Beauty does not boil the pot.
Ever since I left Conamara, I’ve had a terrible cold. I could say it’s a symptom of withdrawal, although I should admit that it was being widely shared even before I left. I’ve tried to boost my body’s natural defenses with a daily dose of 1,500 mg of Vitamin C, but I’m about to admit defeat. Alice, who runs An Spéice, my B&B here in the wild west end of An Chorca Dhúibhne, just offered me a box of black currant flavored Lemsip Max. It’s a powder you put in boiling water, because almost everything good here is potable: Murphy’s, Jameson’s, Green Dot (uisce beatha), Guinness, and Lemsip.
When Alice handed me the Lemsip, I remembered standing in the kitchen of the house in An Cheathrú Rua with our bean an tí Lucy when the first signs of this slaghdán started. She handed me a box of Lemsip then, and I declined it. After all, I’m not sure what’s in Irish medicine. It’s likely to be filled with fairy dust. Or possibly narcotics. I think both might be easier to come by here since pharmacists are called chemists. Wasn’t Walter White a chemist?
After I took the Lemsip from Alice, I felt a twinge of disloyalty to Lucy, whose role in my stay in Conamara is substantial. Every day for three weeks, Lucy fed seven of us three meals a day, including a big basket filled with delicious lunches that she brought to school every day. She worked from early morning ’til late at night, so that we could sit on our tóeanna and learn Gaeilge. She had a seemingly infinite supply of patience for our halting Irish, listening to our awful pronunciation and bizarre sentence structure without batting an eye.
But it wasn’t just our Irish for which she had patience. Lucy saw the best in each of us, and this could not have been easy. We were seven people of varying ages, backgrounds, and lifestyles living with a family of five. We ate together, studied together, and sat in class all day together. Only one of us didn’t share a room. One evening Lucy laughingly suggested she might “knock the corners” off one of us. It sounded like a fairly good idea at the time. Everyone could benefit from being a little more well-rounded, right?
All this nourishment and care came from a woman who, on our second day, had broken her leg. At first, she was told it was a sprain, but after two weeks, it was clearly not healing. Just before we left, she went to a specialist to find that two bones were broken. She came home wearing a big black boot and proceeded to run around taking care of us still.
Now there are seven more lucky mic léinn in Lucy and Ciarán’s house being fattened up for Irish. I hope they appreciate the wonderful care they’re being given. I hope they eat all of Lucy’s delicious meals happily and carry their dishes to the kitchen. I hope they don’t get lost coming home from the pub and call Ciarán at midnight for help (like we did on the first night!).
By the way, Lemsip, according to Wikipedia, is mainly paracetamol, which, in the U.S., goes by the brand name Tylenol. Maybe there’s still time to get to the chemist for some fairy dust. I’m not sure this Lemsip is going to be strong enough.
Learning Irish in Conamara 