Praise a youth and she will come.
It wasn’t Conamara. It was Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Yes, there was a beach, but not one made of small bits of coral. At least the sky filled with clouds as we arrived, and the wind picked up—that damp, chill wind that makes you want a thick sweater and a pot of strong tea.
Daltaí na Gaeilge had organized an Irish immersion weekend, and Irish speakers gathered from as near as Philadelphia and as far as Belfast, to be fed on a diet of Irish and cottage pie. I picked up Lisa, my roommate from An Ceathrú Rua, at the airport in Philly, and we drove downtown to pick up Catherine at 30th Street Station.
Catherine was another student in our summer course at the Acadamh. A 19-year-old sophomore at Villanova, she had a dry sense of humor, a quick tongue, and a sweet heart. When the twenty Americans and Canadians from the scholarship programs were meeting under the archway at the National University in Galway, Catherine was still making her way across Ireland from Dublin, where she had taken in the sights and drunk deeply of the “culture” at the Temple Bar. She arrived at Lucy and Ciarán’s house looking slightly green and with a ceann romhar (fat head). “Poor creature,” Lucy said. “She must be very homesick.” Lucy sent Catherine straight up to bed for a rest before dinner.
At the Daltaí weekend, there was no bean an tí, no house mother to serve us scones. No one to make sure we got a good night’s rest. We were on our own to find our way to class and to the costume dinner on Saturday night. Taking the lowest of profiles, we arrived at dinner without costumes. We enjoyed our dinner and some of the show, eventually making our separate ways to the hotel bar.
If we had been in Conamara, Catherine would have found an older gentleman with red cheeks and a shock of white hair to practice her cupla focal, but at the Jersey shore, there were only an Italian-American contractor, a Fulbright scholar from Belfast, and a young lawyer who planned to retire to the village in Donegal where his mother was raised. I interrogated the lawyer about his suitability to date my older daughter. Lisa made fast friends with the fellow from Belfast, her Akron-Castlerea accent evolving as the night progressed. The Italian-American fellow had a pair of lobster tails in which Catherine had great interest.
In Carraroe Catherine succumbed to the Conamara cold that traveled through our group freely, and our bean an tí gave her the magical elixir Lemsip (mentioned in an earlier post). Not long after, we got on the bus to go to Tigh Khitt for a trad session. After bouncing along the road for a while, the remedy and the cold came together with an unpleasant result that was gathered in Catherine’s black sweater.
Yuck. I know. But stay with me. Catherine was mortified she had done this. She was afraid Lucy would find out and draw the wrong conclusions about Catherine’s visit to the pub. She stashed the sweater behind a rock across from the house. The next day she told Lisa and me what she was up to, but she refused to get the sweater out from behind the rock. She was worried that one of us would retrieve it, so she waited until we weren’t watching and moved the sweater to a spot under a bush across the street.
Moving the nasty sweater from bush to rock and back again continued for a couple of days; all the while, Lisa and I tried to convince Catherine to own up to the sweater. Bring it in the house. Wash it out by hand. Let it dry in the Irish sunshine — well, maybe in the hot press. Finally, one night when Catherine had gone up to her room to study, I walked outside and grabbed the sweater from underneath a bush at the foot of the driveway. I carried it in the house and washed it out in the bathroom sink. Done.
My guess is that Lucy knew it all. She had seen students arrive in Carraroe with the tethers of home and country stretched to the point of breaking. She worried about the young ones, who were full of adventure and curiousity…but, at the same time, completely vulnerable. With a toddler you hold onto their hands as they take first steps. With a teenager you have only to wave good-bye. “And by the way, here are the keys to the car!” Catherine was wise beyond her years — and as worried about disappointing Lucy as Lucy was of letting Catherine out on her own.
When the hotel bar closed at the Daltaí weekend, Catherine and I went to bed. Lisa was nowhere to be found. Catherine woke me up every twenty minutes to ask if we should call the police, if I thought Lisa might have been abducted by a psychotic Irishman. I would calm her and fall back to sleep but, sure enough, in twenty minutes, she’d be back. Finally, I called the front desk and asked them to take a look around. Lisa was sitting in the lobby chatting up the fellow from Belfast. Slán sabháilte.
Post script:
Catherine had an ingenious routine for buying wine at home in the States (teens: don’t try this!). Before she walked into the liquor store, she would arrange her hair in a messy bun, put on the glasses she used for driving, and hold her phone to her ear. Once inside, she’d grab a bottle of wine, and as she approached the cashier, say loudly into the phone, “Yes, I’m at the store. I’ll bring home dinner if you could just pick up the kids…I’m running a little late.” The cashier never had a chance to doubt her maturity, let alone ask for an I.D. It was brilliant. Catherine would continue her marital negotiations until she was out of the store. It never failed.
It’s a wonder any of us survived to our 25th birthdays.
Learning Irish in Conamara 