"Remarkable Trials and Interesting Memoirs of the Most Noted Criminals"
from 1740 - 1764

It is warmest by the fire.

A library of books to browse.

An AGA that has been burning coal for 50 years in the yellow kitchen down a stone staircase to the basement, cheery light from a huge casement window, still. Tea by a long wooden table, scrubbed and ancient.

Going back into memory, lovely.

Dundrum is not humdrum

I have been having issues with blogging and do not possess enough geek skills to dig myself out of what has seemed like an intractable mess since arriving in Dublin a week ago. But I will find a way, and rather than write an entire entry only to see it disappear into the ether (noooooooo) I will start small and see if I can edit as I go along.
Here goes!
Part II:
This will be a bit higgledy piggedly (like the streets of every town here) so bear with me until I can import the posts I've saved so far. I'll just take up where we are today and keep going...
We arrived in Dundrum after a bit of a white knuckle day. Arlene volunteered to drive (bless her!) during the planning phase of the trip but once we had made our way by train and taxi to the small town of Portadown in the heart of the Northern Ireland countryside, she started to have second thoughts.
"It's a stick shift!" she mouthed to me after the manager of the car hire place showed her how to work the car. Driving on the left side of the road is hard enough without having to deal with shifting, and I had reserved an automatic, so we endured a lot of eye-rolling by the manager but he went off to locate another car.
Then we were off.
Kind of like the first time you took the wheel in your father's station wagon, and I was the lead-footed passenger trying hard to be helpful "Look left!" without cringing every time Arlene skimmed the hedges on my side of the car.
To be fair, it is a real brain teaser to be driving on the other side of vehicle and keeping as close to the middle white line as possible while trying to wrap your head around the fact that cars are coming at you from the right, rather than the other side. Sort of like trying to write with your left hand. I could tell when a truck or bus was coming because the car would drift slightly toward the hedges that line the road (no shoulders), or worse, a stone wall. I found myself leaning toward her as if I could influence anything, and sometimes I had to force my eyes away to keep my sanity.
We had a GPS so as navigator my job was to let her know when we were coming up to a turn, or a roundabout. Fortunately the roundabouts in the country are wee ones and not like the heavily travelled 5 exit kind you find in the city. After a bit things began to normalize.\
Then we hit a pothole. Actually a series of small ones in a row.
Both of us yelped at the same time but it was over so fast and we were still moving forward that we just kept going, grumbling about potholes in roads so narrow there would be no way to avoid them.
It wasn't until we stopped for gas about 10 minutes later that we realized our front tire was completely flat. The gas station lady in the tiny hamlet wasn't really helpful but someone in line offered to bring her son around to change the tire and when he did we realized the car only had a temporary spare so we were sent off to the nearest garage for a fix. The tire, it turned out, was split at the rim so after some negotiation, the mechanic convinced the car hire place that we couldn't have possibly done it without a weakness in the tire wall so they paid for a replacement.
Then the GPS stopped working.
Driving in tiny country roads that bend and weave and have unmarked sign posts is neigh on impossible without help but we were close enough to our destination that a few hand gestures from the mechanic and we were on our way.
Dundrum. A tiny stretch of houses and shops along a tidal bay, a blue stretch of the Irish Sea beyond. We spent the rest of the afternoon combing the wet sand for shells, and photographing the landscape, hiking up a steep hill to the remains of Dundrum Castle.
There was a card for us in the room from our host at the nearby seaside estate. "Welcome to Ireland", it read. "Please do give us a call."
Tomorrow.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Bacon and a Man Named Liddy: Dublin

Sunday, April 25, Dublin
Thank you Pat Liddy, for the wake-up call on Irish Breakfasts. Arlene and I have mastered walking with various blisters and sock issues (every pair I brought seems to want to migrate down into the toe of my boots so they've been dumped in the trash) but we are humbled by 70-something tour guide who is taking us through the hidden streets of Dublin at a speed we young folks apparently can't match. I blame my lag behind on the frequent stops I make to take pictures but the fact is Pat Liddy is in better shape than I am and as sobering as that may be I can't seem to turn down a scone or the bacon-laden breakfasts yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Irish breakfasts are both a curse and a necessary evil. I've been starting my morning with more food than I usually consume in an entire day and have had to gradually change my routine to prevent cholesterol overload. Since they are presented as a fait acompli, it's taken a few tries to overcome my feeling of obligation to eat everything - who knew how many bits of meat could fit on a plate already loaded down with a perfectly poached (and delightfully runny yolked) egg, toast, boiled tomato, buttered toast, beans, and fruit, placed next to juice and milky tea? Besides the ham, bacon, and sausages, our B&B in Dublin served a small patty of something that was identifiably meat but otherwise mysterious in it's cultural and four-legged origin. Both of us left that particular item alone after one experimental bite, and I've been feeling quite guilty lately about the amount of food I have started to abandon (sorry, pig!) despite my best efforts.

