26th May 2003

Monday was a day off on Denis’ farm. I slept in until 11- the latest I had slept in for many weeks. I woke up to a silent house with an adrenaline surge; a guilty feeling that made me hop up out of bed, get dressed, and hurry outside to look for everyone.

I found them all unloading the trucks from the weekend. Soft fruit, cucumbers, greens, and things like that were to be wheeled to the pigs, while apples and anything else worth keeping were to be put back in the warehouse.

I told Henrike I was sorry I slept in, but she just sweetly laughed at me and said not to worry, it was my day off. But I couldn’t leave them alone to do all the work- it would all go so much faster with me than without me. And besides, I would have felt guilty if I let other people work on their day off while I just enjoyed mine.

Two hours later, we finished working and each went to have our own quiet days. I sat down in the quiet kitchen writing letters to my Dad, his parents, my Mom, and two kids, Chuck and Jesse, from the after school program I had worked in before I left the states.

With each of these people, I felt the slight guilt of an unmet obligation. I didn’t really want to write them a letter. It wasn’t anything to do with them at all, I just didn’t really feel I had anything important to say.

But they all had said they wanted me to write. So even though I did not feel especially important to any of them, I did write. For three hours I wrote, just filling the page with whatever words and feelings came to me in the moment of writing- which turned out to be more than I had thought it would when I was only thinking of it in the abstract.

As I wrote the return addresses on my envelope “Talbotstown, Kiltegan,” I had a thought. Right now, sure, I was living in Talbotstown, Kiltegan, but when I leave here and go somewhere else, I’ll have lived in Ireland. When I finally go back to America, I’ll have lived in Europe.

It was in this strange moment I truly became an American. Before this moment, I had always been from Pittsfield, from Massachusetts, or from the Northeast. But right now in this moment, I was from America. It made me smile to think of it.

I took a very long shower after writing those letters. Standing daydreaming in the narrow shower cabinet with the electric shower box buzzing on the wall in front of me.*

The highlight of my day was when we went to see the second Matrix film. Well, no. The highlight was all the hours of excitement and speculation beforehand. Actually seeing the movie left me bored and angry.

I was just so angry that these characters put so much stock in their “real” world even after showing us how completely believable a fake world can be. How do they know their crazy underground town is real? How do they know they shouldn’t wake up from that too? Maybe Neo killing the robot by thinking hard at it right before the end points to all that?

But that’s not even getting to the heart of it. All the logical objections and critiques seem to lend more seriousness to the movie than it deserves. I just thought the movie sacrificed interesting concepts and questions in favor of more car chases and gunplay and pseudo-electro-French-villainish talk about how swearing in French is like a luxurious expensive ass-wiping with silk.

Notes-

*I still don’t really know what they are called. But they are an electric box on the shower wall, the size of an old cassette player. They offer hot water on-demand. I had seen them suggested as a green alternative in American homes, but here in Ireland, where so many homes did not have central heating anyway, these seemed to be standard.

25th May 2003

This morning Denis brought Henrike, Hilary-Anne, Kera, and me to a much smaller market in the middle of the Wicklow Mountains. I was so overwhelmed with the newness of the place and the newness of the job, that I didn’t even ask where we were or take note of how we got there.

I was just happy to be breathing thinner cleaner air in the hills in a kind of courtyard area under whitewashed walls, sorting, bagging, and weighing cherries. That’s what I did most of the day.

For so many reasons, a whole slew of reasons, I thought almost every woman is a little bit (or more; sometimes quite more!) attractive. I saw a woman and could imagine what it would be to think of her as the most beautiful woman in the world.

And I showed every woman who came into that market a tasteful appreciation for their particular beauty by smiling at each one who came through my section and offering her a cherry.

I sold an awful lot of cherries that day.

There was one lady, a single mother of four, wearing a shapely dress, and hiding red teary eyes behind sunglasses. She, like many people tended to, opened up to me and said how badly she needed a vacation.

It hurt a little to see her so sad. I somehow felt responsible for her happiness while she was with me. But what could I do? Just listen. I gave her a cherry and she smiled at me so broadly.

We continued to talk, which in this case mostly meant me listening to her, and she bought a bag of cherries. On her way out she turned and called over her shoulder, “I’ll think of you every time I eat these, Michael!”

That sent a little Romantic thrill through me for some reason. A bittersweet glow in my heart. A tingle through my stomach. But I didn’t linger there on those feelings and try to recreate them or cling to them. Soon afterwards, another woman came by, and I smiled at her and offered her a cherry.

That night, before falling asleep, for reasons that are unclear to me even now, I thought again about the time I rode on top of Jason’s red Subaru, straddling the roof as if I were a midget on a fat pony, clinging to the roof-rack, and sometimes laughing wildly when I ducked under low branches, as Jason sped down the winding, pot-holed, dirt road late one night with several friends.

I felt the sick weightlessness and the giddy, dangerous joy of it and my whole body tensed and arced as I let out a long and low belly giggle alone in a silent room in a quiet house late at night, gazing at the stars in my skylight.