Sláinte!Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. - Yeats
Perched at the gale's ragged cliffs
poised
waiting
for the sunlight to become
just
perfect.
Wide as my wanderings have fared, I find myself drifting across unexpected and amusing similarities between distant locales. Ireland is casting my memories to late days of Iceland, when the snow had begun to melt and my boots bore fewer scuffs.
The thick gray air carries with it a faint scent of seaspray, warmed by a shy but curious sun. I ponder what Iceland must be like today, and briefly consider starting the whole thing over again.
Something seems fundamentally errant with the flow of time in Ireland. Every clock is wrong. And by that, I mean drastically, cripplingly wrong. There are plenty of publicly displayed clocks around the cities here, and not one of them seems to be either accurate or in agreement with its nearest neighbor. Even the digital clocks on the buses are sometimes off by significant portions of the day, rendering them more of an inconvenience than an aid.
I've concluded that time doesn't actually exist here, and that any attempt to ordinate a concept of time can only fail. Following that revelation, I find myself far happier.
I am sitting in a candlelit window alcove in an extremely crowded tavern, sipping a tall pint of Harp lager. In the opposite corner, the trio of guitar, banjo and fiddle fill the small room with endless meandering melodies, occasionally eliciting a clapping beat from the patrons, none of which are younger than me, and most of which are far drunker.
The Irish don't speak English! This may be completely obvious, but it was a total surprise to me - I figured they just all had strong Irish accents and talked about crisps and lifts and "the loo" like their neighbors. I didn't know they had an entirely different primary language - let alone a language that distinctly and consistently sounds like lunatic gibberish! I at first thought the streets of Ireland to be full of roaming madmen, and it turns out to just be people speaking Gaelic into cell phones.
Even more amazing is how absolutely beautiful the language becomes when sung. This is clearly how it was meant to be communicated.
The trio takes a request for ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" - it goes really well.
I am laying in the grass beneath a churning black sky. Slivers of sunlight shimmer around the edges of the enormous approaching thunderhead, and the trees above me dance and sway in the increasing wind.
The pathetic cries of a sheep roll from over the next hill. Everyone else has the common sense to come in out of the rain. I watch it begin to come down.
I am in bed on my final night here, listening to the rainfall attempt to outdo itself with each passing minute. The deluge slams hard against my roof with a rumble that rivals the occasional roar of nearby thunder, which comes rolling through the little town of Killarney like a gargantuan bowling ball. Droplets smack the open windowpane, and a few lightly touch my skin in the small hours of twilight.
I want to wake up to this in the middle of the night. I open the window a little farther, in case the downpour lightens.
And as a parting sentiment:
