Connemara Whispers

My mother's last wish on a bed at Mass General was for her second unmarried son to go to Ireland.

"You've roamed the workd and never returned to your native land. I want you to go out there and meet a woman like your sisters, cousins, or aunts. I'll leave you money for that trip."

And like that I was obliged to heed my mother's wish, even though its incestuous nature scared the bejus out of me. She passed in January of 1997 and left me $6000. Andrew Camp, an English friend, arranged an autumn rental of a cottage west of Galway from Lord Robert Guinness. My cousin from Hawaii Ty Spaulding planned on joining me. Late August I landed in Dublin and spent an evening with my aristocratice English-Irish landlord at the Shelburne Hotel bar. The next morning a train ride from Euston Station to Galway. A night of the craic in the lively college town. On the 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 roamed the boglands. Ty Spaulding, 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 a capsized carrack noticed my attention to a young bartender. Sheillah. Eighteen and ready to leave town for good.

"Whatcha lookin' at?"

"THe wall."

"Liar. 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 son. First sons in the West of Ireland inherited the family farm, the tie-dyed sheep and cows, and a bacholer's life, because every woman in left the Connemarra by eighteen, unless they had been knocked up by a teenage boyfriend. Just the way it was. A green county of rain with the whispers of Ireland are blown across the bigs into the ocean. Days I wrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN and wandered the bogs to end uo at Keoghs with Ty to drink my drink and sleep in a haunted schoolhouse.

Aah, true Ireland, the Connemarra. 1997___

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Much more to come__