“This is the moment
This is exactly what we were meant to be
This is what we do, and this is what we are”
Nick Cave
What leads to this exact moment ? Yes ,, this moment, right here, right now, with you reading this line that I wrote yesterday in what is already the past. Perhaps you are a close friend, relative, or family member and you read this out of a sense of obligation, or curiosity. Maybe we simply met once and I happened to mention that I write this. Maybe we never met at all and someone else told you about one particular edition of these posts that they knew you were interested in, the true history of the Christmas Tree, a run we all took part in, Neil Young’s visit to McKenna’s, or the invention of the Chicken Ball in the Happy Garden on Park St., and then you stayed to find out more. Or, better yet, you simply randomly came across it , and … here we all are. Even though you are most likely reading it on your own, and to yourself, so are other people, and they are frowning too at the bits that make no sense, and laughing at the bits that do, hopefully, so although it’s personal, it is a glorious common moment.
It shouldn’t exist at all.
At some point in 2011 I started following Chris Brogan online and got a weekly newsletter. Like lots of people who sign up for newsletters I read them weekly , then monthly, and then didn’t open them at all for a few weeks, but didn’t delete them, sure that I’d get to read them sometime. I was at a very low point in my life that year, and one particular night couldn’t sleep at all, so I went downstairs, made a cup of tea, filled a hot water bottle, gathered a few blankets, and made a wee nest for myself on a sofa in the sunroom, and started to read all of the Brogan newsletters that I’d saved…which it turned out were thirty six. I read them all back to back and brought myself completely up to date and the last one, which I read around 5am, announced a 16 week online course he was starting called the Blog Topics Masterclass. I signed up immediately.
The course was conducted via email and an online private Facebook group where I met the other 14 course members, two ladies from England, and twelve Americans. We submitted written exercises which Chris critiqued, and we became a wee community, giving each other tips and having a Friday night hangout with a glass of wine and swapping favourite songs.
It gave me hope when I had none. But much, much more importantly it gave me friends. Of the 14 people I met , I’m still in regular contact with 9 of them. We have exchanged gifts , books, advice, and , bizarrely, grits…don’t ask. And this week Barbara became the 4th member of the gang to visit Monaghan and have dinner in our house. But we’ll get back to that.
I have been a fan of Talking Heads since 1985-ish. One of the best nights out we had as teenagers was in Dublin where after seeing The Pogues play in the SFX we went into town and watched the Stop Making Sense movie at midnight in The Ambassador. On a Sunday afternoon in 1987 I was driving my Mum’s silver Mazda 323 along the North Road , listening to a Talking Heads tape and dancing with exaggerated arm movements to ‘Slippery People’, when I was pulled over by the Gardai…they thought I was having a fit. On Sunday I got to see David Byrne live in concert in St.Anne’s Park with our Elliott, my best friends Micky and Helena, the Mulligans, and Mad Liz. I have never attended an outdoor concert in a thunderstorm before , or attended anything better. The performance was inspiring, heartfelt and very, very, very, groovy. He spoke to the crowd in between most songs and seemed to be genuinely taken aback at the love and applause he got from the sodden crowd. He said that love and kindness in today’s world are the punk resistance, and we all roared our agreement. At one point I noticed the lovely Jando couple standing behind us and in a break between songs I turned around and shook their hands and said that I loved what they do. They were pleasantly surprised that someone had recognised them ‘out in the wild’. I follow them on Instagram, I love their art, but I stay for the happiness hat they exude doing what they love to do.
Elliott burst that lovely bubble by saying that the water had soaked through his raincoat, sweatshirt, and tee shirt and was now dribbling down his back. I told him that there were two songs left. We met Liz on the way out, huddling under a coffee hut awning. She agreed that it had been the best and wettest gig of all time. When we got to our car I told her that I had a DryRobe if she wanted to change out of her wet clothes and she smiled and cried. Elliott took off his shoes and socks and turned the heat up full until we got as far as Applegreen where I got them hot chocolate and Tayto. We chatted all the way home about the gig, other gigs, and people we love.
The next day I met my friend of 14 years in person for the first time. Barbara hails from New Jersey and takes no prisoners. She introduced me to her effervescent daughter Hanna, and her very patient and longsuffering husband Stephen. We chatted giddily over coffee in Liz’s green room, where they were staying, and every so often , amid the conversation , I would simply look at Barbara and smile at the wonder of us being here together.
