Maybe It's a Goat

Fiona, Myles and I are visiting John’s mom this week in Clonbur, county Galway,while John spends most of the week working in Dublin. Grassy, rural and sparsely populated, Clonbur is our favorite place to play outside. But today’s icy rain and hail combined with a north wind makes playing outside rather dismal. Playing inside is fun, as long you move around the house enough to stay warm and oxygenated. The front two rooms of the house are filled with smoke from the smoldering peat and wood fire. I hang out long enough to get warm, which is about how long my eyes can tolerate the smoke. Once tears flow, I know it’s time to wander to the other end of the house to breathe. Lungs refilled with bracing cold air, I dance with the kids to the ABBA cd that they’ve been playing for 2 days. This helps keep us all warm. We used to not be able to play music in Granny’s house because she said she was tone deaf and didn’t like it. Now that she’s becoming just plain deaf she doesn’t seem to notice it. Fiona and Myles have spent the day making up games, including one that involved figuring out which small toys would stick to their cheeks after they licked them. I spend a lot of time staring out the window at the two sheep that have declared squatters’ rights in the yard. Out of sheer boredom, I find myself trying to convince my mother-in-law that one of them is actually a goat. She takes the bait. We’re both strong willed, and spend a lot of our time together subtly trying to prove the other wrong about unimportant things. It’s part of our dynamic. She’s far more stubborn and smarter than I am, so I usually lose the spar. I’m getting a total kick out the fact that I am really convincing her that this ugly old sheep is a goat. She pauses play to make dinner. She rarely accepts my help in cooking or grocery shopping because she says she likes to do these things for us when we visit, which is very sweet of her. But I do feel guilty. She makes us leftovers for dinner – cold ham and last night’s boiled cabbage and potatoes fried together and renamed “bubble and squeak.” This suits us very nicely, as my kids love debating which is the bubble and which is the squeak. As a leftovers queen myself, I love this tradition in English cookery. You mix up what you cooked last night and rebrand it with a charming name, such as Shepherd’s Pie. I think only English cuisine can withstand this second cooking without any change in flavor and texture. It’s a purely lateral move, culinary speaking. Dessert -- or “pudding” as it’s called in these isles -- is a different story. My mother-in-law says it doesn’t keep until the next day, so she never tolerates leftover dessert. She enforces this rule by making sure that everyone stays at the table and continues to eat the dessert she’s made until it’s gone. This sounds like delicious fun until you taste the dessert. Tonight it’s ‘steamed chocolate pudding,’ a soft greasy lump of smooth, slightly salty, wet brown dough. It’s entirely inedible. I later try to figure out how anything can taste so bad. Hard to say what precisely went wrong, but I discover that she used three different sorts of fat in the baking – lard, suet and margarine -- any of which could be rancid. Or perhaps the 23 year old cocoa powder is the culprit. I can’t date the cocoa powder exactly, since it was manufactured before expiration dates became mandatory. But based on the two clues I find on the can, it was purchased sometime in the eighties. It has a price tag in Irish pounds, so it pre-dates the euro. More tellingly, it has a recipe contest with a June 1987 entry deadline. I’m confident that the saltiness was imparted from the plastic tub it was steamed in, since the tub was recently used for steaming steak and kidney pudding. Luckily, the kids and I quickly realize we can hide the pudding in our bowls under the cream we’ve splashed on it. A few strategic smashes with our spoons make it look eaten enough. I can tell the kids share my stress about the forced finish-off-the-pudding rule, because I see them shifting their worried eyes between their grandmother and the remaining wet brown lump on the serving plate. She stands up, hand approaching the lump. Our throats tighten. “I don’t think this was one of my greater successes,” she says. “I think I’ll chuck the rest.” Whew. “If that animal out there were really a goat, I’d throw it outside, since goats will eat just about anything,” she says. She shoots me a hard stare. “But I realize you’re wrong,” she declares, through her wise half-smile. “It can’t be a goat, or else it would have rooted around in the compost. It’s a sheep.” Aarrgghh! She wins, again.

