It is not uncommon, or intended, for me to slip into an Irish accent when drinking around locals or in “irish” (small “i”) pubs in America. I don’t mean to speak like the poser I know I am when I do it. It just happens.
At a late-night “chipper” (or fish-and-chips shop), I ordered fried Plaice (a small flounder-like flat fish popular in the north Atlantic) and curried chips while Sadie, fed, watered, relieved, and barricaded in the kitchen, acclimated herself to her new surroundings. That’s when I was caught “doing” the accent, and I hadn’t had a single drop since my first night.
“Where’ye from then?” asked the sophisticated-looking hostess/cashier/waitress/cook who I would later learn was also the owner.
“Uhhhhh, I live in Seattle.” I backed it off as much as I could without sounding like John Wayne.
“Sure then, but where’ye from, HERE?”
I suppose I could have said I was renting a ruined cottage from The Princess and explained the whole story but determined that the fewer words I could use in the interaction, the more likely it was that I could make it most of the way to the skate-ball bag before she called all the neighbors out to point at me and laugh.
“The family’s from Fermanagh,” I said, only stretching the truth by about three hundred years.
“Ah! I thought so. I’m from Cavan!” says she. “I thought I heard a ‘northern twang’ in your brogue, so.”
County Cavan shares a long border with my ancestral county as well as with the country of Northern Ireland, being that Cavan is in the Republic of Ireland and Fermanagh in “The North.” How, I wondered, could the version of the accent with which I’d played since I was a boy—the one a pint of black could so easily induce—how could that accent be the proper accent whence my people come?
Coincidence? Luck? Genetic memory?
I didn’t really want to take the time to figure it out. I wasn’t absolutely sure Your One wasn’t having me on for a laugh. But she was for real.
We talked of her mother still in Cavan, the fact that she drove all the way there and back every fortnight to visit her, my new puppy, the current price of wool, and all of the other requisite niceties called for by proper social edict when waiting for the curry sauce to heat and breaded fish to boil in oil. She dug a small piece of smoked salmon from the back of a small, refrigerated cooler and offered it as a “welcome to the neighborhood” treat for Sadie.
We parted the best of friends, and I didn’t have to look over my shoulder more than twice to see if the neighbors were gathering.
There must be something about the front door to the cottage, because for the second time in three days, upon opening, I was struck with a bolt of offensive aroma strong enough to stun a Boer goat.
Newkedare Sadie Peg O’My Heart apparently had a nervous digestive system. Most puppies are homed at around eight or nine weeks. The extra month (along with the training and family bonding Helen had afforded Sadie once we knew she was Sadie) must have added to the stress of being assaulted by my northern twang for the entirety of our epic journey back to The Town.
She sat now, shaking in the corner of the kitchen and looking at me through a stinking haze that emanated from the near entirety of the floor. I don’t know if she thought she was to be reprimanded for the accident, or if she was frightened of the whole move or a combination of those and other factors known only to dogs. Whatever the cause, the first order of business was to take Herself up to the bathtub and give her a good washing.
I toweled her in front of the heat of a dying turf fire, where she fell asleep before she was completely dry.
Leaving her to rest, I did what every puppy owner (and I’m guessing, parent) has done far more than once. I cleaned the mess, sanitized the room and then threw away my dinner, now more than hour cold.
* * *
I wish that I could report that a calm and restful night’s sleep greeted both Sadie and me. It would have made the remainder of the morning’s follies far closer to tolerable.
Herself wasn’t used to sleeping in a crate, the house-training method I had settled upon, or maybe the Brooks Brothers Italian wool sweater I used to replace her wetted fleece wasn’t comfortable. Whatever the reason, she whimpered and whined herself to sleep and then back awake again for most of the night. By the time it was 6:30 a.m. and what we used to call “Civil Twilight” back in the day lightened the sky, neither of us was rested, but we both had to pee.
