sometime.”
“If I’m in Derry,” I said, “maybe we can go out to Donegal or somewhere, and you can hear some of the things I hear.”
“Write me,” he said, with another champion handshake, and at that moment the desire to like him was born in me. But how often it would be challenged! My postcard to Miss Begley, sent next morning from Killarney, read, “To use his own word—he’s neat.”
They drove off, I cycled away, each of us roaming the globe in his own fashion. I think that I had the greater affliction—because wanderlust is based on the homing instinct; we’re always looking for the one place in which we’ll feel safest. Miller already had such a place, on some big farm in a far continent.
As a stopgap for home, I liked bed-and-breakfast houses with older landladies; they know in their bones when a person wishes to eat in silence.In Killarney I kept returning to Mrs. Cooper, on account of her tact and her cooking. Also, I liked her, probably on the basis that we tend to like people who seem to like us. She knew some relatives of mine in County Limerick, and she had a gift of knowing exactly how much conversation to make about them or anything else. Furthermore, her husband had died in the previous war and, childless, she understood people who want to be left alone.
On the Sunday night, I stayed with her. Monday morning after breakfast, I waited for a shower to pass by, said good-bye to Mrs. Cooper, and set out for the long ride to Valentia Island. I hadn’t yet decided where to stay for the coming night, but as usual I’d take steps to secure a roof before dark.
Clear of Killarney town, I was soon floating in long corridors of green, between hedges taller even than I on my bicycle, with an occasional glimpse of a field, cows, a farmhouse.
Those were wonderful moments, those long spinning rides through quiet country places. I had the open road to myself because few cars were able to get fuel in the middle of the Second World War. How fondly I think of those times, the hedges brushing me now and then, a bird screeching indignantly as her roadside nest was threatened by me, a tall marauder on his high contraption.
On those whirling days I saw things, images that to this day hang in my mind’s gallery:
An old woman sitting outside her cottage, the sun giving impossible luster to her rusty black shawl. A serene farmer sitting on his cart, smoking his pipe, the blue plume curling in the air as his horse plods to the field. A muscled thatcher high on the ridge of a house, cutting the willow rod to the length of his arm, and then bunching golden straw under the willow rod to make the roof as bright as the sun itself. Barefoot children running alongside my bicycle, trying to keep up with me. The green weed smell of a roadside stream where I stopped to get a drink and found myself waist-deep in wild mint
.
No war or rumors of war in these places, just scenes that could have been observed at any time in the previous hundred years in that part of Ireland. That’s what I loved about my job—I traveled also in the past.And so I went that morning, heading from Killarney down to Valentia Island, a place with nobody west of it, as they like to say, until the island of Manhattan.
Let me use this moment, as you ride along with me, to get something off my chest. Every story costs you something; as you tell it, you give it away—but that’s all right; generosity comes with the storyteller’s gift. In this case though, as my recollection will demonstrate, I’ve had to consider another element, very different from the impulse of generosity—I’ve had to weigh the anguish I’m reopening.
By telling the tale of Kate Begley and me, with its wide canvas, its wild swings of emotion, its heroes and villains, and its extraordinary conclusion, I’m opening old wounds to examine why I took the actions that I did, some of them terrible. Once more I’m hurting myself, and even though I long since traveled past
“If I’m in Derry,” I said, “maybe we can go out to Donegal or somewhere, and you can hear some of the things I hear.”
“Write me,” he said, with another champion handshake, and at that moment the desire to like him was born in me. But how often it would be challenged! My postcard to Miss Begley, sent next morning from Killarney, read, “To use his own word—he’s neat.”
They drove off, I cycled away, each of us roaming the globe in his own fashion. I think that I had the greater affliction—because wanderlust is based on the homing instinct; we’re always looking for the one place in which we’ll feel safest. Miller already had such a place, on some big farm in a far continent.
As a stopgap for home, I liked bed-and-breakfast houses with older landladies; they know in their bones when a person wishes to eat in silence.In Killarney I kept returning to Mrs. Cooper, on account of her tact and her cooking. Also, I liked her, probably on the basis that we tend to like people who seem to like us. She knew some relatives of mine in County Limerick, and she had a gift of knowing exactly how much conversation to make about them or anything else. Furthermore, her husband had died in the previous war and, childless, she understood people who want to be left alone.
On the Sunday night, I stayed with her. Monday morning after breakfast, I waited for a shower to pass by, said good-bye to Mrs. Cooper, and set out for the long ride to Valentia Island. I hadn’t yet decided where to stay for the coming night, but as usual I’d take steps to secure a roof before dark.
Clear of Killarney town, I was soon floating in long corridors of green, between hedges taller even than I on my bicycle, with an occasional glimpse of a field, cows, a farmhouse.
Those were wonderful moments, those long spinning rides through quiet country places. I had the open road to myself because few cars were able to get fuel in the middle of the Second World War. How fondly I think of those times, the hedges brushing me now and then, a bird screeching indignantly as her roadside nest was threatened by me, a tall marauder on his high contraption.
On those whirling days I saw things, images that to this day hang in my mind’s gallery:
An old woman sitting outside her cottage, the sun giving impossible luster to her rusty black shawl. A serene farmer sitting on his cart, smoking his pipe, the blue plume curling in the air as his horse plods to the field. A muscled thatcher high on the ridge of a house, cutting the willow rod to the length of his arm, and then bunching golden straw under the willow rod to make the roof as bright as the sun itself. Barefoot children running alongside my bicycle, trying to keep up with me. The green weed smell of a roadside stream where I stopped to get a drink and found myself waist-deep in wild mint
.
No war or rumors of war in these places, just scenes that could have been observed at any time in the previous hundred years in that part of Ireland. That’s what I loved about my job—I traveled also in the past.And so I went that morning, heading from Killarney down to Valentia Island, a place with nobody west of it, as they like to say, until the island of Manhattan.
Let me use this moment, as you ride along with me, to get something off my chest. Every story costs you something; as you tell it, you give it away—but that’s all right; generosity comes with the storyteller’s gift. In this case though, as my recollection will demonstrate, I’ve had to consider another element, very different from the impulse of generosity—I’ve had to weigh the anguish I’m reopening.
By telling the tale of Kate Begley and me, with its wide canvas, its wild swings of emotion, its heroes and villains, and its extraordinary conclusion, I’m opening old wounds to examine why I took the actions that I did, some of them terrible. Once more I’m hurting myself, and even though I long since traveled past
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