Blaming my overloaded stomach, I try to keep up with Pat Liddy as he briskly winds his way through tiny alleys and crowded 18th century marketplaces as we struggle to keep up. Lithe and energetic, silver-haired Liddy is the perfect specimen of a person who does not indulge in Irish breakfasts. Dressed in a long wool coat, trilby hat and carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder he is every bit the professorial image of what you expect a walking guide to be. Running his famous 2.5 hour walks through the storied and often hallowed ground of literary and historical Dublin is his retirement career. We know he's written several books and sent two children through Trinity College, Dublin's famous (and very old) university but we speculate on what he did before this job. He's educated and kindly (professor?), witty and urbane (advertising executive?) and in superlative condition (yoga teacher?).

Aside from the two tidbits on his personal life mentioned above he is not forthcoming on any subject save his beloved city, and we are learning about it from the ground up. Fishamble Street, once next to the sea, now obscured by acres of landfill and a very ugly military-style City Hall, the 20' stone wall surrounding the old Viking city, battlements and a river rushing below us under them, hidden from view but audible on quiet mornings. Bullet holes in statues and buildings from various civil uprisings, the loss of almost all the country's historical archives during an ill-conceived bombing of the public records office in 1922. In Dublin, as in many parts of Ireland, the English are reviled, but Pat Liddy keeps it light - he has British tourists after all, a new era of detante after the peace treaty in Northern Ireland.

Our tour takes longer than advertised - there is only one of these each day, after all, and we ask so many questions that the afternoon stretches on, the shadows lengthening over Dublin Castle, I search for echoes of aristocracy in every grand building whitewashed over if only to get closer to the ancestral connection I am weaving daily here. The modern city is barely visible, bits of glass thrust up between endless brick facades distinguished only by their colorful doors, Edwardian, Regency, Dutch, Scottish plain. Here there is an upstairs and downstairs, a place for every level of society once kept firmly in check. Kitchens that stretch out underneath the streets, dark places where so many once toiled, now tombs for storage, carriage entrances used for car parks, window boxes left empty. In old cities where a thousand years is only part of the story, change is not as swift as it might appear in billboards, memory is left intact in these places. The past and the future intermingle and we, the visitors, are left to speculate as to how they will continue to co-exist.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Snakes and Leprechauns: Dublin Day One

snakes and leprechauns!

No matter how experienced one is at world travel, technology is something we have to learn to do without. It may be an illusion that things have changed dramatically since the days when letters home once a month sent by packet boat or tramp steamer, because I have proof. My blogs, written in the airport (where I almost missed my flight), hotel rooms and on the train have been eaten every day since we arrived, despite my best efforts, and I can't find an explanation. And for a writer there is no greater frustration than having something disappear forever, rewritten (twice), until there isn't much left to say except "snakes and bastards!!!"

But I am persevering, humbled by my apparent lack of real technology mastery, and writing everything first on the iPad's word platform and then copying it into wordpress for blog publication. At least now, when the page goes mysteriously blank I won't be left sitting here wondering if I should chuck the whole thing. The daily diary will still exist, and I may have to re-constitute the experience once I get home.

I'll recap my first post, albeit briefly - and perhaps my stab at the proclivities of vanity are to blame for the apparent mischievousness of the leprechauns who have been messing with my iPad. For those of you who want to stay in touch daily with family back home, my suggestion are as follows: a)forget using facetime because the double-chinned, military-grade super dooper camera visuals make anyone look like crap, b) those cheap 'multi-country' cellphones like Eurobuzz aren't worth the $29.00 if you can use your regular cellphone for about the same price (.79/min) and c) use Viber, a free app that is better than Skype because once you install it and find WiFii (all our hotels/B&B's have it) you can call or text anyone else who has the same app for free.

That's it for Day One. I am really in Ireland and will try again in the virtual tomorrow (read 10 minutes because I have a lot of catching up to do if this works).

And the striped sox must go....

Some part of me still thinks I'm 25 and that's partly because when I was 25 I felt more like an over forty-year-old than the naive, unwieldy, immature youngster I still was.  Wobbly as I was on my feet, I was boldly crashing forward with every aspect of my life: marriage, film career, vice-presidency, expensive car, self-important Hollywooooood through and through.

