Spend the years of learning squandering

Courage for the years of wandering

Through a world politely turning

From the loutishness of learning.

-SB

It’s too early this morning. I can feel that my body is already paying the price for a battery of well-deserved excesses: tire wear, caffeination, publican haunting, sleep deprivation, repeat.  I am no longer a twitchy teenager, but I don’t see a better way to go about occupying a space that yields so much affectionate return.

This weather—and I’m talking about the 4AM kind set in a winter where the sun doesn’t rise until half eight—has lashing rain that finds every reason to whistle through the single street center of this tiny Irish town. On the flip side, my last minute packing and early morning rise offered no good cause for sleep last night. I actually imagined that I would make up the deficit while riding the Aircoach, Dublin’s comfortable bus transport that pulled me out into this tempest at such an ungodly hour. This would be a dress rehearsal for my exit from another calendar year of life experience.

Languid and cold, but it’s more than okay. Physical discomfort is always more welcome than the emotional. Pelting rain is nothing at this hour of departure.

Here now on the bus, almost everything that is shaken out in my seating area is damp and not drying. The time moves past 5:30, and my grand plan for shuteye has become a point of abject disregard. The coach bumps along in the smudgy rain, and I trace the route with detached ease: Stillorgan, Blackrock, Ballsbridge—and then, almost without warning, we are in Dublin 2.  Along a brick row house is where I catch a street sign bearing this postal code number. Suddenly I am zapped awake to honor these environs like a rapt parishioner.

We have the greatest reverence for places that taught us the most about ourselves. I think that’s why I’m suddenly drawn into the present.

But the bus continues to move, and just as I expected, we’re spit out onto the quays. The Beckett Bridge…it should be right…there. And we’re on it now, vaulting over the Liffey in a way that makes this handful of seconds almost forgettable. The bridge, for all of its newness, was one of the more beautiful millennium projects that sprang up in Dublin while I was away. Its boney, curving spine reaches skyward like a Celtic harp that has been left on its side and forgotten in one of the more touristy pubs offering trad. The architecture echoes nothing of the disquieting artist’s portrait that just yesterday I studied with admiration in the National Gallery.

On to the city’s North Side, and once again it hits me that I am leaving. These moments of witness are almost completely through my fingers now, and the last gasps come at me like the wind beating against the window glass pane. For all of its grit-coated Georgian architecture, I cannot reconcile why any of this should feel remarkable.

With absolutely no ceremony at all, the bus finally comes to its terminus at the Dublin Airport. My heart sinks as I am strangely caught off-guard by our arrival, and I scramble to squish my belongings back into my bags. The experience ends here, and all that remains is a grasping at straws that is the ingenuity known as duty free shopping. The sentimental side of me knows that I will wander the departure hall and buy crap that I don’t need, but my logical half tells me that anything that I can take back—right down to the used Luas ticket still tucked in my pocket from last night—these valueless keepsakes will sustain me until the next unknown return.

I’m on the aircraft now, and courtesy of this airport’s pre-immigration hall, I am by political definition already back in America. The angular accent of my Newark-based flight attendant rather matches my own, but at the same time her voice grates on the ear. I know that soon her speech pattern will fade to mundane. Adaption, after all, eventually settles into itself everywhere that we go, doesn’t it?

“Does anybody read these things?” asks a crewmember as he walks down the aisle holding copies of the Irish Times and Irish Independent in each hand. They dangle as if he is holding up two pieces of trash that will hardly be claimed. I reach for a paper. I wish that I had remembered to pick up a copy of yesterday’s Times; the cover page bore a photograph of Trinity College’s Front Arch by night. The West Front façade was painted psychedelic by a light projection colored paisley with the words “Love Dublin” resting at the interior.

I slide the paper between my seat and the bulkhead. We gain speed and move off the runway. The patchwork of green below starts to become smaller as I look back and get one last glimpse of Dublin Bay. The Liffey, the Poolbeg stacks. Breaking the cloud line. I am asleep.