Dateline – Tralee, Ireland

And the end of the tour of the Irish countryside approaches. One more day as we head back to Dublin tomorrow, then a few city days before heading home. Even though I return stateside on Wednesday, I am not going back to work until Monday the 9th as planned. There is an extra bonus sequel: Vacation II in between that will go direct to Netflix as no one asked for it and no one much is interested and it’s not likely to engender a daily update as it’s a destination I’ve been to and written about many times. In the meantime, I will keep writing about Ireland with other random thoughts thrown in as they strike.

Today was a relative sleep in day and I didn’t have to be down to breakfast until sometime after 8:15 for my oatmeal and yogurt (my staples when I’m a bit uncertain about the eggs and breakfast meats at the hotel buffet) prior to boarding the bus. This time, we headed south to the road around the Iveragh peninsula known as the Ring of Kerry, one of the most scenic on the island as it veers from the waters of Dingle Bay to passes between the highest mountains in the country all in the matter of a few miles. Mind you they aren’t terribly high mountains, even in Appalachian terms, but they’re pretty darn impressive as they more or less rise directly out of the sea. The weather held (cloudy but fairly clear) and most of the morning was spent stopping for photo ops and oohing and aahing at the scenery. Lunch was in Waterville, at roughly the halfway point. The rains descended while we were safely inside the pub, dropped an inch or so of water and then cleared up just as we finished lunch and thoughtfully stayed away the rest of the day. I guess they were making up for yesterday at the Cliffs of Moher.

After lunch, a stop at Daniel O’Connell’s family manse, Derrynane house with a ramble along the beach in the company of an expert on the growing and preparation of seaweed for human consumption. Samples were provided for tasting. This was nothing new. After all, my mother was a marine botanist by training. I was encouraged to try a number of seaweeds on beach walks as a child. I did not develop a taste. Then back on the bus for more scenery (wild little islets, steep green cliffs falling into mountain tarns with their own wild little islets and the occasional red deer hanging out in the fields along with the cattle) arriving in the town of Killarney late in the afternoon and told to amuse and feed ourselves for a few hours. As it was the Saturday of June Bank Holiday weekend (more or less equivalent to our Memorial Day Weekend and the start of the summer season), the town was hopping, especially with a large motorcycle festival in town. I was getting a bit tired of meat and potatoes so I looked around and found an Asian restaurant and had a bowl of Thai green curry with rice.

I’m having a quiet evening in tonight. Tomorrow promises to be a fairly long driving day with only one significant stop prior to Dublin, at Blarney castle. I’m not sure if kissing the Blarney stone is involved. If I come back with a new accent and even more of a tendency to get up on soapboxes than I already possess, you’ll know.

Having not felt great for a couple of days, I’ve cut the last few of these missives a bit short. There are some of you who are offering prayers of thanks, I know, but others like heading into the woods of my prose and ideas. I’ll make it up to you in a couple of days. There are a bunch of things percolating that will need to be written down soon. Just not tonight.

Dateline – Tralee, Ireland

Today is the 30th of May. If we still believed in traditional calendars, we’d be celebrating memorial day but that was this past Monday due to changes made in my childhood in order to create more long weekends for the federal workforce. I get the reasons for the floating holiday but I think we lose something when we give those calendar traditions up. In this case, the special celebration of my sister’s birth. Yes, she was born on May 30th of a year a number of decades prior to the current one. If you want the exact date, ask her. In her time, she has been annoying younger sibling, creative free spirit, talented graphic designer and now a well regarded tattoo artist. She has always been the one in the family who has always met me where I am and never tried to course correct me. She also tells me exactly what she thinks when I’m being stupid. Here’s to you Jeannie Rae.

The viral illness is being beaten back through a combination of wise eating choices, Tylenol, and adequate rest. I haven’t missed anything major. It seems to be going through our little group. A few others have had a bit of a hacking cough and looked a little peaked at breakfast. All I can say is it’s not terribly long lasting and doesn’t appear to be covid, at least according to my internal barometer. I should be pretty much back to normal by tomorrow with one more night’s good sleep. And as we aren’t changing lodgings tomorrow, I get to sleep in a bit.