I dashed as quickly as my weakened limbs would carry me from my cold bed—I’d yet to master the oil boiler for heat—to the colder loo and back, then slipped boots onto my sockless feet. A big jumper (sweater), pajama bottoms, and cap finished my ensemble, and I suited up Herself with her American import collar and lead for introduction to the sheep in the garden.
Back and forth across, around and through every part of the front garden we traipsed. “Terrier” comes from the root “of the earth,” and that is firmly where Sadie’s nose was locked. She wandered about smelling the stones, the dirt, the skate-ball bag’s tires, the fences, and shrubbery. She flinched a bit when the sheep caught her eye (oh, and they were wearily watching her!), but she didn’t back down from their bleating and threatening stamping of the ground.
Instead, she looked up at me—the first time I had felt her seeing me, like a child who could newly focus—and cocked her head the way we all know puppies can, looking back and forth from the sheep to me as if to ask if these were her sheep. “Mine? All mine … REALLY? For me?”
Then, she finally peed.
* * *
The comedy of what happened next was surely evident in the moment, to those who were unfortunate enough to witness our morning as it unfolded. For Sadie and me, however, the next several hours were the coming to life of childhood nightmares. At least they were my childhood nightmares. Sadie was in for an introduction to The Town.
The big, old Dutch door of the cottage was heavy and well hung, and even when the fireplace was drawing like a blacksmith’s forge, it could be closed with one hand. On that still morning, with nothing but a few dying embers from the coal that had dried Herself after her required previous night’s shower on the grate, the door had closed and latched itself behind us upon our exit to pee with the sheep. I reached into my pants pocket for the key I’d retrieved from B&B#2, only to remember I wasn’t wearing pants, only pajama bottoms.
Though she was wee, Sadie was and is a very smart dog. Helen had begun lead training her as soon as we knew her to be “Sadie,” and she learned quickly. Once finished up with her morning piddle, she knew the routine should continue back into the cottage, where she would await her breakfast. The look in her eyes had changed from excitement about the sheep-toys I’d offered up and her little mind had moved on to more important things: warmth, food, perhaps a kip while her new da built her another one of those wonderfully bright and warm fires but first, “You have to open the door, now ….”
I’d of course been vigilant the night before to secure all doors, windows, hatches, and portholes before retiring. Probably overly vigilant for the bucolic environs of the cottage where The Town butted up against miles of farm fields and sheep pastures. Certainly I’d been overly vigilant for our current circumstances: clad in a hodgepodge of day and night clothes with no visible ingress that didn’t call for later re-glazing and extensive explanations. We had one key. It was in my pants on the chair, next to the bed, in the upstairs bedroom, all behind a very locked door. It looked like Herself and I were in for a morning constitutional before our breakfast.
There were no paved walkways along the laneway. In fact each side of the road was paralleled by two-foot deep drainage gullies, which all but met the pavement. We headed down the rather steep hill to The Town, both of our heads bowed—Sadie’s in order for her sniffer to pick up the new scents that met her every step, and mine in shame and embarrassment that I was living out the chimera of attending school half-clad.
It was, fortunately, early enough in the morning that we encountered neither a single person nor car until we reached the heart of The Town. Using several of the side streets and alleys Billy and I had stumbled through to a phone box and back, we managed to find our way, triumphantly, to the door of B&B#2, detected only by the occasional neighborhood border collie and a sleepy cat cleaning herself in the morning sun on a doorstep.
Sadie had taken keen interest in the feline, as she’d been raised with several cats living at Helen’s home. I picked her up and carried the puppy for the last few blocks. The last thing I wanted to be doing that morning, aside from walking through the streets of my new—if only temporary—home town in my pajamas, was to chase a dog chasing a cat through the streets and gardens of my new neighbors’ homes dressed more for the night before than for the morning after.
