On June 25, 2010 I was visiting the island of Ireland to explore the roots of the Sullivan's, my mother's side of the family. I had flown in the day before, after a week visiting my sister, her soon to be husband, and our sister from another family. I immediately got on a bus from Dublin to Cork, and then walked from hostel to hostel to find a room before eleven pm. I got lucky on the second try, and it turned out to be the perfect place to be. I spent a night readjusting to the dormitory bed lifestyle in a room with several other strangers, mostly Europeans, nothing new.
My first full day in the land of Michael Sullivan's ancestors, I took a train twenty minutes to the town of Cobh (pronounced "cove"), where my ancestors left when they were escaping the potato famine. They were hungry for food, and they were hungry for a new life in a new land. Much of their hunger was due to unfair practices by the British, which is actually where most of my family roots come from and not just on the Sanford side. But the Sullivan's are pure Irish, and I'd already been to England for two weeks with my family when I was sixteen. Now I had completed a journey beyond my wildest imagination, and it was about to come to more poetry than I could believe.
I stood on the shore and contemplated the feelings that all of those scared yet hopeful humans must have had as they stared out over the harbor. Once they were beyond those boundaries, it was the open ocean, and a voyage to the "new world" that welcomed you to the greatest young powerful city of opportunity on Earth, New York, with a statue of Liberty. And how hungry they must have been. And how hard some of them were going to have to work to survive and get ahead and continue their families and the magic of the Emerald Isle. And how long a voyage it must have been.
Today we learned about the Erie Canal and how it was an amazing risky project that made New York incredibly rich, and was mostly built with the brunt of whiskey fueled Irish labor. We also saw imagination of how horrible slavery was. We also saw whalers in boats and their dangerous journeys. We saw Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass's bold incredibly brave journeys to freedom, or the in the case of the former, repeatedly risking her own life and freedom to bring others to safety and freedom.
Then I went online to find out that the Supreme Court had made a decision against the Voting Rights Act, one of the most valuable steps in the Civil Rights Movement. We're such--ah, forget it.
Anyway, we also learned from our students. A Thai student explained on the board how to make cocktails, and then a Japanese student taught us how to be happy. She used an acronym that I won't steal, but it involved being healthy in body and mind and active and young, and to look at the glass as half full.
I needed that today. I went to bed feeling great, but then had a weird beginning to my day. I'd looked at an apartment yesterday, right down the hill from where I live, actually, and it seemed perfect. The first thing I saw was a Bonnaroo 2007 poster, and then one from 2009, and TOKYO, and Phish, and Life of Pi was on his bookshelf, and a John Lennon poster, and then it turned out that he wanted a full check ASAP, and I'm relying on my next paycheck. He went with someone else, as many others had responded to the ad. When I got home, someone I had replied to four days earlier had finally gotten back to me with an invitation to see their Oakland apartment (half the price of Bonnaroo pad) today. But then they never got back to me, and later in the day wrote saying that the room had been taken. I was late to work walking but decided to drive, and then I saw that my back tire was completely out of air, which seemed crazy as I'd used it just a few days earlier. Sometimes the tires get low, but never flat. It was also a really rainy and humid day. Luckily an apartment in the East Bay got back to me, and I checked it out first thing after work, despite the slight rain and persistent clouds of moisture everywhere. It's in a much calmer neighborhood than I am now, and the first thing I saw on the porch were all of those Hindu/Nepalese prayer flags I saw all over Asia and various stores in Ithaca and San Francisco. I could tell I was going to like the place, even though it's only a one month sublet. That's perfect for my plans, as I've already set aside some time in August for a journey.
I tried to change my tire after work, but the lug nuts wouldn't budge, even when I jumped up and down on the included lever as stated in the directions. Well, maybe I wasn't supposed to jump, but it came to that after it wouldn't move with any force no matter what I tried. I called my dad and found out I can buy a small air pump to get it enough air so I can bring it to a gas station around the corner and then get it repaired, and then the weather started to clear up. Then I found out I got the apartment.
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When I got back from Ireland my sister let me borrow some of her music, and for the first time in my life I wasn't ashamed to admit that I'd always found the soothing harmonies of Enya to be heavenly in a very strange way, ever since my mom played them in the kitchen around Christmas and my sister played them through the wall, sometimes in the morning when I was trying to sleep.
Anyway, I love that song "The Celts".
It's perfect for walking on any windy hill and remembering how lucky you are to have food in your fridge. That being said, just because you're being fed doesn't mean you can't stay ravenous for more of this wonderful new world.
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