DA 2003: Daughters of Ireland (to Anne Linde, my daughter)
Dolphin Address 21 2003
July 31, 2003
It was the kind of evening that you just don't know where to go. Inside, the car was still radiating the heat of the day. Outside the midgets seemed to multiply by the minute. I begged the Burren for a breeze, a gentle breath to blow the beasts asunder. Alas, it was denied. My life was to follow a different path.
I chose the sandy one and dragged myself across the dunes to where tis preyed upon by the hungry waves. But also here the air was hanging still, only to move under a zillion midget wings. On condition one has been good, Providence may take over in such cases.
To get back to my car I went through the bottom of 'the Hole', the Irish nickname for this wide and deep dune valley. Before, I had caught a glimpse of a head wrapped girl that walked up the slope with an elegance that most people can only walk it down.
There were three of them down there. They were very Irish and they cannot have been older than my daughter. Joyce was the one who had picked up my name at the dolphin swim and I was pleasantly surprised by the welcome ring she gave to it. The tone was set though by Niamh. In addition to her athletic build she was of extreme dynamic and assertive character, relishing her memoirs with glee and turmoil. As a boy she surely would have made captain of a football team, but it turned out she had done quite some traveling, and had been particularly active in the care for war children in Yugoslavia.
They were having a bonfire and were trying to decide whether to be eaten alive by the midgets or to suffocate in the smoke. I joined in this creative self-preservation after being invited to food and drink. As it got darker the fire got more articulate. That afternoon I had been shaking my head at the amount of garbage people had left behind, but the girls had exemplary cleaned up the 'Hole', supervised by Joyce, who was involved in a nationwide organized environmental scheme. She was a bit quiet, not for something to say, rather than the right time to say it, the proverbial Achilles' heel of intellect. And she was the only one wearing legs.
Every now and then one of the girls had to go to the 'Ladies' and disappeared in the dark. When I announced to go to the 'Ladies' as well, it felt like having ritually passed between genders when I returned.
Except for the poor sausages the food was eaten and the alleged vitriol vodka, that allegedly contained 13.6 times as much alcohol than tap water, never got below the label.
Claire had driven her car to the bottom of the 'Hole' and now it skidded like a jitterbug and would not come out. She tried bravely to ignore it, but she was very upset about it, like you wish you never had done something irreversible. About every hour she relocated it, to check the battery, to shelter us from the wind that of course came when we had stanched out the midgets or to just keep in touch with it as long as it was alive.
When she had taken of the wrap around her head, I had half-surprised shouted: 'But Claire, you have hair!'. This, apparently, rather affected her and she insisted me to explain my outcry. As it had come spontaneous, I had to reconstruct my own runway and we finally settled for the change in profile. There was just a little bit more to it, though. Not only does her hair become her, she even allowed me to touch it and it felt as soft as a holy well.
But if you think that Claire only had the softest hair and the only car below sea level, you are so wrong. When Niamh told me about the train drivers strike, that they transported everybody for free as a protest and won the absolute sympathy of the public, Claire presented a very different picture. She calculated how the train drivers are not only very well paid, but also enjoy several benefits and that these actions are payed out of the pockets of the public by future raises of the tickets price.
I am not sure I understood everything, but it became clear, how in the relative extremes of Joyce and Niamh's characters, Claire's is a center, absorbing shock waves, guiding intelligence and providing solid knowledge.
It sounds almost too good to be true, to have met the flower of the nation, the power, the sense and the character. There is an explanation to this. In biology it goes: if there is one, there are more. There must be a great many fine young women in this country.
PS. The next day the sausages proved to be burned on one side, on the other they looked even uglier than before.
Because the grass had dried, Claire drove the car out of 'the Hole' as easy as she had driven it in.
Jan Ploeg, Fanore meadow, July 31st 2003
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