Upstairs in a Cork Café

We’ve gone native in Ireland.

Thank God, it's only five weeks, or the magic would keep us here eternally enchanted forevermore. Missing busses, enjoying too much, meeting fabulous people, listening through their accents deciding what they mean, sleeping in their B&Bs, flooding the bathroom.

Enjoying

Old buildings, new buildings, cemeteries & book stores, pubs, more pubs, libraries, more pubs, pulling the perfect pint, & paintings & art & cliffs with determined fog & the wind that wants to drag us along, promising to bring us back like Roy’s Guinness hat.

Here even the cows have personality & sing for us, while we, tribe of artists, scholars, painters, leaders, mothers, boyfriends, girlfriends, & husbands soak up stories & history, drink too much, work too much, sleep too little, finding stones to throw, maybe take home a new panoramic world-view. all was an unparalleled, flawless, ultimate, success.

But the dorms have shitty internet.

Escape was necessary, to send the emails, do the research, post pictures, beam thought off the island, so slam the door, slam the gate, tromp to a place with a Wi-Fi that didn’t say goodbye at weird intervals and inopportune times.

My darling complained us to the Co-op: vegetarian restaurant and bakery—he wanted dependable WI-Fi, — I wanted to visit the crowded, bloody canvases of color and intentions made by one of the early “Siouxsie and the Banshees” drummers. His water-color, acrylic, collage, chipped mirror family hangs on the walls. Waiting for me.

I loved Siouxsie. Back in the day, when I was far too young for sexual exploration & mind-bending incantations, Siouxsie was my sound track. Some guy with records, who was only gorgeous, & lived in his dad’s garage, would masturbate while I tried on different faces. He wanted what all guys wanted. But, I was fifteen & my mother was bat-shit crazy, & owned a bat.

Siouxsie’s Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit introduced me to a national shame. Street kids taunting the Irish ghost tour lobbed guilty invectives I didn’t know we shared. While at Karaoke, I never find anything remotely Siouxsie.

So, we’re in Cork, Ireland, sitting at a table upstairs at the Co-op eating nibbles & plugged in to the perfect WiFi. Men in sandals grow from the tables & we all drink healthy, vegan wine, nibble chick-peas in a questionable sauce.

The River flows outside the window. Accents flutter to the high ceiling without sprinklers or billboards or direction. Tribal friends from UNO sit at the table across from me & my life mate. An enchanting child babbles happily to her toys.

I’d be outrageously happy, & satisfied but, I’ve got four thousand words to write on Samuel Beckett, & only two days to find them. I wonder if google-translate could possibly explain what that amazing Irishman meant when he put all those words together, in the way he put them together.

He’s dead, or I’d find him & make him tell me.

I love you Ireland. Thank you, Cork.

Next summer, I’m taking an acting class.