In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
During the Vietnam War, American soldiers took to calling their home country "the world." So, for example, they would talk about "rotating back to the world" at the end of their tour of duty. America became the world for them as a psychological defense mechanism. If the world was back home, then here, that is the jungles of Vietnam, was a bad dream, a fantasyland, an aberration. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the real world.
I have noticed that my family has begun to think like Vietnam combatants. Everything we do now is laced with the expectation that soon, soon, we will be back in the real world, a place of water pressure, clean hair, and take-out sushi. We have become, to use another Vietnam War phrase, short-timers. We’re going back soon, and we’re reluctant to do anything that might somehow jinx that fact.
And before we rotate back to the world, we’re doing another bout of R’n’R. Tomorrow we’re going back to Italy, land of sun and wine. I shall report on our adventures when we return. In the meantime, a couple of very short notes…
I’ve been keeping you up to date with incidents of drunken Irishmen headbutting inanimate objects, vans, walls, etc. This weekend there was another incident. A young man who had, in the Irish expression, "drink taken" was found in Eyre Square repeatedly headbutting a bus stop. Police asked him to stop. He refused and continued butting. They finally arrested him before he could do permanent damage to himself. The bus stop is, apparently, physically fine but may need emotional counseling.
But Irishmen do not merely butt inanimate objects when they’ve been drinking. No sir. They disappear. Every Monday flyers will go up all over the city with the picture of some goober (always in his 20s) who mysteriously disappeared over the weekend. He was always last seen a) leaving a bar b) entering a bar c) leaving a club d) entering a club. Sometime on that fateful evening, usually very late, his friends lost track of his movements and he was never seen again.
What ever could have happened? Well, regular as clockwork, two weeks later, his body will wash up on the shore of Galway Bay. He got drunk and fell into the water. He drowned. This occurrence is so regular that I am astounded they bother putting the signs up. A 20-something Irish male disappeared after a night of drinking? Just go down to the beach and wait for the tide to come in. Save yourself some xeroxing.
The Irish penchant for drunk drowning has been driven home by a recent incident: a double header. A couple of gents, middle-aged "part-time laborers" disappeared a couple of weeks ago. It was an unusual disappearance because it happened during the week. The relatives of these guys got worried when they didn’t turn up to collect their welfare checks on Thursday and so called the police. The police went around to their usual haunt, a bush in a public park where they went to drink beer every day (no, I’m not making this up). A bunch of empty beer cans were discovered, but not the two guys. But guess what? This bush is beside a river. Two weeks later their bodies were found downstream. The coroner suggested this scenario: Guy A got hammered and fell in the river; Guy B jumped in to save him, and they both drowned.
On another cheery note, someone asked me about Finnegan the dog. This is the small dog that shows up every day in the student cafeteria to try and bum curry fries from students. I have described this dog as being depressed. How can a dog be depressed, one faithful reader wants to know. Well, dogs can be depressed. In fact all the dogs of Ireland are depressed. They manifest this depression by folding their ears back, not wagging their tails, and cowering whenever anyone comes near. I’ve never seen so many moribund, craven dogs in my life. The only happy dogs that I’ve met are a family of Irish Setters owned by the parents of a friend of Max’s. These people live in the country in a ramshackle house that is so dirty that as soon as you pull up in the driveway you can hear the opening banjo notes of the theme from Deliverance. How dirty is this house? Two years ago it got flooded when a river rose above its banks. River water swept through the house. The owners have not yet quite cleaned up the mess. Yikes. Anyway, the dogs are happy because they, like the children of the family, have been allowed to go entirely feral. It’s Lord of the Flies time and the dogs are winning.
Now, a last thought for today: I do not know what is happening in the world. Has Osama Bin Laden been caught? Have there been more terrorist attacks on the US? Are Sharon and Arrafat holding hands and necking in public? I don’t know, because the only formal news that is in the Irish papers or on Irish TV these days revolves around the world cup. All of Europe is, of course, soccer mad. Ireland is so soccer mad that businesses across the country are bracing for the mass no-shows from personnel that they expect once the cup games start to be broadcast. Have heart surgery planned during the world cup? Better postpone that baby. The surgeon is going to be down at the local getting hammered at 7 in the morning and cheering on the team.
Ireland’s chances of winning the cup are, well, real bad. Bookmaking odds give them something like 60 to 1. Hope springs eternal, however, and the airwaves have been full of songs, especially written for this world cup, which pine for an Irish victory. There have even been song contests. People, from ages 10 to 75, have phoned in to radio shows and sung their own compositions, some of which go on for 30 or more verses, full voiced for the world to hear. They ain’t good. These people have no shame.
But then the big news. The Irish team flew to Saipan to practice for a week before moving to Japan and start competing. But the team captain, Roy Keane, got to Saipan, threatened to quit, then said he’d stay, and then quit/was fired. Apparently somewhere in this mess he called the team manager a "fucking wanker." Basically he was having a hissy fit because he didn’t like the practice facilities and he thought some of his teammates weren’t working hard enough. They were probably just shell-shocked by the sight of the sun and bewildered to be experiencing something called "heat." But of course it could have been genuine Irish ineptitude, of which there is plenty to go about.
Anyway, you would have thought that Jesus Christ had returned to Earth to announce the apocalypse from the way the media have handled this story. Huge headlines and ten pages of coverage in the newspapers; three-hour phone shows on the radio; hour-long TV news specials; mass hysteria all around. You had to wade through whole sections of the newspaper to find other, tiny headlines like "India and Pakistan begin nuclear war." People were weeping in the streets, fistfights broke out in pubs, drunks started headbutting animate objects, 20-something males threw themselves into the canal, dogs got more depressed. Chaos. All because some guy who kicks a ball decided he didn’t want to kick it. The Prime Minister of the country himself was asked to intervene in the situation. An Irish millionaire offered to loan his private jet so that Keane could be flown back to Japan at a moment’s notice.
Am I the only one on this island who thinks this is a teensy bit disproportionate? Apparently yes.
Definitely time for me to go to Italy.
Ciao, baby. More in about ten days.
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