Stinging Nettles and French Diplomacy

Myles ran down a hillside in France last week and tumbled into a bed of nettles which stung him all over his face and hands. Luckily, it was cold and he needs a haircut, so his ears, neck and the rest of his body were covered with his shaggy mane and clothes. But his cheeks and hands smarted and swelled for two days, despite soothing applications of some sort of Chinese salve my friend Wing smeared all over him. We were visiting the remotest part of France there is – a tiny hamlet inhabited by three families in the Massif Central region of the country. This place is not on the map. When I had emailed Wing’s husband before our trip for directions to his family’s place, he directed me to a French government website, told me to open a particular geoportal, then zoom in. “Our house is at 02 degrees, 02'46''E, and 45 degrees 51' 16''N, with a grey roof top,” he wrote in his email, “See you soon, Philippe.” Oh my. I felt like Alice going down the rabbit hole. Our GPS was useless. But, armed with little more than longitude, latitude and a strong espresso, we found the place: Le Villard, population 12. Philippe’s father, Marcel Barbe, grew up here, and inherited his family’s land. Marcel left Le Villard as a young man, joined the French army, rose to the level of General, settled in Paris, then retired from service. He and his wife, Marie-Therese, now divide their time between Paris and Le Villard. Monsieur Barbe, 83, is the only Frenchman I’ve ever met who complains that the official 35 hour French work week is too short. During the 4 days we were visiting, he logged at least 50 hours of hard physical labor around his vast property. John, Philippe and I helped out some, but just couldn’t keep up with the man. He cleared a field by chain-sawing down trees, axing up brush and building a dozen giant bonfires to get rid of the growth. He taught us how to drain a flooded field by shoveling trenches in marshland. Imagine sinking knee-deep into thick muddy vegetation, while trying to scoop up the heavy, sodden soil you’re standing in. Now, imagine doing this while your friend’s octogenarian father is doing it twice as fast alongside you. Total shame, I tell you. He used a handmade tool that looks like an executioner’s sickle to hack away at the roots of the swamp weed before he’d shovel it away. I couldn’t lift the tool; he’d heave it up over his head to get a great leveraged whack. His land includes pastures and commercial pine forests, but it’s parceled up and spread out all over the place. Often, an acre of his land might abut a slice of his neighbor’s property. Over the years, neighbors have negotiated trades to consolidate their lands. This perpetual land swapping has bred attitudes of suspicion and greed among the villagers of Le Villard, so it’s not a terribly friendly place. Unlike in Ireland, where a stranger like me will get a friendly wave walking down the road, in Le Villard a smile is met with a swarthy glare. Philippe’s aunt lived in the family home until she died two years ago at the age of 89. Marcel, her brother, offered to install indoor plumbing decades ago, but she refused, preferring to do her business outside and bathe in the stream a half mile away. Indeed, you’d have to be self sufficient living here, because you’re isolated, the climate is harsh, the woods are full