And then! O, alackaday, tragedy struck with the double-edged sword of a sudden fever and a blizzard between Dublin and Belfast, landing me in a comatose state unable to swallow and Iarnród Éireann unable to run its trains to the North on time. Therefore I spent the weekend slowly puttering around my apartment, forcing liquids down my throat and trembling meekly. Very little gallivanting was had, but I did produce this thing here, in response to complaints that I don't write about Cork enough.
(If you do not like overblown silly melodramatic prose, this is not for you):
To
Cork (An Apostrophic and Apologetic Love Letter):
My
dear city,
I’ve been remiss; I’ve spent too many words
extolling the virtues of London and Dublin and Paris and Rome, of Kerry and
Tipperary and Derry/Londonderry, with little regard for your feelings. While
you’ve treated me so well these past few months I have squandered my praise on
the gaudy lights of Piccadilly and the library at Trinity without taking pause
to make my obeisance to you, the Rebel City, the People’s Republic of Cork,
like.
Sure
we’ve had our differences, like that time when you were frigid and kicked up a
wind that blew me over when I was trying to meet a friend at the bus station.
There was traffic and rain in gusts and we missed our bus and if we hadn’t been bound for free whiskey at the Jameson factory I would
have feared for my blood pressure. There’ve been the many nights I’ve strolled
home from the pubs, shoulder to shoulder with my friends against your North
Atlantic chill, loudly voicing our complaints against your lack of social
diversion. And then, I’m sorry to say, there’ve been my censures against your messy
streets, your janky apartments, your pebble-dash and pink-stucco houses, water
damaged near the river from that flood a few years back.
But
that’s unjust of me. I am an ingrate. What I really must say is this:
Cork,
I love you. Is breá liom tú, Corcaigh, as we learned yesterday in my Irish
class.
I
love how I can navigate by belfries here. Shandon Tower and Saints Mary’s and
Anne’s lie to the North. Saint Vincent’s peers down from Sunday’s Well at Saint
Finbarr’s to the South. Holy Trinity lies to the East and one anonymous spire,
presumed to be Catholic, is used as a compass needle when picking my way home.
The space between these towers contains my life here in Cork as well as a whole
host of other churches that spring out from the city quite suddenly, stately
surprises concealed by shops and flats and boarded-up construction sites.
I
love living between the two forks of the Lee, waking up every morning to clear
grey light and knowing that I’m on an island in an island, off the coast of
another island. I love the bridges that extend from said island to the far
banks of the Lee, bridges kissed by the river’s high tides and left dry by its
lows. Back in America I live in the desert. We don’t have big rivers or tides
or floods and we certainly don’t have an ocean nearby to cause them. I am
perennially enchanted by the steady sweep of the Lee and can rarely contain my
excitement when a stiff wind causes the whitecaps to flow backwards, upstream,
towards Inniscarra and Macroom and places far to the interior.
I
love to walk down Saint Patrick’s street and hear voices speaking in Irish, Chinese,
French, and Spanish, as well as every breed of English one might hope to
encounter. I love the raucous shouting: Ey
gurl, how are ya? and the man crying Echo!
every twenty seconds, regular as you please. Sirens wail and people laugh and a
car blows by blasting a club song that makes me want to dance. At night it
mostly lulls to a bubbling laugh or two, and I can hear individual footsteps
clattering up and down the street.
I
can’t say I love your dark side but I appreciate it. Fistfights in the street,
beggars huddled on the quay, empty naggans of Huzzar thrown through an
abandoned window in the sketchier parts of town all remind me to look alive and
be thankful for my four mildewed walls and age-specked ceiling that keep out
the rain. There’s the convent in Sunday’s Well that used to house a Magdalene
laundry, a convent whose windows I can pick out leaning out my balcony. I once
saw a pair of bank robbers go tearing away from the AIB on North Main street,
with Garda vans in hot pursuit. A man in a car once tried to entice me into
getting into the passenger side on my way to school. But all of that can be
taken as impermanent and the sight of the sun sparking off the blue domes of
Saint Francis’s is a reminder that these things too shall pass.
I
didn’t realize until I took my first extended ramble away from Ireland just how
much I could miss ye, Cork. There has never been a sight more welcome than the
rush of green fields and scattered clouds as my plane touched down on Irish
soil after my first week away, and the familiar path from the bus station to my
doorstep felt like second nature going home along the quays. I don’t like to
think about what I’ll be feeling in a few months when I see those fields and
clouds again from above, this time headed to Heathrow and then across the gray
Atlantic to the severe basalt crags and parched expanse of my part of America.
The
past few months have been a collection of pleasant memories strung together by
train tracks and handshakes, scented with Barry’s tea, incense, the bakeries at
the English market, riverside plants, and the wool of a new Aran sweater. It’s
been lit with a soft Irish sun, strobe lights, and the flickering of votive
candles. None of these things can be scrawled on a postcard or captured in a
letter, but they’re the things I wish I could share with the old folks at home.
They are, dear city, what I like most about you.
I
should now apologize, Cork, for grievously injuring your pride by egregious use
of the word “Corkonian.” I thought it was a legitimate way to describe all
things that are of or pertaining to you, but late one night in a chip shop the
truth was revealed by a pointy-faced lad with a cone of sweet chili chips. He
recognized the obvious American nature of my friends and me by our demure
hemlines and ineptitude with euro coins. After the usual pleasantries, he
sneered at us “I suppose you say things here are Corkonian, like,” and we, with
a sudden dread, answered the affirmative. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Next time
say ‘Corker.’” I don’t know, O city mine, whether the rude lad with the sweet
chili chips was talking shite or if I’ve really sounded like a ninny describing
things as Corkonian these many months and more.
Living
in Cork, between the steeples, I can hold my head high knowing that each
morning I walk to school past the old, crumbling home of eminent mathematician
George Boole. I can follow the same streets as did Yorkists and Anti-Treaty
revolutionaries, obstinate to the last, and I can imagine this gorgeous city
burned by Black and Tans. This is where MacCurtain was shot and where McSwiney
governed before he was taken away to Brixton to die on hunger strike. I can sit
in a café near Mardyke and know that, in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus passed
this way when the trees were blooming just as they are now. His father, after
all, went to UCC.
I
love you, Cork, like the bundled old woman huddled on the red-and-gold bridge
loves the few passersby that toss a handful of euro into her Styrofoam cup. She
mumbles bless you, bless you, God bless
you and blows me a kiss as I hurry off to class, feeling guilty and
privileged and grossly robust. It’s when you, Cork, toss a few coins my way-
the sun glancing off the Lee, the perfect reel drifting out of a pub, a chance
encounter with a stately gray heron in the middle of South Main at four in the
morning- that I remember to shower you with blessings and with kisses. Otherwise
I’m an unappreciative sod, who hardly deserves to call these cobbled streets
and flashing crosswalk signs her own.
I
remain, Cork, ever your humble servant.
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