Home From Home

7 minute read

It’s 1986 in a hotel in Dunfanaghy, one of the most northerly parts of Donegal. At 12, I am on the cusp of being too old for the fancy dress competition - this is likely going to be my last time entering so I’d better make my costume a good one. My dad suggests I go as an Irish holidaymaker which would be an easy ensemble of our rain gear from the car and the big new golf umbrella that we bought when our Dublin one proved itself no match for “real” rain. But I have other plans - I am going as The Lady in Red.

Chris de Burgh’s breakthrough ballad has been the soundtrack to my summer so far but judging by the four other “Ladies in Red” who show up, I’m not the only fan. It’s an impossible task for the judges to pick out only one of us, although, with the benefit of three decades of hindsight, even if they had, I don’t think my red crepe paper outfit would have earned me a gold. Instead, they choose a winner who is dressed as - you guessed it - an Irish holidaymaker, decked out in wellies and rain gear with a nice added touch of a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic in her top pocket. The fact that she’s my best friend at the hotel and someone who had laughed along with me at my dad’s “silly idea”, makes her victory sting a bit more, although the Club Orange and packet of Tayto Snax she buys me afterwards helps a little.

As life lessons go, there are many you could pluck from this simple story: always listen to your father; be careful who you trust; or the reinforcement of the old adage that if you have red hair, you should shy away from red clothing, even the crepe paper kind. But for me, the lasting message is more practical than that - an Irish summer has many high points, but don’t expect the sun to be one of them.

Packing for my first trip back to Ireland in 19 months is a tricky affair. For one thing, there’s the aforementioned weather, and then there’s the fact that I’ll be there for a month - first working and writing and then on actual holiday. It’s a complicated trip booked when things were more complicated, requiring quarantine, which is why I find myself alone in an Airbnb in Clare, a county I hardly know. In between my time of booking and my time of leaving, the quarantine restrictions have been lifted and Aer Lingus has pulled out of Shannon. Some people would take this as a sign and have changed their plans, but the Airbnb is fully paid for and after a year and a half of working from home alongside my wife in a one bed New York City apartment, the expanse of the West of Ireland beckons. And so, here I am.

Something I didn’t expect was to arrive in the middle of a heatwave or for my first day back to be a beach day - a real beach day, the kind where you have to apply sunscreen and can “get down” in the sea without stifling a blood-curdling scream. But here I am at the beach at Spanish Point, doing just that. After my swim I Facetime my wife who is still in bed in our apartment on the Upper West Side, just so she can see it, that the sun really does shine like this in Ireland. One upside of eased restrictions is that she is joining me in Dublin. Seeing the sun, she gets excited at the idea of having a real summer vacation in Ireland. It’s two weeks until she will arrive and I haven’t the heart to tell her just how long a time that is in any Irish summer.

That first afternoon, I find myself doing this thing in my head that I’d forgotten I do when I’m home - making comparisons. The week before, I had been in Long Beach, Long Island, our regular beach spot during the summer. On Spanish Point Beach, I notice there are more children, a wider array of what constitutes swimming attire - the GAA short is a favourite - and more space for everyone. More people seem to know each other, calling out greetings, which often involve asking each other “how’s the head?” In general, beachgoers seem to come to the beach like I remember coming to the beach in the 1980s, with towels and small bags - I only see a handful of chairs and umbrellas, no Tommy Bahama beach equipment in sight.

Watching the kids bury each other by the water’s edge I’m remembering burying my cousins, being buried by them - I can almost feel the shift of the heaviness of the sand on my limbs when I finally decided to break free. In the spanking sound of the children’s footsteps on the ripples of the sand I hear echoes of my own and wonder why I’ve never seen those ripple formations on either American coast. The sea is calm today and lying floating on my back, I remember my uncle showing me how to do this one summer in Courtown, explaining that I just needed to completely relax, something that even as an 11-year-old was apparently not my natural state.

I’m eight days in now, to this “quarantine” part of my trip, and in between the pleasing rhythm of my mornings spent running and editing my novel and afternoons and evenings working my New York day job, I’ve been exploring the beaches along the coast. Driving down the narrow lanes from my Airbnb, I listen to Aslan, U2, the Hothouse Flowers, channelling my teenage self, who, it seems, was very patriotic in her music tastes. At Kilkee, Quilty, Lahinch and of course, Spanish Point, in the kids who don’t lick their 99s fast enough so the ice-cream drips down their arms or the ones who scream because they see a jellyfish, I’m surrounded by younger versions of myself.

By now, the weather has broken - of course, it has - but in a way that only a tourist can be, I’m kind of happier with that too, the play of the changing light on the water and the landscape, the colours that are so much more vibrant in real life than on my laptop screensaver. One morning, I am running when the white glary sky turns to a smoky grey then almost black, bringing with it a sudden freak hailstorm that stings my bare legs redraw and puts my Lululemon rain jacket through its paces. Drying out here in my little kitchen that overlooks a field with horses and beyond that, Mutton Island, I wonder how I can possibly capture all these little details and micro-events that make up this feeling of being back in Ireland after all this time and what it is that I’m even writing about at all.

And then - like sometimes happens in the writing of it - what I’m feeling, what I’m writing about, becomes utterly clear: I’m writing about home, that simple letter four-letter word that has become a tricky one for me over the last decade. Since 2011, New York has been my home - in many ways, it felt like home before I’d even set foot there - but yet, when I talk about booking a flight “home” or going “home” for Christmas, New York isn’t where I mean. In the deepest sense of the word, Ireland will always be home, this place where these childhood and teenage and adult versions of me were formed, the ones I will always carry inside, no matter where I am in the world.

In five days’ time, I will drive to Dublin - to the place that really is home - and I am grateful for it all, my home here in Ireland, my home in New York and for all those different parts of me who will be packed into the Renault Clio as we embark on our journey. And who knows, I might even give a blast of The Lady in Red as I drive up the M7. You know, just for old times’ sake.

Home From Home

7 minute read

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