Page 25 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

on Mairead’s door. No response. With a swiftly sinking
heart, I sat on the stone wall in front of the house and
stared dumbly at the landscape. It was like a place in
a fairytale. The fields, no two of which were the same
shade of green, sloped down to the Atlantic Ocean. Huge
waves exploded into mushroom clouds of white as they
bashed against the rocks below the cliffs. The Blasket
Islands glowed just offshore. I fully understood that I
was sitting alone at the remotest edge of Europe, with
nowhere to go and absolutely no idea what to do next.
I knew nobody here. I was exhausted and afraid. I felt
like crying. And then I did cry.
Soon an old man came up the road on a bicycle, and,
seeing the suitcase and the unfamiliar face glistening
with tears, he stopped and asked me what was the
matter. Without hesitation, he dropped his bike against
the wall, took my suitcase, and said, “Follow me now,
girl.” I followed him up a road no
wider than a sidewalk, and soon
we came to a cluster of houses.
The man banged on the door
of one of them, and presently it
was opened by a stout, white-
haired old woman with the face
of Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker
of the U.S. House.
“Liza,” the man said, “I have a
girl from America for you.”
This was one of the luckiest
things that ever happened to me.
Almost everyone I met in the next
few weeks had nothing positive to
say about Mairead O’Donnell: she
was reputedly volatile, humor-
less, and a nag. Liza Mitchell was
the opposite. She loved to sing,
loved a good joke, and was gener-
ous and warm and reasonable. By chance, Liza had a
two-room cottage next to her house that I could rent
cheaply for the rest of my stay in Dunquin. For me, it
was a dream come true; my own little house with a
fireplace and a vast view of the ocean.
It was the first time in my life I lived on my own. The
cottage was unheated, so every morning I had to light a
fire of coal and peat. I had to do my own shopping and
cook for myself. (I was a terrible chef and survived
mostly on boiled potatoes, eggs, soda bread, and tea
biscuits.) I had to learn how to husband my money and
speak for myself among complete strangers. My neigh-
bors were all much older or much younger than I. Most
of the teenagers from Dunquin lived with relatives in
Dingle so they could attend the high school there. The
village, which was little more than a small shop, a post
office, and a pub, was a 20-minute walk. The bus to
Dingle – the only place one could do any real shopping
– traveled only twice a week. Few houses had telephones.
Eventually I bought a little Honda 90 scooter from an
The fact that I was
keeping my own
schedule, with no
one telling me what
to do or keeping
an eye on me, was
inordinately thrilling.
old man named Sean Criothain and learned (not without
mishap) how to ride it. As I came to know the elderly
people on the lane, they started to rely on me to run
errands. Soon I was happily the local messenger and
delivery girl, carrying news from one village to the next
or fetching groceries from Ballyferriter, Ballydavid, and
Dingle. I went to the Irish classes at the local grade school,
the biggest student in the room, and in the evening I
practiced my Irish phrases with Liza or sat by my fire
and wrote letters home and recorded the day’s events in
my journal, which Richard Davis, my ISP adviser at SPS,
had wisely urged me to do. Keeping a journal became a
habit I never lost; over the years, several of my journals
have turned into books.
Not long after I arrived in Dunquin, there was a na-
tional postal strike that lasted two months. The only way
left to communicate with my mother was with the public
telephone in the tiny post office.
Every 10 days or so, I would go
down and make a 60-second phone
call home, just to assure my mother
that I was all right. The postmis-
tress, standing three feet from me
as I talked, always pretended not
to be listening to what I was say-
ing, yet within a day or two all my
news was firmly broadcast across
the village. I was generally known
there as “the little Yank” or “the
child from Boston.”
The fact that I was keeping my
own schedule, with no one telling
me what to do or keeping an eye
on me, was inordinately thrilling.
When I rode the motorbike through
the fields, I had a feeling of incred-
ible freedom and self-reliance.
One day I ran out of gas and had to walk the motorbike
two and a half miles to the nearest gas station. I remem-
ber struggling to push that bike up a long gradual incline,
sweating, feeling desperate, and thinking, “Jesus, I’ll never
get there.”
But I did get there, because I had no choice. I was on
my own. If I got myself into a fix, it was up to me to get
myself out of it. I was teetering on the brink of adulthood.
I cannot say that the little bit of Irish Gaelic I learned
was ever any use to me, and I’ve forgotten most of it
now. But everything else I learned from that experience
in Ireland has remained with me. Prompted by the trust
the School and my family placed in me, I learned to trust
myself. I learned that I was capable of exercising good
judgment, of following my instincts, of knowing when
to offer help and when to ask for it. I learned how to
talk to and appreciate people whose lives were very dif-
ferent from mine. These revelations gave me a sense of
independence, self-direction, and adventure that I have
craved ever since. 25