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Replying to @DiscussingFilm
A 4.8 on Letterboxd. All six people who saw it have podcasts.
First night in an Irish pub, five lads bought me a pint each.
I thought, what a friendly country.
Then the table went quiet and they all looked at me.
I said I had to get home and feed the dog. We don't have a dog.
Our Irish address has no house number. Just a name and "opposite the old creamery."
I wrote a whole paragraph of directions for my first delivery.
The postman never read it.
He found the house fine. He'd heard about me in the shop.
First week in Ireland, I charged my phone all night. Woke up to 4%.
Tried a new cable. Then a different plug. Then bought a new charger in Tesco.
Irish wall sockets have their own on/off switch.
The lad in Tesco knew. He sold me the charger anyway.
Storm Austen hits Thursday. Orange warning.
Back home, a storm warning means everybody into the basement.
Irish houses don't have basements.
Last storm I sat in the bath with a bike helmet on.
My father-in-law rode it out in the pub. Without a helmet.
Still, every morning, I get into the passenger side of my own car.
Sit there a second. Get out. Walk round.
Declan next door thinks I'm waiting on a lift.
Twice now he's given me one.
There's a bowl of monkey nuts on our hall table.
Peanuts in the shell. For Halloween. At the door.
The mother-in-law says that's tradition here.
I bought full-size candy bars.
Now she's calling me the Yank who caused inflation on the estate.
"C'mere to me," said the lad at the Centra deli.
So I walked around behind the counter.
He just kept talking. About his cousin's van.
Turns out it means "listen to this."
Twenty minutes later I'm wearing a hairnet and slicing ham.
Four cups of tea by noon. I made none of them.
Declan made one when I returned his ladder.
The man fixing the boiler made the last one.
In my kitchen. With my kettle.
I asked the plumber if he'd be back Tuesday.
"I will, yeah," he said.
Back home, that's a promise. I took the day off work.
In Ireland, it turns out, that's a polite no.
That was three Tuesdays ago.
Back home, a 20-minute drive is "just up the road." Here, it's three villages and a whole new accent.
Back home, a goodbye takes 45 minutes and ends at the car.
Americans call slipping out unnoticed an "Irish goodbye."
Then I heard my wife's mammy end a phone call.
"Bye. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye bye."
Nobody here has ever left anywhere unnoticed.
Declan, over the hedge: "How's she cutting?"
I said the mower was fine. Bit dull on the blade.
He meant how am I.
Back home it's "How's it goin'?" Here it's "she," and nobody will tell me who she is.
Ireland. The Centra deli. "What's the story?"
So I told him. Friday through Sunday, with detail.
He only meant hello.
Four people in the queue now want to know how the gutter thing ends.
Before pumpkins, the Irish carved turnips for Halloween.
Declan next door still does one every year.
I tried it. Forty minutes, two spoons, one blister. It looks like a worried potato.
No wonder the emigrants saw an American pumpkin and never looked back.
Turnip or pumpkin?
Ireland. Late October. The green in our estate.
Monday, one pallet.
By Friday, forty pallets, a door and a three-seater couch.
The council came Saturday and took the lot.
Sunday morning, a new couch. Nicer than ours.
The wife's mammy cut me a slice of barmbrack.
Fruit bread, thick with butter, and a ring baked in somewhere.
Find the ring and you'll be married within the year.
I'm already married. I've never chewed anything so carefully in my life.
Settle this: is a ring in the bread a tradition or a lawsuit?
Irish weather forecast: sunny spells and scattered showers.
Every single day.
And somehow it's right every single day.
Back home we'd call that hedging.





