says. “He doesn’t have opposable thumbs.” She’s right, of course. Tom doesn’t have opposable thumbs. He’s a cat. So is Colleen, for that matter.

“These are the neediest cats in the world,” Donna says, when Colleen wakes us up at 3:00 a.m. For a small cat, Colleen has a loud purr, sounding very much like a tractor with a couple of bad cylinders. She is also quite strong for her size, and drives her head shovel-like under your arms to wake you up. If you pull your arms under the covers to escape, she goes for the face.

“Cats are supposed to be aloof,” Donna says when Tom plops his considerable bulk between us on the sofa. “This cat acts like a dog.” Tom has always been of the belief that if you have time to watch television or read a book, you have time to lavish attention on him.

In the mornings I eat my oatmeal and stare at Tom luxuriously sprawled out on his back on the rug next to the table, his massive white belly thrust upwards as if it were his proudest achievement. “Tom, you are the fattest man who ever lived,” I say.

“He’s not a man,” Donna corrects for the hundredth time, “He’s a cat.”

“He’s a fat man who happens to be a cat,” I explain for the hundredth time. I can’t understand why this is so hard to understand.

Tom and Colleen have been living with me in Philadelphia for over ten years. There’s a photograph of the three of us somewhere, taken shortly after I got them -- a man in his mid thirties sitting on a wicker sofa, holding two gray and white kittens. I took the photo myself with a timer, so the three of us have that self-conscious posed look.

They were born where I grew up, on my Uncle Bernard’s farm in rural York County, though I had left the farm nearly fifteen years before they came along. Their mother was a stray who Bernard took pity on and allowed in the house one night when the weather was bad. He didn’t know she was pregnant.

The next morning he had four cats in the house, or rather, one cat and three kittens. He didn’t want cats, didn’t particularly like cats, but Bernard was a kind man and couldn’t put them out. Eventually, I took two of the kittens and my mother took the third, a tabby who she named Tabby.

Bernard died four years ago today, in the fire that destroyed his house. The farm, which had been in our family for over a hundred years, has been sold. And farming, which had been the family trade since our ancestors arrived in this country over two hundred and fifty years ago, is something none of us do anymore.

You could say that Tom and Colleen are my last connection to that life, but the truth is, I never was much of a farmer, and long ago I decided to choose another path.

The real connection is this: Bernard showed extraordinary kindness and patience toward me when I was growing up, despite the fact that his work never ceased, that he never got more than four or five hours of sleep at night, that the farm which he wanted with all his heart to be a success was sinking into ruin. He always made time for me. He also showed kindness when a stray cat gave birth to a litter of kittens in his house, making their welfare his responsibility.

That is our shared legacy. Bernard’s kindness, at least on my better days, has given me a way to be in the world. Tom and Colleen remind me of that.

“Now who is spoiling them,” I say to Donna. Tom and Colleen are swarming around her feet. (And yes, for those of you who don’t have cats, two is enough to constitute a swarm.) She places two not-particularly-well-emptied tuna cans on the floor for them to clean out, then referees to make sure that Tom doesn’t raid Colleen’s after finishing his own.

As I am completing this post, I find that Tom and Colleen have crept upstairs into the guestroom-cum-office where I keep my computer, and have fallen asleep on the bed next to my chair. They always want to be near me when I’m at home. After all, they are the neediest cats in the world.