This morning, however, it was up early and back on the bus for the drive to County Clare and the Cliffs of Moher. This was the first disappointment of the trip (there has to be at least one). Although we left the hotel in sunshine, when we arrived on the coast it was rainy, foggy and minimal visability. I put on my rain gear, and headed out to the view points anyway. I have long learned with sea fog that patience will be rewarded. Sure enough, with picking a single vantage, and waiting, clouds would lift and separate and reveal different parts of the cliffs. It wasn’t the postcard perfect scenic view expected but was more dramatic with sudden reveals, shapes looming in the mist, and the birds calling and dying down depending on the visibility. Not good for pictures, but oh well. My fantasy of being Sarah Miles in Ryan’s Daughter and losing my parasol over the cliffs in David Lean’s somewhat obvious visual set up of loss of innocence will have to wait for another day. Besides which, I’m not Sarah Miles, I’m John Mills (and at least he won an Oscar).

Leaving the cliffs, we started south to the Dingle peninsula. We hadn’t gone five miles before the skies cleared again. Figures. Something about the microclimate of the cliffs I presume. Down into the valley of the river Shannon and then onto a ferry across as it’s much too broad at its estuary to bridge easily. Then up and down various hilly country roads until we made it into that part of Ireland that I’ve always referred to as the Fingers after Game of Thrones and ended up on the south side of the peninsula at Dingle Bay and the town of Dingle. Dingle is a seaside town that was probably aworking fishing village and port for about ten centuries and has now become a twee tourist destination full of gift shops, yarn shops, and ice creameries. It’s setting on the edge of the bay is spectacular nad the harbor isn’t large enough to compete these days so I guess they had to do something. I took pictures. I had an ice cream cone.

Then, with the waning of the afternoon, a bus ride back to Tralee (as in Rose of Tralee), the big town in the area at 25,000 population. The hotel is decent. Dinner was good and I’ve been watching some bad local television after. Tomorrow, a scenic drive around another of the finger peninsulas, the famous Ring of Kerry.

I poked through the political headlines from back home a bit. Was very amused at the thought of Stephen Miller, the chief protagonist in the sick and somewhat farcical deport them all games the current administration is playing running around with an immigrant who lied on his visa application by the name of Elon Musk. I almost forgot that there’s a genocide against White South Africans – it’s so enormous that fewer than sixty took advantage of expedited evacuation and immigration.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer as to what the purpose of DOGE was and saving dollars wasn’t it. The total savings, despite untold havoc and tens of thousands of disrupted lives is only that of a couple of pieces of top grade military hardware. The purpose was to install assets of Musk, Peter Thiel, and the other tech bros in all of the necessary offices to be able to swipe, collate, analyze and otherwise use government data for whatever purposes they choose and with virtually no oversight. The obvious first move, now that the foundations have been thoroughly weakened is to let government agencies fail and, when the public starts screaming, to replace those services with private companies who can do the same work (as they absconded with the data) for profit – it will likely be done well for the haves and poorly for the have nots with tiered benefits and premium services and it will all be made palatable by direct to consume psy-ops which will make Cambridge Analytica look like childs play.

I really need to look into that British passport eligibility. Although I’m not sure it helps all that much post Brexit.

Dateline – Adare, Ireland

I’m feeling a bit better thn last night after snoozing in the bus a good piece of the day. (The weather was foul – rainy and grey so there wasn’t all that much to look at anyway). I expected dreary grey weather when I booked the trip (but according to all of the locals the early part of May was absolutely lovely this year. Must have brought the grey skies with me from my Seattle upbringing).I’m hoping one more long night with nothing to do will get me over the hump. Not feeling well in strange hotel rooms in foreign countries is my idea of a good time.

We left Westport and county Mayo this morning, once more tearing across rural Irish lanes. Dominic, our driver/guide has been doing this for decades and seems to be an old hand at roads too narrow for passing, sharp curves, and blind corners. As we are a small group, we’re not in a full size bus. I can only imagine what mad skills he would need to handle one of those on some of the backroads we’ve been trundling down. Our first stop was a sheep farm which offers a demonstraction of border collies rounding up and maneuvering a flock. I wouldn’t want to try and train a dog for something like that. But Janet, our demonstration dog, seemed to be having the time of her life – the sheep not so much. The farmer running the place struck me as being out of the mold of Farmer Hoggett and I expected ‘That’ll do pig, that’ll do’ at any moment.