We had a look around the Monaghan Museum, then strolled down Glaslough St., The Diamond, Church Square and the North Road, telling a potted history of the town. We drove out to Scotstown, had coffee and jambons in Henry’s and then drove around Bragan and Sliabh Beagh. We stopped near the Penal Cross and I took them on a walk to see it…and then realised that the path we were on was taking us away from the cross, so we had to walk the whole way back. I offered to take them to the correct path but Stephen said that it was OK, he felt blessed enough from the car. Hanna noted that her phone service provider kept flipping between Ireland and the UK, and I said that the border was two boggy fields away.
We drove back into town and Hanna got to pour her own pint of Guinness in The Squealing Pig, and a pint of Murphy’s for Barbara, and a Guiness 0.0. for me. Ray , my other best friend, told Hanna that she could work for him anytime. Then we sat and Ray told stories of his time in New York and Stephen and Barbara shared theirs from the same time. After saying ‘Goodbye’ to Ray and being hoofed out of the bar we visited Mum and Dad. Mandatory tea, biscuits, and childhood memories were shared.
We had dinner in our house with my Soulmate and Elliott, and we discussed everything and anything…twice. It was simply gorgeous.
Last year while I was doing timekeeping at our Monaghan Town Park Run a lady who’d just finished her run came back to me and said that she’d given up running for a number of years because she’d collapsed during a marathon and her fear of something similar happening again had prevented her from running ever since. She read my blogs about the cancer malarkey and my subsequent marathon exploits and said that had inspired her to have another try, and she just wanted to say thank you. I choked up a little and could only smile. She’d left before I had a chance to say how lovely she was. A month or so ago this same lady asked if I did school tours of the Drumlin Giants, and I said I hadn’t but that I’d love to. She put me in touch with another teacher, Denise, from Corduff National School and we arranged that I would take her 3rd and 4th class on a walk around all 13 of our Drumlin Giants in Rossmore on Tuesday the 9th of June, my birthday. I sent her the story about Banba and Benny Callan , and asked them to make some boats for a river race. On Tuesday morning I bought 36 tennis balls and 36 little notebooks and an obscene amount of Haribo on my way out to the Park where I set up a dam at the small weir on the river Muireann to create a good flow for the boat race. This ended up requiring two trips to the CoffeeDoc to retrieve old signs to bolster my rather lame dam building. I collected Barbara, Hanna, and Stephen who’d asked to tag along on the tour, stopped at our house to change my shoes and socks which were soaked from dam building, and then back to the Park arriving just before the school bus…and my Soulmate who arrived out with a helium filled ‘Happy Birthday’ balloon that she tied to my rucksack and said it would break her heart if I didn’t wear it for the whole tour!
My Yankee guests and my Soulmate were dispatched to the CoffeeDoc to write numbers 1-36 on the tennis balls, and 1-36 on the notebooks, while I met Denise and the kids getting off the bus. They all said ‘Happy Birthday Paul’ as they passed me on their way to the playground. When my Yankee Minions had everything ready we gathered together and I introduced them to the kids and then we handed them each a numbered notebook and a pen and told them to remember to note the number inside and that I’d be asking them questions as we went around. With that we began.
We stopped at the Castle Lake and I told them that there were 7 manmade lakes in the Park but to be careful of them and never go for a swim as they are uneven and dangerous beneath the surface…and I stumbled backwards and almost fell in , to prove my point. At Roddy, our first Giant, I asked them to write down how many sticks were used to make his moustache. This was met with lots of groans, so I said that guesses were allowed. We walked up the Hill of Death to Spike and I told them the story of how he chased Cú Chulainn out of Monaghan. I opened my rucksack and handed out the tennis balls to match their notebook number then Hanna , Stephen and Barbara waited at the bottom of the hill and I said that whichever ball Hanna caught first would win a prize. On a count of 3 they all threw their tennis balls and #9 won. Then they all chased after them to gather them up.
At the baby Giant Redwood I got them to try punching it and showed them the date it was planted. I asked if anyone knew where Giant Redwoods came from , and said that no they weren’t from Carrickmacross. Stephen told them that they were from California, and were called Sequoias there. Other questions were how many types of ducks are in the Park, how many people visited the Park last year, how many Starlings are in a murmuration, how many children is The Morrigan allowed to eat each year, how many leaves make up Ailinn, and how many toes does Rocky have.
