Read Jaywalking with the Irish for Free Online

school, and are never otherwise seen again, unless they participate in some ruthlessly organized activity like the drill teams of children’s sports named U.S.A. Hockey, or U.S.A. Little League, or U.S.A. Pick-Up Sticks, each with a dozen pages of officially sanctioned U.S.A. Rules and boards of governors to look after the behavior of each U.S.A. Child.
    The creature comforts and automobile to-and-fro of modern life swallow entire families into oblivion. Televisions offer two hundred channels, video shops two thousand movies, and the Internet connects people to previously unimaginable distractions from all over the globe – but not to their neighbors. The thralls of easy celebration that united previous generations have all but vanished. Americans have become ever more serious and efficient, and increasingly antisocial, thanks to men and women slaving in equal measure, both being too exhausted and time-starved at the end of the day to pause for a social drink or street-corner chat. This guardedness may reach its worst extreme in a historically reserved New England community like Cornwall, Connecticut, where the preening of six hundred or so weekenders arriving every Friday from New York City adds an extra measure of status to set against mixing too freely. But the art of free and easy conversation is dying, and isolation is a peculiar by-product of modern affluence everywhere.
    For a long while we remained patient, sure that things would change. They did and they didn’t. Friends were made and rites of passage shared. But undercurrents rippled through our town that looked so ideal to outsiders. Here and there, the circles of sociability began to implode. Yesterday’s glowing young mothers latched onto desperate schemes for self-improvement in the battle against growing ennui and lengthening crow’s feet, while their husbands grew more distant or clouded with self-doubt. Barbs between dinner guests grew sharper, and one day we looked around and realized that things would not likely improve. One after another, couples were bitterly breaking up and sometimesreconfiguring in awkward new arrangements. Meanwhile, Jamie and I were getting restless ourselves, and older.
    Ireland had always promised a separate reality, a place where we could let down our guard and slide into the amble of conversation, both feeling like we somehow just fit. This conceit may have been no more than a holiday-steeped dream, but its sway held. We contemplated moving to certain seashore towns closer to home, but they seemed too similar to what we already had, promising more of the same dull earnestness and fastidiously programmed lives that we wanted to escape, if only for one more fling at youth or freedom before it was too late. One night in March we looked at each other and said let’s finally do it; let’s embrace one great adventure before the children grow any older and our next rendezvous with excitement will have to be postponed to our denture days.
    The decision was not easy. Our fathers were newly deceased; our widowed mothers were aging visibly; beloved uncles and aunts were reeling from one disease to another; my wife’s sister had been paralyzed from a car crash for years. Were we heartless, or selfish, or brave? Or screaming fools?
    “How can we possibly know that you are who you say you are until six months have passed?” asked the bank lady. My, but she had a point.
    Return to beginning of chapter

Chapter 3
    “Jamie, come here!” I shouted. Pottering about in the front room, I had just discovered a photograph on an alcove wall that jabbed shivers down my spine. It was of a stone cottage in a sheep-studded greensward bordered by a Kerry “beehive” – one of those conical, shoulder-high stone formations thought to have been erected for hermetic monks to sit in for weeks at a time while they meditated on the Lord or cursed the infernal rain. The foreground revealed a six-foot-long stone slab lifted high on three standing stones