of wild animals, and your neighbors suspect you’re out for their land. Compared to his childhood, a career in the French army must have been a cake walk for Marcel Barbe. Still, the army taught him nuanced diplomatic skills. Wing, a fantastic forager, stewed a big pot of nettles for us after Myles’ accident. (The toxic hairs on nettles are neutralized when cooked. The Vikings, in fact, brought nettles with them during their conquests throughout Europe so they could have a green vegetable year round.) Myles loved this idea of eating his attackers. Monsieur Barbe, however, hates nettles. He nevertheless politely served himself some, thanked his daughter-in-law for her cooking, and made her feel good about preparing a dish he disdains. I later tell Philippe how impressively his dad handled the nettles without hurting Wing’s feelings. “My father was a general in the French Army,” Philippe explains to me. “When he was imprisoned for his role in the Algerian uprising, he learned how to make people feel good while refusing their demands.” Fiona and Myles thought it was remarkable that Monsieur Barbe doesn’t like nettles, because, to their American sensibilities, the French eat just about everything – pigeons, rabbits, frogs, snails, horses. But during our stay, Madame Barbe and Wing collaborated on lovely three-course meals happily devoid of storybook animals. Monsieur and Madame Barbe weren’t comfortable speaking English, but they kindly suffered through my college French, so we were able to carry on enough conversation to last throughout the long meals. Monsieur Barbe was particularly conversational, which I loved, because it helped me improve my French and stroked my ego. Until Philippe set me straight. “My father was a general in the French Army,” he reminds me. “When he served in Indochina, he became accustomed to communicating with people he really didn’t understand.” Monsieur Barbe had discreetly gauged our level of French the first hour we spent with him, over tea, as he described how an injured sanglier (wild boar) caused some havoc up the road that morning. While he and I discussed animal behavior, John sat quietly and listened. Monsieur Barbe eventually turned to John, and tactfully drew him into the conversation using his best French 101. “What sorts of wild animals cause problems in Ireland?” he asked John. John rolled his first semester French vocabulary list over in his head, scrolling for animal names. “Uh, les rats,” John said. Good, I thought, a cognate. I nod to John, trying to encourage him to carry on a bit and show willing with our kind host. “Er, uh, rat,” John says. “It’s the same word, in Irish, as Frenchman.” Oh dear, is he really going there? I wonder in panic. As Monsieur Barbe furrows his brow, trying to sort out what John is saying, I search for a way to get John off track. “Un rat,” John repeats. Shut up now! Abort, abort! I try to tell John with my evil eye. Yet he persists, “The word in Irish for rat and Frenchman is the same. It’s francach.” I sink back into the couch, the embarrassment seizing my ability to rescue the conversation gracefully. Monsieur Barbe nods and stares in front him. As our afternoon chat thus dies its abrupt, awkward death, I console myself thinking that perhaps Monsieur Barbe is familiar with total social ineptitude, since both Philippe and Wing are mathematicians.

