It seems strange, thinking back on it now, the first few days in this new green country, tentatively foraging forth from the airport into parts unknown. Some of us were returning to the motherland and some of us strangers to all of it. But we were all of us ready, and willing, to learn. Those first few days were hard, getting used to the way the people spoke and the money and the pace of life in small, rural Spiddal. But it grew on us, and we, in turn, grew to love it.
We were told stories, dozens of stories, stories about men still living and men long dead and some about men who had never lived at all, except in the hearts of other men. Ireland is a land for storytellers, and even the ground sometimes speaks, strange stories out of a long past. All of us shared stories – Megan told us things on our trips we would never need to remember again and Professor Davis told us things we would, indeed, need to know for the quiz later. And we made our own stories too – like the time we got lost in Galway and found our way to the best fish and chip shop on the planet, or the time the girls went thrift shopping and came back with articles of clothing with their own interesting stories to tell, or the time in the pub when the guys…well, there were a lot of times in pubs. We drank our way through none too few good times in the city. We were kings and queens in our own age, heroes in our own time, unafraid to go out and see the world as it would have itself be seen. Not to conquer but to be conquered by the sights and sounds of Eire. We were open, and we had to be, to see everything that needed to be seen and a few things that didn’t. We went everywhere, and like good soldiers we never left a man or woman behind, though some of them might have wanted to be left.We fed each other everything we had – enthusiasm, which came in droves from all fronts, and knowledge, which came from our professors, and food, in all kinds. The food! Katie kept us in cookies and muffins and all sorts of warm, fresh from the oven goodness and Megan, heaven bless her, made us dishes we couldn’t name with ingredients only she could identify and we put up with them anyway because eating them made her smile. Not that she ever tried foisting on us anything unfit for human consumption – she had limits just like the rest of us did. We put up with singing, too, singing and whistling and all the manner of music making, because humans like to express themselves in song, even if their singing could wake the dead. When we were annoying, we were tolerant. When we were angry, we remembered to count to ten. When we needed silence, we gave it, and when talk was needed, we listened.
We had skills, and we shared them – Our english and communication majors checked and double checked our papers, our accounting majors helped us budget, our management majors kept us all in line. We all shared laughter. We all shared pain, the pain of being away from home and the sweet pain of adventure and the pain of wearing new shoes you forgot to break in the summer before. We shared each other’s weight, carrying each other home from the pub or shouldering the burden of a day gone wrong. Not that there were too many bespoilt days, mind you.
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