Standing before the door to B&B#2, I congratulated myself, and Sadie, on our uneventful resolution to our morning situation. Not many can say that they’ve traversed the better part of a busy little town in their pajamas unnoticed. A quick explanation and we’d be given a lift back up the hill to our adopted little country home and our day would be back on track—perhaps even better for the story.
No one answered the bell.
I was beginning to get that look again from Sadie as I led her around the townhouse cum bed and breakfast, peering into each lace curtain-trimmed window and finding nothing to raise hope of a quick resolution.
The reason no one answered the bell, for all I could garner, was that there was no one in the place. All the tables in the breakfast room had been reset after the prior morning’s medical breakfast. There was neither sound nor light nor anything, really, to evidence occupation. The sun, which had been behind the rim of low mountains when we arrived, was now above the horizon someplace and the day had become fully lit.
Thinking first of the phone box as a means of getting ahold of my landlords, I came to the rolling realization that my current state of dress afforded me neither of the two requisites to using said technology to our benefit: 1) As was the case with my pajamas pockets lacking a house key, neither did they contain coin. 2) Equally blaring was the fact that pockets nor jumper nor brain, for that matter, contained the numbers I’d have to dial in order to reach my key-masters.
Herself, it should be noted, was chosen to be my Sadie in great part because of her personality. While it was only weekly emailed files of photographs that I was judging, her inclination to be an “observer” of situations struck me. In one photograph, Helen called the pack of seven pups to her on their first foray into the garden without their mammy. While some pups bee-lined straight for their surrogate, two others appeared to wander toward whatever happened to catch their big brown eyes, and one had turned its back to the situation, completely. Sadie, however, had plunked herself down at the back of the formation as if to see what might be the outcome of each possibility.
So was the case this morning.
Sadie found a tuft of grass no larger than my fist struggling up through a crack in the walk and plunked herself down on her bum. She was no doubt exhausted from her previous eighteen-hour experience and maybe even sensed that I was rolling the options and ticking each off for their lack of possibility and/or plausibility. Her head moved in tandem with mine as it rolled up the lane and back, up the side of B&B#2 and down. It was probably I who first cocked my head 30 degrees in rather canine fashion as I soaked my brain in possibility, hoping to reach a common sense resolution.
It was from that same, seated position on her claimed bit of grass that she looked down on me in the gutter between walkway and lane.
As is oft to happen with my version of MS, my mind sometimes forgets that its constituents are no longer able to answer in previously sequential manner. When the brightest flicker of hope I could foretell required my eyes, head, shoulders, torso, hips, legs, and feet to move fluidly from right to left in order to face the direction of my mental lixivium, the signals left my brain and hit one of those corroded bits of wiring.
Flailing like an untended fire hose, I crumpled to the deck and learned something new about my companion.
It was neither with shock nor alarm that she stood and padded over to me at lead’s end. She stopped at the edge of the walk, looked both ways, jumped on my chest, and began wildly licking my face. I’m not sure which was moving faster, her tongue or her tail and therefore, by extension, her whole back half. Pure joy exuded from every ounce of my puppy and it infused me like a bag of corticosteroids with energy and purpose.
There are some things that happen in Ireland that go beyond explanation. It’s best to just accept that things happen there, for reasons unknown, that don’t happen elsewhere. Lifting myself and my pup up from the pavement, I spied something leaning against a hedgerow that stopped at the edge of B&B#2. I didn’t recall at the time—nor do I to this day—seeing the blackthorn walking stick tucked neatly between an iron gate and the hedge of less than manicured Laurel, but there it was.
With every intention of returning the stick to its place after I was able to replace it with my own walking aid, I crawled from the lane and used the blackthorn to hoist myself to standing. With my leg now supported, my plan gelling, and my face freshly wetted, I set forth down the block, dragging my left side like a cartoon monster. I wore a confident expression, as if I were not in my PJs and had no doubts that my plan would actually work.