Part II was a bit different and I blame my lack of age-awareness on the fact that I clung to the notion I was a late bloomer.  Which I actually was.  When I left my job at the studio and went off to Canada to rediscover myself as a writer, I was suitably homeless for a while (if staying in a friend's guest house counts) jobless, and then looking for paying work anywhere I could.   My relationships weren't working out so well either. Once I'd let go of the career marriage, my taste in men hadn't matured beyond the Justin Timberlake stage and I was picking one tempermental lost soul after another.

My solution was to jettison any trappings of age to stay in a kind of time-travelling stasis, one that was forgiving of all my mistakes, and I think it actually worked for me.  At an age when, in past centuries, women were rotund dowagers wheeling around in wicker chairs and playing whist, I started my real married life, got a kid, and jumped into the PTO head first.  They say children keep you young and so far this has worked wonderfully for me.

For the first six years of Sweetpea's life I lived in seven pairs of yoga pants and assorted tee-shirts and just as I envisioned, my fashionista focus disappeared into diapers and home videos of baby steps. But inevitably, the need to bounce a wet child up and down on my lap or crawl around on all fours half the day morphed into a more grown-up lifestyle and I realized that my wardrobe, as practical as it was, would no longer suffice.  Yes, I was still the mother of a young child but no, the thigh-high boots and skinny sweaters weren't working anymore.  No longer in the market for the pricier styles of days past, I gravitated to Forever 21 and found that it had gravitated....away from me.

At first I thought it was because my backside and frontside were no longer in agreement.  Somewhere along the line the fat that was meant to push my bootie up into a nicely rounded shape had decided it was better utilized protecting my internal organs from baby stroller handles or carrying a 40 pound monkey-child who was clinging to my neck for dear life.  Thanks, belly fat!  So nothing I tried on in Forever 21 fit.  Even the large sizes.  Someone should tell the buyers over there about the apparent obesity problem in America because I'm a size 10 and sized out of the joint.  Everything was too tight, too short, or too transparent.

Then it hit me.  The dreaded words I'd heard from my mother decades earlier when I'd seen an adorable Madonna-ish flouncy dress and though she'd look smashing in it.  She was, after all, quite a lovely woman with a great figure.
"Oh, dear, she said with kindly dismay, "that's too YOUNG for me."
I didn't get it.
Now I do.

Cut to the other day when I was going through my packing list for Ireland and trying to figure out how to cover the bare skin peek-a-boo of leg between my ankle boots and slim wool pants (thank you, Lycra).  I need both for the upcoming trip to Ireland where I'll be doing a lot of walking.  I was proud of the boots - they were a step up from the Merrill clogs I'd been wearing for the past eight years.  And more comfortable than the 4" heeled, square-toed knee-highs I'd saved from a time when I walked the fashionable advertising floor.

Still, my legs are as white as a dead flounder (probably fit right in there in Ireland) but not an attractive wedge between boot and pant no matter how great they look in a Macy's ad.  Then I had a great idea!  Why not wear a pair of black and white striped socks.  In the gauzy image of my mind's eye it looked like the perfect solution.  Practical, and hip.  Maybe even a bit edgy.
I slept on the idea.
In the morning I had to face the fact that these kinds of Pippi Longstocking ideas might have worked when I was actually 25, but sadly, at my age it would be more reminiscent of the crazy cat lady who wears purple and, like the famous poem, uses her umbrella to rattle picket fences and prove she's not going gentle into that good night.
No thanks.
I've resigned myself to the fact that I've got to think more like Kate Winslett (she may be south of 40 but she's quickly aging into her British dotage), and less like Lady Gaga.  A plain pair of black socks, ones that hopefully don't fall down and reveal my legs like a bit of granny's underwear.

But whatever happens, I'm not giving up my pigtails.  Not until I look into the mirror at some future point and realize that they too have had their day. Then I'm going to shave my head and become a performance artist.  Apparently if you are a performance artist you can be bald and everyone thinks it's cool.

Still packing.

You have been warned!

Dear Readers:
In about three weeks I leave for Ireland to do research for my next novel.  Those of you who read my blog with pleasant anticipation because it comes only once in a blue moon may be shocked when the frequency increases exponentially and wish it would disappear into the corn field (Billy Mumy/Twilight Zone reference for those of you who missed this episode).  I hope not, but if you do, I promise there will not be a test when I get back.

