The salt, the spray and the wind.

I grew up watching those towers; always standing at the other end of the long, low tedious tide. With a tide that low and a beach that flat you could walk among the wet rippled sand out a mile or so, if you wanted, but I never did. I had a job to do.
First thing in the morning I'd be out there with a pile of newspapers draped over the bars delivering them to the news starved families of the strand road. I've smoked some of my best cigarettes there.
Woodbines, they were called. Orwell's brand. Rough and ready. Filterless. A bit like smoking a sweet turf fire. I could buy a pack of five when I was twelve. I'd buy them at work at Browns on the Merrion road on payday. Six days a week. Six thirty 'til eight thirty. Be in school by nine. Every friday Mr Brown would pay me my 60p and I'd get a pack of five for 10p. I felt like a real worker. I smoked one a day every day except Wednesdays. Mainly I'd just hold it in my mouth dragging and blowing whilst hanging on to the handlebars. On days with no wind I'd try to hang on to the ash for as long as I could. It's been one of my favorite roads in Dublin ever since and if given the chance I'd of lived there with the salt, the spray and the wind.

The times they are a changen

Some things never change in Ireland. Like, for example my fathers' love for the newspaper. He frequently sleeps with it on the couch. There it lies crumpled all over like a blanket keeping him warm and informed. He'll cozy up to the small print or the situations vacant on the back page. He might snore through the Israeli conflict, maybe change position on the rugby page. His mouth will droop on the editorial page. His nose can drip a little on the weather page. He might wake up to a letter.

Your brain on eggs

The other thing that hasn't changed of course is the cooked breakfast; the fry up— good old bacon and eggs: Apart from the basic essentials like a fried rasher, a sausage, an egg and some white toast and butter— it can be embellished with any number of things, like fried mushrooms or fried tomato, perhaps a fried kidney or some fried black or white pudding. Or, you can have the whole lot of it fried up on one plate.
I have a theory about my mother's brain tumor: She never used to have an Irish breakfast until her tumor got going good and strong. These days, she craves one every morning with double the butter. And she hoards extra butter in the fridge by her bed. I think she craves cholesterol laden foods because her brain, in a desperate bid for survival, demands them.
Mothers milk contains a massive amount of cholesterol, because without it our little ones couldn't survive. The brain needs a considerable amount of it to grow. Maybe that's why she seems to improve every day.

The Aran Islands. July, 1969.

The other thing that happened was the Americans' landing on the moon and its connection to the Irish language. In the summer of nineteen sixty nine my parents arranged for me to go to Inisheer, the smallest of the three Aran Islands, to study the Irish language. I didn't want to go. My goal had been to continue my studies in the art of loitering which could be practiced almost anywhere and didn't need any Island at all. But when I told my girlfriend of their cruel plot, she managed with her sweet smile to persuade her parents to send her to the same place. Needless to say she didn't see the need to mention that I would be going along for the ride as it were. All of a sudden I became very interested in the Irish language.

The Island had no electricity. Most of the Islanders had never been to the mainland. There wasn't a car. The only bicycle belonged to the lighthouse keeper and it was broken down. The best way to get around was on foot or on a donkey. You would see great big men in massive wool coats clutching whips in their hands and sitting side saddle on their donkeys as they galloped along the sandy pathways. They had never seen a television set, a radio or a telephone.

There was neither priest nor policeman on the island.

Well, the big boys in Dublin decided to send over a generator and a television set so that no-one would be denied the chance of a lifetime to see the Americans land on the moon.
We all convened in the school house and waited while the apparatus was set up.

And sure enough there they were; the Americans were at it again; they were walking on the moon— walking around and talking. It was easy for us city dwellers to see what was happening: We had all been exposed to modern media and tended to believe everything it dished out. Not so for these Islanders. They saw it more as a fairy tale. They were quite amused by the whole affair. It wasn't until they noticed that we the city kids were taking it perfectly seriously that they became angry. We must of had the arrogant air of city brats because one fellow grabbed me by the arm and led me outside and shouted at me in a mixture of Irish and spittle while pointing with his free hand at the moon above, "Look at that now! Look up there! There's no fucking American to be seen." It was the most Irish I had understood since getting there.

The Sixties

In the late sixties I had an uncle who was a Benedictine monk. He made a name for himself in monk circles. Got into meditation and mantras. He came back from the states for a visit and he asked me if I had seen the movie Easyrider which had just been released. I said I had just seen it twice; two days in a row. So he asked me what I thought of it and so on and I asked him what he thought and he said that after seeing the movie, it had such an effect on him that he took off his watch and either gave it away or threw it away— I don't remember which. This had a profound effect on me. Here was a guy, clearly from the older generation who was totally hip to the idea that time actually didn't exist.

He talked about America and the rock concerts there which hadn't even started in Ireland and were just barely coming to the UK. He saw them as a huge youth movement that was sweeping the nation with change. He said all you could hear at these concerts was the throbbing of the bass, and all you could see was a giant cloud of marijuana smoke.

Here was a country at war having attacked the Vietnamese and everybody at home was getting stoned and I wanted to be there in this land where the monks threw away their watches and the soldiers threw away their medals.

All That Jazz

Jack Keroac sparked my curiosity for jazz music. At first I didn't get it. It was like music from the moon; all lit up but inside you knew it was blue. I had a friend Pat who was an American kid living in Dublin with his mom and dad in the basement of their house on Ailesbury road. The top part was always rented out. His mom was a cherokee indian. His dad was an ex jazz musician now trapped in a  wheelchair and suffering from Parkinson's disease. 

After school Pat would come home and he and his dad would play chess together. Occaisionally we'd get a glimpse of him in his chair through the opened door in the living room, frail and bearded, the room always with closed curtains and Pat would raid his stash of Jazz albums and we would spend late afternoons listening to these beautiful LP's from Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis. We would have lengthly, opinionated discussions about Keroac, Harleys, hitch-hiking and the American highway system. Most of my education, it seemed to me happened after school. 

Cowboys

 They had been my reality. They could sleep outside all night with just a bedroll and a few flames from the fire. Well, in Ireland you could never do that. You'd have to have a tent or a caravan. The rain would never allow a fire to burn all night. There'd be no dry wood around anyway. And you'd get drowned if you tried to sleep outside. And we had no desert, no high plains—only wet fields and soggy cigarettes. Furthermore, we couldn't get beans like what they ate in America. The one's we got came from England with tomato sauce and sugar. I wanted the real stuff with pork, chiles and tortillas on the side. I had to wait another fifteen years.