In front of the Super Value I had used to stock my cupboards just a few days prior, there was a quaint, old hitching post and ring. One might be forgiven for assuming that it served no real purpose and was simply a reminder of days gone by. (In just about any American town, that would be the case.) Over the course of my stay, however, I would see any number of farm animals, from ass to horse to an honest-to-god ox, tied to its ring. On this day it served as a convenient hitch for young Sadie as I shook off every last remaining scrap of pride I’d managed to hold onto after my spill into the gutter and slowly entered the market.
Sadie, once again, curled her tail under her bum and sat to observe.
The morning was turning out to be a case of one “of course” after another. Of course I locked myself out of the house. Of course I had to walk down to The Town without a cane. Of course I fell after such a long walk, and of course there was a walking stick perched for my use. Now, of course the woman working the only open register in the market was the manager. Of course she knew The Princess. Of course she knew the phone number and of course, by the time this had all transpired the landlord had gone to B&B#2 to make his guests breakfast.
I’m guessing that I should add that of course the manager and the few people wandering in and out for morning coffee and a newspaper noted that there was a new American in town who liked to roam around, pajama-clad, asking for favors.
My plan had worked. Your Man let us in and had the spare key ready to hand off by the time we arrived at the door. What didn’t work was my assumption that we’d get a quick lift up the hill to our cottage. He was late making breakfast for his guests and couldn’t spare a moment. Sadie and I, along with our newly acquired cane and key, were left to exit the far more awake town than we had entered on foot.
It is fair if you have wondered how a man living with multiple sclerosis and wearing PJs could hike nearly a mile down into and around The Town at all, let alone in such cold conditions. You see, while it might seem counterintuitive at first, cold can be a boon to one living with MS, as was the case here. Not for everyone and not all of the time, even for those of us who find some cold helpful.
Heat is the real enemy.
If you think about a computer server room of an office building or even your home electronics, you’ll note that there are fans or extensive air conditioning systems to keep the wiring cool. It’s actually to keep the electrons that are moving around cool so the system doesn’t overheat. When a person with MS experiences a fever or a particularly hot day, our “electrical systems” (central nervous system) can misfire, and many of our symptoms will relapse in what is known as a pseudo exacerbation.
When I say “pseudo,” I don’t mean these symptoms (usually a return or heightening of existing symptoms) are not real, but rather, they are not symptoms of a new attack on the brain. Rather it is more like aggravating an old injury which has semi-healed and will get no better.
The night had been cold and our cottage walls not yet warmed to their new residents. The morning was cold, and quite frankly, I wasn’t what one would call bundled for the elements. This uncomfortable cascade of climate and clothing had allowed me to cover the distance into The Town without much trouble. The exertion of the walk coupled with the stresses of the morning were beginning to work against me, as was the rising warmth of the sun as we proceeded back up our hill.
Even with numerous stops to rest, which I was able to disguise as pauses for Sadie to smell her new surrounds, I’d be lying if I said that getting back up the hill was easy. By the time we passed our overgrown hedgerow and reached the end of the two-track drive, both puppy and papa were pooped.
While Sadie dispatched her morning (now nearly afternoon) meal, I could only muster the energy to assemble toast and tea for myself.
We retired to the main room, where I had to start fresh with a fire on the grate, all of the early morning embers having gone gray and cold. And there we stayed for the remainder of the day. Re-stoking the fire and making more tea were about all the tasks I could muster. Sadie seemed perfectly contented with our day of recuperation, and after her long morning trek, she made only the shortest work of any calling nature had for her.
I poached an amazingly fresh hen’s egg to go with my evening tea and we ascended the stairs early. The cottage was still quite cold, and though a warm bed sounded far more inviting that the icy sheets I was about to part, I hoped that another bracing night would repair the damage we’d done. I had, after all, to set my alarm for 2:00 a.m. so that we could fold ourselves into the skate-ball bag, drive to Shannon, and collect our first houseguests—my parents.