Free Midlife Irish by Frank Gannon

six-six with tight curly black hair. His T-shirt
     said “Manhattan, The Greatest City in the World.”
    I asked him all about the cliffs and his life. He was from Bunraty. He played rhythm guitar in a band. They played in bars.
     I asked him a lot of questions. He answered them politely. Then he asked me a question.
    “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
    “I’m writing a book,” I said. “I just need the facts, sir.” I tried to sound like Jack Webb in
Dragnet
as a friendly, bantering thing. He didn’t get it.
    “Do you know
Dragnet
here?”
    “Sure.” A pause. “Oh, you were doing a Jack Webb thing. That’s funny.”
    I saw Paulette returning from the bathroom. The wind was lifting her hair. It was now just starting to rain.
    “I gotta get out of here,” I said. I shook his hand.
    “There aren’t any facts in Ireland,” he said. He waved goodbye.
    But there are some facts. William Faulkner said that the past wasn’t really past. There is no place on earth where Faulkner’s
     statement is truer than in Ireland. But first, let’s just look at the physical place.
    Ireland is an island, “John Bull’s other island.” It’s set out there apart from the rest of Europe next to that other island,
     England. But Ireland is its own little, intensely green place.
    The oldest definition we have for the word “Eriu,” the source of the word “Ireland,” is often translated as something like
     “the most beautiful woman in the world,” which is pretty appropriate because Ireland is really good looking. If we personify
     countries, and the United States is Uncle Sam, and Russia is either a bear or a rotund “Mother Russia,” Ireland is “the most
     beautiful woman in the world.”
    If Ireland were a woman, she would be a very good one to date. She is a knockout. The most beautiful woman in the world. She
     walks down the street and breaks hearts.
    Ireland is known by many names, but none of them, except “Eriu,” is a woman’s name, although sometimes, in songs, they refer
     to Ireland as “she.” The country is sometimes called “The Emerald Isle,” “The Old Country,” “The Old Sod,” or “Erin.” My dad,
     who referred to England only as “jolly old England,” called Ireland all of those names and a few other less pleasant ones.
     But my dad never referred to it as a warm, inviting place. He often referred to it like a place he escaped from, an old woman
     whose clutches he evaded.
    Whatever you call it, magical land or penal colony, whenyou approach the island in an airplane, or look at it from a boat far offshore, it seems like an enclosed, very separate entity,
     a different world, a theme park made by God. “Mist Land.” “Planet Green.” “The Land of Saints and Scholars.” “Island of the
     Religious Drinkers.” Too bad “Greenland” is taken.
    Ireland’s coastline is 2,000 miles, pretty remarkable when you consider how little the country is. From the tip of Ulster
     to the shore of Kerry, it’s only about 350 miles. From northwest to southwest, it’s about 200 miles. A little place, really.
     A little bigger than New Jersey, smaller than Georgia.
    Planet Green is a theme park with a lot of water. Eight hundred lakes. The River Shannon, its main river, is really a huge
     interlocking network of rivers and lakes. So, if you add in the fact that it rains almost every day, you can safely say that
     if you are in Ireland, you are close to water no matter where you are. In fact, if you are in Ireland, you are probably wet.
     When people speak of the “Shannon dampness,” they are describing the place very well, and they are very close to the heart
     of Ireland. The average yearly rainfall in Ireland is over thirty inches a year, and the idea of dampness comes up in countless
     Irish sayings.
    Irish people are wet a lot, although they, as a rule, don’t do much swimming. Ireland, for all that water, isn’t big on water
     sports. Oddly, Irish people aren’t