Back on the bus and heigh ho the wind and the rain and headed into Galway for lunch. Galway is a prosperous small city of about 100,000 which has made a name for itself in the biotech industry. (remember that your heart stents, insulin pumps, defibrillators and all the rest are imported when considering tariff policy. Some shopping, some lunch, a stop at the cathedral (which is younger than I am – it’s Romanesque in style but was built in the 1960s). Then on the bus to the village of Adare which is about seven miles outside of Limerick. The hotel tonight is the Woodlands which started out as a four bedroom B and B fifty years ago and which the family have steadily grown into a 100 room rural destination hotel/event space. Confirmation parties and a wedding in residence this evening.

The matriarch of the owning family came in to tell us a bit about the story of the hotel when she checked on our dinner. The kitchen is very much farm to table with their own organic gardens and orchard (Tommy would have loved that). And there’s a petting zoo and a number of walking trails, including one with some fairy scenes for the kids to explore (Steve would have loved that. Actually, he would probably have stolen a couple of table cloths, rigged himself up as Oberon, and run around popping out from behind trees exclaiming ‘Look at me, I’m a fairy’ giving a couple of three year olds life long psychological complexes and leading to a visit from the local constabulary).

Going to bed early. Nothing else to say tonight.

Dateline – Westport, Ireland

As Robert Preston once said as Toddy in the movie version of Victor/Victoria, there’s nothing more inconvenient than an old queen with a head cold. One snuck up on me today with a stuffy and runny nose, a mild headache and some mild unwellness. It’s not bad enough to knock me off my stride but I did decide it would be wise to knock off the days activities at dinner and to spend this evening in the hotel room doing very little. Tonight, I am at the Knockranny House hotel in Westport, Ireland, a rather upscale little boutique town on the west coast of the island. The hotel is spacious and my room is large enough to conduct a pilates class should I so choose. I am lounging on the bed before getting about nine or ten hours sleep. WIth luck, the viral demons will be subdued in the morning. I know it’s not Covid. I have some very specific physical feelings with that the times I have had it and they are all absent this time around so I think it’s garden variety rhinovirus.

We got up this morning, left the hotel in Donegal and headed a bit south and back just over the border of Ulster and into Northern Ireland about 100 yards in order to visit the Belleek pottery and procelain factory which has been in continuous operation in the same facility for about 170 years. I emerged from a tour of the factory with a much greater knowledge as to the creation of fine china, a healthy respect for modern kiln technology, and a new understanding of how much of the work must be hand done. Belleek is known for their intricate porcelain baskets with a multitude of china flowers and butterflies arranged on them for maximum effect. It’s all done by a team of fine crafstmen from the creation of the weave patterns to the making of the flowers to the painting of the colors. And there’s not a lot of them. Maybe a half dozen or so in each department as it’s difficult work which requires years of apprenticeship training to get right. I now understand why the pieces are as expensive as they are. Many hours of skilled labor in each. I did not buy one as everything I liked was well out of my price range.

From Ulster, we cut across the northern part of the country to the west coast through WIlliam Butler Yeats country beneath the shadow of Ben Bulben mountain, a huge table formation and through County Sligo and into County Mayo arriving at the town of Westport. Where most Irish towns grew up higgledy piggledy from medieval footpaths and lanes with streets running every which way, Westport was a planned community, laid out at the behest of the Marquis of Sligo back in the 18th century and it’s rather charming with its streets radiating out from a central octagonal market square. The town isn’t very big so it didn’t take that long to explore it. Then it was off to Westport House, the local manor house and home to the Marquises of Sligo for three centuries.

Westport House was commissioned originally in the 1730s with much rearranging and adding over the years. The grounds were laid out with an ornamental lake and canal, and woods and copses to catch the eye and at the end of the property, the tidal inlet that leads to the sea. Like most of the other great country houses, three hundred years of water damage and deferred maintenance have left significant scars on the house and the family like, most of the rest of the landed gentry, no longer had the rental incomes to support it after the great war. (It’s all very Downton Abbey). The family have sold the house to a very wealthy local family who are about to pour tens of millions into a major restoration effort for both the house and the grounds.

The house was built on the site of Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen’s castle from Tudor times. Nothing remains of this other than the dungeons in the basement. Boubil and Schonberg of Les Miz fame wrote a very bad musical treatment of her life a few years back that flopped on Broadway and has not been seen since. She’s a fascinating historical figure, especially in her negotiations with Queen Elizabeth I but not everything needs to be a musical. It might be worth coming back in five years or so to see how the restoration is getting on. I’m one of those who was forunate enough to see the Sistine Chapel both before and after it’s major cleaning and restoration in the 1990s and it was a very different experience both times.