My Yankee Minions seemed to enjoy the walk and the talk, and only got annoyed when I pointed out the feeding boxes for the red squirrels. I told the kids that we were very lucky to have red squirrels in our Park as most Parks in Ireland had big fat American grey squirrels, but that we also had Pine Martens and that the lovely Irish red squirrels knew about Pine Martens and knew to stay away from them, but the big fat American grey squirrels had no idea what a Pine Marten is , or that they love to eat big fat juicy American grey squirrels, et voila. Barbara shouted out “Oi !” everytime I mentioned big fat American grey squirrels. She said it a LOT !
When we got to the weir, the water pressure had demolished my dam, but the flow was strong enough and we placed the boats behind Muireann’s bridge and had a competition to see which one got the farthest. There was LOTS of screaming.
Between our Giants Dagda and Aoife, two of the wee girls handed me cards they’d made from pages in their notebooks with pressed flowers and birthday wishes. Dear Reader I choked up.
On our way back to the school bus I asked all the kids to hand their notebooks to the Yankees who would add up all of their answers to see who won. The kids ran ahead and I told my frantic looking Yankees that they didn’t need to correct the answers as I couldn’t remember the questions, and didn’t know most of the answers.
“How will you pick winners ?” Hanna asked.
“I’ll come up with something…don’t worry.”
Back at the playground we were greeted by my Soulmate and a large bag of sweets. She was really there to make sure I still had my balloon, and despite the kids taking turns to whack at it the whole way around, it was.
The kids gathered in a semi-circle and I put all the sweet packets on the ground and handed two large party bags to Denise and said “Your teacher has enough sweets there so that you each get a wee packet, and she will be giving you each your notebooks, pens and tennis balls back. Now first of all the winner of the boat race gets first pick of whichever large packet she likes.” Teagen came forward and picked sourpatch something or others, then we had Shaun as the owner of ball #9 picked second.
“Now for the prize for the correct answer to all of the questions. Well, we’ve all been doing this for a long time and this has never ever happened before. When you handed the notebooks to our Yankee friends here, they added up all of your answers to see who was closest to the correct total, and even though none of your answers are the same for each individual question, when we added them all up , you all had the same total !”
There were lots of ooohs and aahs, and one or two cynical looks from kids that have careers in local politics ahead of them.
“So what we’ll do is I will ask your teachers, our Yankees and my Soulmate to pick a tennis ball from my rucksack and the person who had that ball and notebook number will get to pick whichever bag of sweets they like , and we’ll do that until they’re all gone.”
And that’s what we did, except that we had to stop my Soulmate from looking in the bag for a particular number after I caught her whispering to the wee girl standing next to her asking what number she was…and Barbara trying to sabotage the whole operation by putting the ball she’d picked back in the rucksack and failing to remember what number it was.
We waved the kids ‘Goodbye’, Eileen hugged the Yankees and headed back to work, and we drove back to Liz’s where the Yankees were being collected from on their way to Dublin and then home. We hugged Goodbye. I hugged Barbara twice. I still couldn’t believe that she was here…in Monaghan.
I went back out to the Park and retrieved my dam materials and all of the boats from the weir and dragged everything back to the car park. Ray rang to see what time we were going for a run at. I asked if we could leave it until the next day as I was wrecked…happy wrecked. He gladly agreed.
I went home and changed my sodden shoes and socks for the second time. I sat down. I fell asleep. Eileen called me for tea, and we celebrated with cake. Denise sent me a message , I have changed the kids name :
“Thanks so much for a brilliant tour. Quote from Ezekiel ‘That was the best tour ever’ and that is high praise from him.”
I went for a bath, and fell asleep in it. Eileen woke me to say that Ray was downstairs. We had celebratory Lucozades and Tayto.
This week on his Red Hand files , my old friend Nick wrote :
“When performed live , these lines carry a powerful energy that speaks to us all and lifts us beyond melancholic notions of self-image, beyond our individual preoccupations and internal worries. They ignite our souls, unite us , and return us to that righteous place – the glorious common moment – where together we can be fully ourselves.
This is the moment
This is exactly what we are meant to be.”
Thank you all for so many more great, glorious, common moments.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. This is for you , Slippery People
P.P.S. This is an audio of an older blog…and it’s very short.
