Tuesday 15 September 2020

Staycation. Kiss a human. Bury a Friend.

So I and some other exhausted members of the extended Fam did a Flight Into the West before Kildare County locked down (though not entirely). For a staycation (native hol) in August. I, having taken three days in Cork in July with Beauty and the Boy, was having a second staycation ( holiday at home) to be truthful. Three nights in Galway, Spiddal, was bought and paid for, to top us up to a week away from Our House.  Our cave and our prison, where we'd all spent more time than we'd ever foreseen or asked for.  Five strange months. Co-exisiting.  Sheltering in Place.  Within walls we'd left behind a year before.


I mean, hey, it wasn't so bad? Not for us.  We were adults all.  We knew how to ignore each other when it was required, come together when it was needed.  It was, I mean,  bonding? Over Netflix, online yoga, knitting (ah yes), messing about in the back garden.  Books. Coffee brewing, and shooting the breeze about the crazy pandemic tornado, howling past Our House, swirling around our boundary line. Out there, at bay. But still, and anyway, time and living in this manner takes its toll  We were getting a little reluctant to leave the house at all, in the end.  In a way. We were obsessing, overthinking things we had to learn to leave alone...

...will I die, will I soon, intubated and drugged, will I scream, inside will I scream? will I....have only strangers masked strangers, masked strangers are turning me turning me turning me... and I'm done? will my mother, my father, my children call out for me, dying, call out for us ...stop! all that fuss, all that hope coming in, coming here, now masked strangers who don't know or forget we must pass with our people....and can I or do I exist now? beginning or ending, if no-one contain me...infection I am..

We must behave like everyone we met including ourselves are infected. I am infection. 

 

We were looking at the world from a position of retreat, peering out at a place at the end of a lengthening tunnel....had to get out!


And how my lungs expanded as miles flew,  fields streamed past the car on the motorway. Speeding. Probably.  A little. Being anywhere, away, was exhilarating, kickstarting, strange, scary-strange. Scary? Well, the gutted towns we slowed for, shop fronts boarded up on high streets in towns. in a city, gaping absences on main streets like missing teeth, exposed, down an out, were disturbing.   Edgy waiters washing down your seat your table,  before you crossed the threshold, dis-infecting your seat your table after you had eaten, was that, scary. Chilling even. The sense of dystopia was there and everywhere.   Like you're getting back to normal, not. Never.  You're on the road to nowhere, or somewhere not mapped (maybe in horror movies?).

But, you know,  the Family was there. Those dear familiars, to meet for meals out, to walk the beech with, and wander through the streets. To drink with, and debrief. Despite that invisible fence hampering essential connection. You know the one. You've learning  not to cross it.  A scared new world. Where you can't have a drink, in a dark warm pub with your people, a mate.  (you can't)  Just drink together and talk, and your talk getting wilder as pints flow, til you're in the zone? If you're Irish, if you're human.

Well I knew where the invisible fence was, and didn't expect to leap the perimeter in  Galway. But walking through a properly cavelike lounge, as we checked into the hotel, I realise it is not empty, as all pub lounges have become. There is the brother in law, gazing philosophically at the far wall, nursing a pint. At 4pm in the day! Hurrah! Turned out there was a way of having one, or a few.  If you were eating, like later, or staying, or something like that. "Come join me" he called like the Host of Drinking, only waiting for us to arrive.

So we joined him and once I got over my fear of the barman snatching the second pint from my hand, or the third, had the most fun I'd had in I mean, five months? A seriously laughing dissection of everything, happening or stalled.  Interrupted, finally,  by dinner when we absolutely had to shift ourselves into the restaurant. How I used to take this,  connecting, for granted. How it is judged by the non-partakers, naysayers,  as valueless, dispensable, not allowed, in these long dark days of panicked pandemic. 

That, my dear readers, was an an actual session?  And then there were communal meals, cooked and served up to you in actual restaurants, while all you had to do was eat, talk and smile (like a good thing).  Compulsivly. Your grown children arranged at the table behind you,  distanced, their chairs shifting closer and closer to the adults to join in the talk. 

My sister,  her daughter and my daughter, eat with me the night before we leave.  Just us, at our socially distanced table, marooned near a window, well served by a not busy waiter. We are all still giddy/happy to be able to do it,  to be in.  All animation, forthcoming and confessional, that night. My sister and I talk of secrets,  family things, happenings, only ever taken for an airing in closed door spaces.  Spilling beans as the wine flowed, the food came and went. The time when someone's mother, on her tenth birth, did  not recognise the child the nurses brought... or so the mother said said.... "Apparently, the nurse said that that was a thing, you know, if your own mother died when you were expecting" my sister says. But the child who was not recognised felt this deeply,  enduringly, for years and years afterward, when a chatty aunt spilled the beans about it.

...and then there was the Uncle Misplaced, a new born babe given to another mother in a nursing home, whose own mother took the stranger baby to her breast, took it home. A fact the lost child never forgave when the mistake was uncovered, the babies replaced. 

....my own memory that may not be a memory, (the chatty aunt again) of hanging upside down from my pram by my pram-straps for an eternity, as I screamed and choked, no one coming, in a field.  Mother having left me in my father's care, the pram parked in a corner of the field he was ploughing, his eye trained on the churning earth. His mind fixed on... ploughing. Evidently. "I didn't remember this, til I was told about..I mean. Then I did?".  I explain. And, (explained)  that I figured it may have given me an interesting and permanently upside down view of life...at the best view of things...

Our daughters listen carefully, silent for a change. As though they are imputing information, receiving key instructions concerning  themselves, for their journey.  And they are, and so it goes.  We pass it on, we rid ourselves of memories that laced, curled about and floored their conception, their making.  One day maybe, they will pass on such stuff to their daughters, to shadow, or illuminate the way. Of course, they will, in telling, medicalise, catgorise  each perfect story, as people do now.  Instead of leaving it perfect, released in it's telling. Illuminating all around it happening in that time.

We left there replete, unequivocally happy and hugging like Americans at the door, tipsy and sure that we'd covered all bases. Like, we said, who knew when we'd do this again? Precarious good times!  Giving urgency, heat,  to the good food we eat, to everything said.  A glorious airing of things needing presence, close contact, the smile in the eyes and the head cocked for listening.  The energy linking, co-mingling your body my body, the only way ever we humans connect.  

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