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Monday, July 17, 2006

Re-entry

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Here I am with the elusive and mysterious Janet Lyon in a pub in Sandycove.  (Nice work by Jamie, n’est-ce pas?) So I finally went to Ireland for the first time in my life.  Even though I’m actually Irish on my mother’s side and would be hailed by all the Clarkes up and down the West, I’ve never set foot in the country.  “You really should acknowledge your Irishness more often,” Janet said one night at dinner.  I replied that the whole hockey thing does tend to tilt the field in favor of the French-Canadian wing of my family history, and that, by contrast, I know nothing about hurling or Gaelic football.  But yes, I’m half Irish, and once upon a time and a very good time it was, I seriously considered becoming a Joycean.  Even worse, I was a budding narratologist at the time, and I remarked to my advisor, Michael Levenson, that I wanted to do for Ulysses what Gérard Genette had done for Proust, namely, a meticulous sentence-by-sentence parsing of temporality and narrative.  “Um,” Michael replied, “you might want to hold that thought.” And so I have, all this time.

Janet had been teaching in Ireland since early June, spending her first two weeks in extremely remote corners of the island.  How remote?  “I don’t know,” said the Druids, some years ago, “this place looks too weird for us.” That’s how remote.  Then she moved her class to Dublin for the next two weeks, and Jamie and I met her after her students departed.  More precisely, Jamie and I wandered around downtown Dublin trying to find her after her students departed: Janet explained that she had to see them safely off, since it would be a Bad Thing for the Penn State study-abroad enterprise if professors lost some of their students along the way, so Jamie and I took a cab from the airport all by ourselves.  We arrived at 7 am, and we had only the sketchiest information about where Janet was staying, because it’s just more fun to travel that way.  Now, keep in mind (if you would be so kind) that Jamie and I had just come from Vancouver to Pittsburgh on a red-eye in late June.  Then he and Nick and I went to New York for the long July 1-4 weekend.  Then Nick dropped us off at JFK for our 8 pm flight, and headed off to his own Nick locations.  I flew over Long Island watching random fireworks explode over Brooklyn and my boyhood home in Flushing, Queens.  And then Jamie and I got a few hours’ sleep before arriving in a foreign country and giving sketchy directions to a cab driver.  So we were fairly addled, is what I’m saying.  And yet, we somehow managed to bump into Janet as she returned from her local café carrying coffee and Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

We spent July 5-7 in Dublin, which, in retrospect, was not nearly enough time—especially for a first visit.  Then, gathering up the proceeds from Janet’s summer-teaching gig (which involved mountains of work on her part), we flew to Nice for a week in the same south-of-France house we’d shared with one of my college friends and his family back in 2004.  Two years ago, when I returned from our first-ever French vacation (part of the record of which can be seen on the “family pix” page of this here web site), I refused to blog about it, except to deliver myself of my theories about soccer and hideous French pop music.  “Somehow,” I wrote, “it feels too self-indulgent, even for a blog, where one always asks oneself, ‘self-indulgent as compared to what, exactly?’” But that was the Era of Blog Reticence, when I had a mere five hundred readers a day.  This is the Era of Blog Expansion, in which one’s bloggedy self-indulgence increases proportionally with one’s readership.  Besides, I have returned with many blogworthy tales and profound experiences and a couple of cool pictures.  I was even sitting in a public square in Fayence for the World Cup final, I’ll have you know.  But I missed the overtime, because it was after 10 pm local time and we had a sleepy child (not mine) to take care of.  Did anything dramatic happen?

So, dear readers, for the foreseeable future, this blog will try to serve as a respite from the End Times, which, as I learned upon returning to the United States, have officially begun in Lebanon.  I must admit that the shock of re-entry, at such times, can be quite severe.  Over the weekend, as I caught up with email and bill-paying, I discovered that most European nations (including the ones we’d visited) had judiciously condemned Israel’s disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive response to the latest Hamas-Hezbollah outrages, whereas the warbloggers, hatemongers, and assorted End Timers on these shores were condemning those European nations for appeasement of terror, etc.  Nick filled us in on the details as we drove back from JFK through central Brooklyn.  Janet, who’d managed to avoid all news of the dying world for six weeks, became numb.  She had asked me, as we walked up and down our mountain on our last day in France, for a small dose of Wingnut News so that she could try to re-acclimate to the U.S., and I told her about David Horowitz’s advanced-dementia campaign against the Travel section of the New York Times.  But even that tidbit, which sent her briefly into anaphylactic shock, was inadequate preparation for the crisis in Lebanon.

“Holy Mother of Moloch, Nick,” I said as I weaved through Atlantic Avenue traffic.  “What part of ‘disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive response to terrorism’ don’t these lunatics understand?”

Nick looked askance at me, silently.

“Oh, yeah,” I murmured.  “The all of it part.  Right.”

I will begin the week, accordingly, with something small and inconsequential.  Because our travels involved a level of planning that made the Apollo-Soyuz mission look like a casual get-together for tea, we had to fly from Dublin to Nice at 6 am on July 8, which meant that we had to “wake” “up” at 3:30 after meeting friends for a few pints in Grafton Street.  All went well, even though the Dublin Airport had had not one but two bomb scares in the previous week.  But when we touched down in Nice, I discovered to my dismay that a previous passenger had decided to deposit a wad of gum on the floor under my seat—and I made this discovery not by picking up the gum with my sneaker but by picking it up with my unshod sock, for I had foolishly taken the liberty, in trying to catch a bit more sleep, of discreetly removing my shoes at some point during the flight.  I therefore walked all through the Nice airport (and customs) with a most unpleasant sensation in my left foot, as my sock began to adhere to the inside of my sneaker.  When at last we retrieved our baggage and I was able to obtain a replacement sock from my suitcase, I excused myself, and retired to the bathroom to de-gum myself while Janet and Jamie made their way to the rental-car desk.  But alas!  The gum in question turned out to be an adhesive of extraordinary tenacity, such that the sock was now chemically bonded to the lining of the sneaker: as I slipped off the sneaker, the lining remained attached to the ball of my foot, dangling from the damaged sock.  Indeed, the wad’s remarkable staying power suggested not only that it was a virulent strain of gum I was dealing with, but also that it had been deposited on the floor of the fuselage not very long before it found my foot.  For even after I managed to rip the sock free, the gum-residue on the sneaker lining was sufficient to mess with the new sock, thereby requiring me to take off the shoe again, this time to try to scrub the lining with hot water in the hope of counteracting the powerful adhesive properties of this most vexatious gum.

I’ll carry on with still more glamorous and exciting tales of travel abroad tomorrow, when I will ask you to experience with me the excitement of renting a car in Nice.  Until then, here’s a shot of Janet with the very worldly (and very tall!) Jamie in the Dublin Zoo.

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From June 26 to July 12, folks, Jamie went to the Vancouver Aquarium, the Bronx Zoo, the Dublin Zoo, and the Musée Océanographique de Monaco.  Which must be some kind of world record. 

Many thanks to Lindsay and Chris for wonderful guest-blogging!  Reading your entries was one of the few enjoyable things about coming back.  Thank you so much for tending this lonely blog with your grace and your wit.

Oh, and by the way, French pop music still sucks.  On the radio, for my torment as I hauled my Citroen up the mountainside:  a techno remix of “Eye of the Tiger” and a techno remix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” It’s as if they’re daring us to do something about it, really it is.

Posted by Michael on 07/17 at 10:45 AM
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