The communal bread oven

Chickens pecking in front of the 17th century stone house that used to contain a bread oven shared by the villagers.

Hostess Gifts

We’re just back from a trip to France where we stayed with John’s colleagues. For my children, I packed enough Dramamine to halt the queasy gut of a horse on a cargo ship. For our hosts, I packed up a bunch of gourmet Irish treats – teas, ginger biscuits, handmade chocolates - from our local specialty grocer. I knew it was risky bringing edibles to France, since the French have better treats overall. But what I didn’t realize is that any nice tea or biscuit or chocolate you can get in Ireland is also available in any old supermarket in France, thanks in part to the homogenizing force of the European Union. Of course the French won’t stand for their culinary culture to be watered down by cheap imports, so they still have truly outstanding regional French artisanal products available at their corner specialty shops. All this to say that what I produced as a hostess gift turned out to be basically a small bag of utterly mundane groceries. We’ve been guests in people’s homes this year more often than at any other time in our lives, so you’d think all the practice I’m getting selecting hostess gifts would be improving. But so far this year, I’ve been striking out disastrously. I brought a nice bottle of Irish whiskey to the friends we stayed with in Croatia, only to discover they don’t really drink. They were, of course, quite gracious about receiving it, but it was embarrassing to see it kicking around the living room floor all week. I hope they’ll use it as a doorstop. The homemade chocolate chip cookies I brought to our friends in Cork could have killed off their whole family. Turns out, Trish and her three kids have wheat and dairy allergies, so the butter, flour, eggs and just about everything else in the cookies were verboten. Allergies are less common in Ireland than in the US, so I figured I was pretty safe as long as I didn’t show up with a basket of kittens. I thought at least I had my bases covered because I also brought my own children’s favorite toy, perler beads, for their kids. (Perler beads are tiny colorful tube shaped beads that kids insert onto spiky animal shaped forms. The spikes hold the beads in place, then a parent irons the form and, presto chango, instant art.) Here’s some advice: If you like your friends, never bring perler beads into their home. Five children managed to strew the little beads all over the carpeted bedrooms and hallways of their second floor. I didn’t notice this until I was putting the kids to bed that night. Hoping I could tidy them away before our hosts (Trish and her husband Andrew, pictured here with John and daughters) noticed, I got down on my hands and knees and started to pick up the little beads, which of course jumped all over the carpet as I tried to sweep them up with my hands. I had barely made a dent in the mess when I realized Andrew was about to come out of the shower and walk down the hall to his room. I ducked into the linen closet so I wouldn’t embarrass him since he was only wearing a towel. He couldn’t avoid walking on all the beads that I hadn’t managed to scoop up, and they stuck to the wet soles of his bare feet. I saw him bend over to brush them off, which is really hard to do and keep your towel on, so I didn’t look too hard, just long enough to see him plant his left foot onto a spiky plastic puppy dog form. “Jaysus!” he cursed to himself. “What is all this…what are these bloody things everywhere?” At least now I know to bring band-aids and a new vacuum cleaner to their house the next time we visit. But in truth I’m totally gun-shy about selecting hostess gifts, so my newest tactic is to hand the duty over to John. I tested my strategy when we had dinner at his boss' house Saturday night. John selected an aged bottle of French wine, something expensive with the region, the chateau, even the dirt the grapes were grown in named on the label. I knew it was completely appropriate the moment we set foot in the house. Donal, John’s boss, and his wife, Joan, have a formal Victorian home in the heart of Dublin that you could imagine the queen would be happy to inhabit, if Ireland had a queen. The first course they served us was a smoked pepper, salmon and tomato tartlet. I was totally intimidated, thinking about the turkey I served when I had them over for dinner. (Turkey, for christsakes… What was I thinking? And I put some peanuts in a bowl and crossed appetizers off my list. Myles licked them to see if they were honey roasted! Must improve dinner party game…) Plus, I was seated next to Donal. Turns out Donal was so fun to talk to that the turkey flashbacks subsided as the conversation swung on. Somebody started talking about wine. Donal turned to me and asked, “Do you know how I buy wine?” Before I could babble something about vintage he blurted out, “I buy what’s cheap! And if I like it, I go back and buy a case!” He grabbed a fresh bottle from a box under the sideboard and opened it up. Joan looked at me, shook her head and rolled her eyes at him. But I loved his honesty. It prompted me to reach for the bottle of red and help myself to another glass. More than once. What the heck, it was cheap, and I liked it! After dinner, Donal broke into embarrassing-stories-about-people-at-the-table, and I thanked God he spared me by not bringing up the turkey. He passed around a box of chocolates and said, “When I came home with these truffles, Joan asked me why I bought them and I said, "Because they were cheap!"” Ha ha! These too! I took one from the box. No chance I wouldn’t like them, since I couldn’t taste anything at that point anyway, because I’d had so much of that happy wine.

What the !?!