From my perusal of the headlines, the Trump administration seems to be doubling down on trying to destroy Harvard, the most prestigious of American universities (he’s so focused on this that there has to be something he’s trying to get back at. Was it his not being accepted when he applied to college? There as speculation it was Barron who did not get in and that this is what’s driving it but Melania is denying that) in a level of petty vindictiveness that would make Roy Cohn roll in his grave. RFK Jr. has decided that the three most prestigious medical journals in the world – The New England Journal of Medicine (founded 1812), The Lancet (founded 1823) and The Journal of the American Medical Association (founded 1883) are corrupt and that government funded scientists and health researchers should no longer be allowed to publish in them. Ummm… two centuries of the brightest minds in medicine have published and monitored the research that appears on those pages. I think they would have noticed if something were seriously off. The ostensible charge is that the corruption occurs because they publish the results of clinical drug trials that were funded by pharmaceutical companies. Ummm…. it’s called research and development and peer review and others then being sure that results can be appropriately replicated. I’m still waiting for the NIH to come out full bore for Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Snake Oil. It’s where we’re headed.

There’s a new strain of covid making the rounds – NB 1.8.1. It became rather wide spread in China and has now started to pop up all over the US and Europe. It’s still an omicron strain and, from what I can tell, it’s not that different from prior circulating strains in terms of virulence, morbidity and mortality. Like all covid, it’s not a great thing to get but it doesnt’ appear to be causing new serious issues. I’m still waiting for a mutation that causes something major. It’s coming and we in the US, after the major destruction of the public health and medical systems that has been meted out over the last few months, aren’t going to be able to do much about it. Keep your masks and your hand sanitizer handy and watch the news.

Dateline – Donegal, Ireland

And a second night in Donegal – which is nice as it means there was no need to pack and get the suitcase out the door at an early hour this morning and I had a very nice time sleeping in a bit. (Cue ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’). I did get up and get moving eventually, had my hotel breakfast buffet (middling quality) and walked back into the center of town to finish exploring. It didn’t take long. Donegal is not all that large. I was back at the hotel in plenty of time to board the bus for our day of exploring the Irish Highlands to the north and east of Donegal Bay. They’re part of the same geological formation that created both the Appalachians and the Scottish Highlands so I suppose I was connected to both my ancestors and my current domicile in some strange geologic way.

The roads in rural Ireland are narrow, rarely divided, and laid atop peat bogs and marshes so they tend to settle in unusual ways. This makes a drive along them, even in a small bus, something akin to an amusement park ride with strange sudden bumps, rapid turns and an occasional sudden drop off. Watching the scenery go by outside the windows was fine but any attempt at reading would likely lead to a bad case of motion sickness.

We skirted Donegal Bay, went through the fishing port of Killybegs (looking like every coastal town in Washington, Oregon and Alaska with a mix of commercial and pleasure fishing craft in the harbor) and then climbing up the side of the mountains to Slieve League, the tallest sea cliffs in Europe rising some 2000 feet from the ocean to the top of the peaks. It was a gorgeous view, if a bit chilly, shared mainly with the ever present sheep snacking away on the grasses and heather. Down the hill for an Irish Coffee (one of the few foods to contain all four essentials – alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat) and then cross country to the town of Ardara and a visit to the Triona factory and showroom where they continue to make traditional Donegal tweeds – complete with weaving demonstration. (I splurged and bought myself a new blazer in a rather becoming shade of blue). More Irish coffee. Down the street a bit to Nancy’s bar, a pub that’s been in the McHugh family for eight generations for dinner. (Guiness this time). Dinner entertainment was an energetic young fiddle player who’s winning awards for his traditional Irish music at the ripe old age of 16. He’s going places. Then back to the hotel. I am considering going back into town this evening, but I am an old fart and should probably call it an early evening and conserve energy.

I’m starting to gather ideas for the sermon I need to write on returning – ‘Moral injury, moral evil, and the American Health Care System’. It shouldn’t take me more than a couple of days. My traveling companions are all of a certain age so I’m pumping them for stories of their experiences so I can have some fresh anecdotes with which to spice up the finished project. I should also be working on Richard II, but that’s going to require deeper thought so I’ll probably leave that until after I get back, recover, and am back in usual form. I have two weeks between back to the grind date and first rehearsal.

