My mother's last wish on a bed at Mass General was to go to Ireland.
"You've roamed the workd and never gone to your native land. I want you to go out there after im done and meet a woman like your sisters, cousins, or aunts."
And like that I was obliged to heed my mother's wish, even though its incestuous nature scared the bejus from my marrow. After her passing in 1997 Adrew Camp, an English friend, arranged an autumn rental of a cottage west of Galway from Lord Robert Guinness. A night in Dublin with my landlord at the Shelburne. A morning train ride from Euston Station to Galway. A night of drink in a lively town. Next dawn a bus to Cliften and a taxi to a cow town between the Seven Pins and the Atlantic Ocean. A small town. Not a woman in Ballyconeeley. Just cows and sheep roaming the boglands. My Hawaiian brother and I drank Guinness at Keough's with a handful of sad cow farmers and teenage bartenders. One night Mickie, an old fisherman living in a stone house shaped like an overtunred carrack noticed my looking a bartender. 18, ready to leave town for good.
"Whatcha lookin' at? Sheilaah. This American thinks he might have a shot at you. Whatcha think?"
Sheilaah studied me for a heartbeat with a laugh.
"Not a chance."
"There you go. Back to your beer."
Mikie was right. The old gnome was a first som. He had inherited the family farm, 5e cows, and a bacholer's life, because every woman in Ballyconeeley left the Connemarra, unless they had been knocked up by a teenage boyfriend. Just the way it was. A green county of rain where the wind carried the whispers of Ireland west to drown in the waves of the Atlantic with me wandering the bogs to end uo at Keoghs to drink my drink and sleep in a haunted schoolhouse.
Aah, true Ireland, the Connemarra. 1997___
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