Fiona’s lounging about in her Hello Kitty pajamas last weekend, quietly knitting her favorite teddy bear a little scarf when she drops a stitch and blurts out, “Oh fuck!” I’m so shocked I can’t speak. I stand over her searching for a severe reprimand and wind up just stammering, “What did you just say?! No. Stop! Don’t repeat yourself. I heard it. What are you thinking?” She’s uncharacteristically contrite, “I’m sorry Mommy. It just slipped out.” She apologies so sweetly that I calm down and forget about it. Until later, while walking with Myles, discussing a scene we read in Harry Potter. Harry and Ron are trying to save Hermoine from a mean giant troll and Ron yells, “Hey, pea brain!” Myles tells me he wouldn’t yell “Hey, pea brain” if he encountered a troll. “I’d be so freaked out!” he says. “I’d probably yell,” – and here Myles switches from chatting to actually yelling -- “Oh FUUUCK!” He resumes chatting, like what he just yelled across the entire village didn’t block all blood flow to my muscles. “I mean, a troll… I think that could really hurt if he hit you with his club…plus all his drooling and gross slobber… Mom? What are you doing?” I’m frozen, ten paces behind him, jaw open, no words coming out. “What?” he asks innocently. He really doesn’t realize he sounds like the most literate kid in the trailer park. Nobody around us seems fazed in the least. Fuck is such a common word here. The boys in his school use it all the time. Ditto Fiona’s classmates. I’m still not used to hearing it, especially from my kids’ mouths. But it is such a part of the Irish lingo that I think its edge has dulled. Radio announcers, TV commentators, newspaper columnists all use the word. Everyone calls Brian Cowen, the Irish Prime Minister, by his nickname, “Biffo,” which stands for Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly. I was shocked to hear this, having assumed for months that Biff was just a cute pet name for Brian until our friend Sam explained the acronym. I asked Sam, a respectable member of the Royal College of Surgeons, if he didn’t think it was a tad disrespectful to the Prime Minister. “Disrespectful?” Sam replied, puzzled. “He can’t help it if he’s from County Offaly.” Sometimes I think I’m living in a sort of opposite universe where fuck is as benign a word as freckle, but pants means something really illicit. It’s hard for me to figure these things out, since I don’t have any close girlfriends here to ask. I would test out my theory on the other moms at school, but I’m too shy. I’d like to say, “Hey gals, fucking gorgeous weather this morning, huh?” just to see if I get any reaction at all. But the last conversation I had at drop-off didn’t go so well. A mom complimented me on my torn Levis. I was wearing black stockings underneath. “Oh, thank you Maeve,” I said. “I like to think the black peeking through somehow elevates my tatty pants.” She suddenly stopped smiling at me, and gracefully walked away to join up with her friends. I was confused about the cold shoulder, until Fiona told me that pants means underwear, which are usually called knickers, and trousers are what you wear to cover your legs. Great. Maeve thinks I wear jeans with holes to reveal my racy ripped lingerie. (“Fucking floozie,” she probably thinks when she sees me now.) Onto more evidence that supports my theory: Guys wave their middle fingers here to their friends in situations where American guys would high-five each other, and French guys would probably kiss each other. It’s a gesture that could mean ‘Great to see you;’ ‘Thanks for the lift;’ or ‘Later, dude,’ etc., depending upon the situation. But John brought forth the best evidence of all. He called me from his office on his birthday to report that it was the feast day of St. Fechin. “Who? St. Fucking?” I asked, pausing my grocery shopping. “You’re joking.” Curious about this Irish saint who shares a feast day with my husband, I’ve subsequently asked a fair number of people what they know about St. Fechin. Nobody yet has said, “crazy name for a saint, eh?” Nope. They all say something along the lines of “St. Fechin? He’s a martyr, maybe… forget exactly what he did. But I know the name well.”

Prime Minister Brian Cowen, aka Biffo

National Anthem

The Irish Times, this country’s paper of record, held a contest challenging readers to write a new national anthem. They published the winning entry on Monday. It epitomizes Irish humor on many levels, and I can’t do the song justice in words. I recommend a quick listen. You can hear it by logging onto http://www.irishtimes.com, type “National Anthem” in the search box and then you’ll be able to click on the blood boiling winning entry to hear it. I will provide the following background: the sheep’s baaaa in the song masks the word -- you guessed it -- “fucking.” The bits of Irish language (Gaeilge) spoken are meant to be ironic. (They are the first words Irish kids learn in elementary school: “one, two, three; yes teacher, I am present today.”) The mockery of the language has many cultural connections. Most Irish people find Gaeilge annoying: it’s an official language of the country, so the government mandates that all schoolchildren learn it well, and that all public signs, documents, etc. are written in it. It is practically a dead language, spoken only in a few remote regions by old codgers who people suspect just speak it for the government stipend involved. Yet it is, paradoxically, also a beloved language, as it’s revival at the turn of the century symbolized the rejection of English rule and the re-establishment of an independent Irish national identity. Finally, the current real Irish national anthem is in Irish, so nobody really understands it when it’s sung before sports matches.

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