Until tomorrow, sláinte…

Dateline – Donegal, Ireland

Up far too early this morning to get ready for the major drive of the week, from Dublin in the country’s Southeast to Donegal in the country’s Northwest. Still it wasn’t too bad. Ireland is not a large country. It’s a good deal smaller than Alabama (32,500 square miles including Ulster vs 52,500 square miles). It has a somewhat larger population of about 6.5 miliion compared to Alabama’s 5.2 million. And it definitely has a different climate. It’s been gray and blustery with intermittent rain showers all day (with a couple of gorgeous rainbows when the sun did manage to break through) and it’s just now twilight at 10 PM due to the northern latitude, all in all very like the Seattle of my childhood. I have my Gortex rain jacket and an extra sweater so I’m doing just fine. My traveling companions from California, not so much.

The first leg was from Dublin to a town called Strokestown in the middle of the country. We stopped there to visit Strokestown house, one of the grand old Georgian country manses that survive and to take in the National Famine Museum that it houses. One may ask why the museum commemorating the potato blight and famine of the 1840s is in such an out of the way place and not in Dublin, the answer lies, as it often does, in historical accident. Strokestown house was occupied by one family, the Mahons, for about 300 years as the lands and rents were granted to the family by Oliver Cromwell in his English colonization enterprises of the 1680s and the last member of the family not having vacated until about 1980. The Mahons must have been packrats as the man who bought the estate in the late 70s, intending to raze it, started to rooting around in disused cupboards and found more or less a complete archive and history of the family, the tenants and the workings of the plantation including full documentation of what happened to the 12,000 or so people who lived on the land at the time of the famine. The head of the family at that time, Dennis Mahon, was a piece of work. Profligate and with no interest in the humans who depended on him and the estate to survive, solely in the profits he felt were his due, he was eventually assassinated by the locals, but not before thousands of his tennants died or emigrated (after walking to Dublin), aided by the Mahons as they figured out that paying passage for their dying tennants in coffin ships headed to Canada was cheaper than paying the relief taxes imposed by the need for workhouses and soup kitchens.

Reading the letters and ledgers, carefully preserved, and the callousness with which life and death are discussed as a drain on profits, I could not help but draw parallels to the discussions currently happening in congress regarding the budget bill and its cuts to food assistance and health programs. The language and attitudes are exactly the same. Looking through the exhibits and through the public rooms of the house (very lived in and with an incredibly intact Georgian kitchen), I thought a little bit of my Irish antecedents. I have one great great great grandmother from Ireland by the name of Betsy Nacey. I know next to nothing about her other than she emigrated to Canada where she married a German emigree named Nolop some time in the early to mid 19th century. I don’t know the dates to know if she was running from the famine or came over in a coffin ship or if she arrived before that time. Must do some poking around Ancestry.com when I have some spare time.

Back on the bus and another hour or so and over the border into Northern Ireland and to the town of Enniskellen where we stopped at a 19th century Irish pub known as The Hollow although its real name is The WIlliam Blake. (Poets and Pubs – that’s Ireland). It was chosen as it has a relatively famous carved door. The center for filming of Game of Thrones was Northern Ireland and one of the locations, used as The Kings Road, is an avenue of interlacing beech trees called The Dark Hedges. During production, a windstorm toppled several of the trees. The production took charge of the downed trunks and the craftsmen employed on the show made them into ten carved doors (one for each episode of season six – why season six? I haven’t the foggiest). One ended up in this pub and there’s a whole game where you run all over Northern Ireland trying to collect all ten doors. I am not participating.

Then back on the bus and on to Donegal where we are spending tonight and tomorrow night. Donegal is one of those picturesque little towns with a crumbling old castle, some well used churches, and a large market square/high street that looks like the set of a BBC television series. I took a quick walk around it before dinner but the rain was getting harder so I repaired back to the hotel (modern and comfortable and not crumbling) to eat and to take it easy for a while. We have nothing planned until lunch time tomorrow so I’ll head back into town in the morning. Hopefully the weather will have improved.