I'm off to root around like a truffle pig for those historical treasures which I will hope delight all of us, and photos will be accompanying the journey.  Thanks, Bob, for producing (like magic) my new compact Canon SLR.  Just in time, too, because as soon as it arrived, there must have been a stand-off in the dark between my new camera and my old, trusty point and shoot because when I tried to turn it on in the morning it had died.
Wow.
I hope I come across more of these unexplainable and yet inspiringly mysterious coincidences while oversees.  If not, the whole thing might make a good travel guide.

Talk soon!

Lotto Fever

$656,000000.26 cents (not including postage)

Several years ago my sisters and I purchased a lottery ticket in the tiny Lake Huron beach town of Southampton.  I don't play the lottery very often but in Canada they don't take any taxes from your winnings so I get a ticket there every time I visit just on principal.  Gotta love a country that respects the gambler.  We didn't win, but this is what we did do - pick 3 of the 5 numbers (they didn't have a Mega number back then).  When my sister called to tell me I though we'd be at least a little bit rich.  Apparently not.  3 out of 5 numbers gets you $5.00. This is why Canada can afford not to take taxes.  They just keep the money.

Anyway, like most of the country this past week we bought tickets for the multi-state powerball thingy. Collectively, we anted up 1.2 billion dollars, a figure that is even more staggering than the winnings pot, which climbed to new heights at a chunk over 650 million dollars.  We seem to have no problem funding what amounts to a small nation's yearly budget, but a parcel tax to pay for teachers and school supplies here in California?  No friggin' way!!!  We are a nation of dreamers, after all, and a dollar toward that dream seems easier to part with the harsh realities of the household, or the state budget.

Bob and I rarely talk about what we would do if we were super rich, but the most fun 99.9999999% of us are going to ever get out of gambling like this is imagining what we would do if we were super rich.  And I mean super-duper rich. In that moment of possibility and before the numbers are pulled, what we imagine is technically possible.

We talked about the fact that his office pool included everyone in the front office and the four senior executives who run the place.  If they'd won, the entire company would have shut down because most of them would have picked up their purses, nail-polish, lunch bags and walked out.  This would have left 100 other employees in the manufacturing side wondering what the hell to do.  Bob said he would stay for a year to help transition in a new super-amazing-runs-everything guy to replace him, but would the others do the same? Doubtful.  At best the rest of the management team, (who are also company owners), would have been scrambling to find replacements, and this would have been very stressful.

But what about afterwards?  My standard answer to the 'what-would-you-do-if-you-were-suddenly-rich?' question hasn't changed much over the years.  I would start a foundation and give scholarships to kids who have good but not perfect grades  - providing full tuition for college as well as trade schools, depending on their interest and goals.  I've since amended this to add girls who are interested in science and math careers, because there aren't enough of them and my niece, Jenifer, is totally outnumbered in her freshman class at Cal Tech.  My other two projects would be a theatre, which I would sustain with an endowment, and a publishing imprint for aspiring writers.  Then I would move from our lovely little home and build a little bit bigger one ( just add a guest house and office) that was completely eco-friendly, made of recycled materials, off-the grid power-wise, and had a great ocean view.

These flights of fancy can be a learning experience because when I asked Bob what he would do with his millions he told me that after he had transitioned in a new person at work he would set up his own foundation and give as much money as he could to improve elementary schools in Los Angeles.  And make this his full time job.  Who knew?  I do think this career path came about after becoming a father; and just like women become conscious of every baby on the planet once they decide to become mothers, Bob's priorities in life have been heavily influenced by his new role in life, his favorite of all time: Dad.

After we added a few sheckles to ensure all nieces and nephews got free college educations, we speculated that having the ability, as Titanic star Kate Winslett did recently, to fly 50 relatives over from England to at the re-release of the movie in 3D.  Extra cash would be nice as we could really fund family-style vacations in pretty much anyplace we wanted.

One surprising thing: Bob said he would give me a chunk of the winnings first, and the rest would be for 'us' to decide.  This autonomy is a testament as to why we have made our old-fashioned (one income-earner) marriage work so well.  I may not be bringing in a paycheck every week, but the confidence shown by my husband that I would make the best of the time and flexible freedom he provides has paid off.  I am doing things for our community, for our daughter, for her school, for my creative life that enrich us all and he seems quite proud of the extended reach his patronage has provided.

One cannot help wonder how many people who have won their millions have done anything other than spend it on a lot of bling and ended up flat broke, like Dennis Rodman.  We've all heard the stories about how winning the lottery ruined marriages, lives, like a horrible curse.  But there are others who have done good things with their share, perhaps out of the spotlight.  Lottery winners don't have to go public so even though there may be statistics out there, they may not be totally accurate.  I hope so.

Meanwhile I have laundry to do.