Many years ago, in anticipation of a trip to Ireland, Geri enrolled me in a class called “How to Behave in Ireland.” She was the teacher of what could only be described as a lecture course. It had no syllabus nor required reading list and the lessons were offered whenever something happened to pop into her head that she thought I should know before meeting those of her family who still occupied the auld sod.
She frequently reminded me that her family would talk about the “wretched heathen” of a man Geraldine Marie Bernadette had married for generations to come if I didn’t behave properly.
This, she reminded me, was the kind of legacy one should avoid attaining.
I took copious notes over several months of intense training.
Chief among the rules of Geri’s Irish road was to politely refuse the offer of an adult beverage.
This rubbed against every fiber of my being.
“Why?”
“It’s just the way things are done,” she explained. “Refuse the second offer, as well. A third refusal will result in your getting a drink.” Up to that point in my life, I had never heard of anything so crazy.
The theory was tested at a bar in Dublin, across the road from Trinity College where a group of white-clad men played what I assumed to be cricket—a game I once heard described as an activity in which “white uniforms are not to be dirtied in the name of sport.” I took my seat at the bar and the barman asked what I’d like to drink. I smiled, shook my head and said, “Oh, nothing, thank you.”
A few minutes passed before an elderly man took a seat next to me and ordered a Guinness, without even being asked.
He turned to me and asked why I wasn’t drinking.
“The barman has only asked once,” I answered. “He’ll ask again.”
The gentleman looked quizzically at me and advised me that the barman in fact wouldn’t ask again and that if I wanted a “drop o’ the craythur,” as they so quaintly euphemize, I would have to ask for it.
I took his advice, ordered a Guinness and proceeded to have a delightful conversation about politics and history with a well-spoken old Irishman whose intelligence was obvious. And then, after learning that I was from Los Angeles, he asked if I “might be knowin’ me cousin Mary Murphy. She lives in San Francisco, don’t you know.”
My report to Geri was met with a great laugh. The three-times-asked rule applies only in private homes, she informed me. She may have called me an unflattering name. It was a long time ago.
The next afternoon we visited a private home where the host asked if I’d like a drink. I politely declined the offer and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping tea from a delicate cup while those around me guzzled shots of Jameson from Waterford crystal hi-ball glasses.
“He didn’t ask if you wanted a drink,” she slurred, as we drove off to find W.B. Yeats’ pond where in a few minutes time Geri would climb a fence and go swimming. “He asked if you drank and you said, ‘No.’ Stanney would never be so rude as to offer a drink to a man who doesn’t drink.”
Geri split her pre-teen years between Ireland and New York, as her parents dealt with a troubled marriage whose resolution might have been aloft in the Atlantic ether between Galway and Queens. The simple, elegant farm life of Gortnamona with its sheep, thoroughbreds and formal noontime meals, stood in sharp contrast to the grittier Woodhaven where stoopball was a major youth activity.
THE MANNERS AND SENSIBILITIES OF the Irish were deeply engrained in Geri’s psyche and in preparation for my introductions on Irish soil, I was informed that the worst possible thing one could ask of somebody you’ve just met is “what do you do?”
It was something I had never thought about. In most cases, of course, one doesn’t have to ask such a question as you probably already know the answer. I don’t know if it’s uniquely American, but it seems to me that when we introduce ourselves we tend to include a job description or title in the earliest stages of conversation. We do so, to a great extent I suppose, to define our very beings and societal standing by our occupations.
In Ireland, according to Geri, people define themselves not by what they do to put food on the table, but by their character, their ability to tell a story or sing a song.
The point was driven home last week when an actor of some renown was “outed” by a woman who, ostensibly, saw as a fall from grace a man bagging groceries at a Trader Joe’s in New Jersey after having had a co-starring role in “The Cosby Show.” This was first reported by a tabloid in Britain and then gleefully exploited in a most spurious way by none other than Fox News, which, of course, in its not-so-subtle way, implied a racist subtext.
Where-are-they-now stories have been around since before Guttenberg invented moveable type and they all seem to suggest a sense of failure, unless the subject has given up a lucrative law practice to raise goats to make organic chevre.
Geoffrey Owens, the actor subjected to all this scrutiny, this job-shaming as it were, was matter-of-fact in his own defense by saying that he needed a job. Work was work, he reasoned.
Good for Mr. Owens for sensing the difference between an identity and a job.
It was a lesson I first took to heart in Ireland.
Trifle
Ingredients
Bird’s Custard (follow package directions)
For the cake layer:
Store-bought stale pound cake,
1/2 cup dark rum
red raspberry jam or preserves
McVitie’s Milk Chocolate Digestives (300g), broken
For the fruit layer:
2 cups sliced fresh strawberries, ½ cup reserved
1 cup fresh raspberries
1 Tbs. dark rum
1 Tbs. sugar
Whipped cream layer:
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
1 tsp. confectioner’s sugar
Prepare the custard and set aside.
Mix the fruit, rum and sugar. Set aside to macerate.
Cut the stale pound cake into two-inch pieces and soak in the rum.
Spread the jam or preserves on each piece of the cake.
Whip the sugar into the cream until stiff peaks form.
In a trifle bowl, begin building the trifle by layering the custard, the cake and biscuits, the fruit and cream, repeating to create three layers. Top the trifle with the reserved strawberries and refrigerate for at least four hours.
Photography by Courtney A. Liska