I have enjoyed a respite from American political news over the long weekend. I suppose I should start paying attention again tomorrow. From what I can tell, Trump’s big beautiful budget bill is falling apart at the seams as more and more people start to realize what’s actually in it and the Republican’s understand that votes for it will be weaponized in the midterms as people start losing various benefits. Trump himself put out a Memorial Day message that was his usual insulting gobbledygook and seems to have insulted the graduates of West Point by giving a graduation speech focused on trophy wives before he left early so he could play golf. I’m paying no attention to either his words or actions at this point. It’s not possible to get them to make any sort of sense or to ferret out coherent policy. I’m watching the powers behind the throne and what they’re up to. They are far more dangerous. Most of the Irish I’ve met, when they hear my American accent, are a bit standoffish so I’m now adding ‘yes I’m American and I didn’t vote for him’ and they thaw considerably.

Dateline: Dublin, Ireland

And I think I managed to make it out of the house and on to the plane without any major mishaps or omissions. I forgot to bring my compression socks for the plane but I do OK with transatlantic flights without them. They are an absolute necessity for transpacific flights however. I miss the world of people dressing up in tailored suits for travel, if it ever even existed outside of the tropes of classic Hollywood. I, in my polo shirt and slacks seemed to be remarkably overdressed for the occasion. I counted at least six sets of pajamas and something that I think was made out of discarded dental floss on the Atalnta to Dublin flight. In another couple of decades, hoodies and sweat pants will likely be de rigeur for society weddings.

Aside from my various ‘you kids keep off my lawn’ moments, the travel was uneventful. There were no weather delays. Air Traffic Control in both Birmingham and Atlanta seemed to be functioning normally. There were no significant lines for security or passport control. They did not lose my checked luggage. The entertainment system at my seat appeared to be fully functional. My choice of films to snooze through: Gladiator followed by Gladiator II (which I had not yet seen and I’m glad I did not waste several hours of my life catching it at the movie theater) followed by my umpteenth rewatch of Mary Poppins so my brain could have some comfort food as I kept dozing off. Actual sleep without CPAP or recumbent position wasn’t going to be possible. Mary Poppins was the first film I was taken to see at the movies, age 2 1/2. (I still remember the experience). It’s funny to consider that I am now retirement age and the two stars are still both very much with us.

As the plane approached Ireland, I cracked open the window shade to look as it was now Sunday morning thanks to time changes. Looking down, lots of green fields with trees and hedges outlining running water and a scattering of hamlets and small towns, then a loop out over the Irish Sea to get into position for landing in Dublin with a view of a number of the small islands that dot that body of water. Smooth landing in Dublin a few minutes later, all of the usual disembarkation rituals, and then off to meet the representative of the tour group in the Arrivals Hall. I’m taking this tour through a company called CIE which is the Irish National Transportation company which runs the busses and railways. So far I have been impressed. It’s a good deal cheaper than some of my other European jaunts but the amenities are almost as good.

The lovely lady from CIE met me, parked me at the coffee bar and told me to wait there while she collected other charges. She then promptly forgot about me and I did not see her for forty-five minutes until she arrived somewhat put out that I was lost. I told her I was sitting exactly where she told me to wait. Quick dash through airport to catch ground transportation to hotel. The hotel is known as Castle Clontarf and is on the grounds of a castle that was built as part of the defensive perimeter of the city starting in 1172. Most of the current castle is a 19th century pile of restoration that was some nobleman’s summer retreat. It’s architecturally interesting with lots of strange hallways and staircases with rooms shoehorned into odd corners. From the narrowness of the hall I am on and the fact that I am a bit below ground level, I assume that I am someplace in the old servant’s quarters… or the dungeon.

Our tour officially began at 2 PM local time so that gave me enough time for a quick shower and change, a stroll through the neighborhood and a lunch of roast pork and potatoes. The castle is on the northeast side of Dublin, about a mile and a half from the city center. I have more time in Dublin on the other end of the trip with a more centrally located hotel so I’ll do most of my city walking and sightseeing then. We were given a bus tour of the city with a few stops (still my least favorite way of seeing any urban area) including Oscar WIlde’s house and the main cemetary where I paid my respects to Daniel O’Connell and Michael Collins. The weather kept seesawing back and forth between blue skies and sunshine and grey and blustery with a very wet rain. Very similar to Seattle so it doesn’t bother me any.

Back to the hotel for cocktails and a welcome dinner (leek and potato soup, fresh hake with green beans, and raspberry cheesecake) and some time to begin getting acquainted with the travel companions. It’s sort of an odd lot. There are a grand total of nine travelers and a driver/guide who will be sharing the next week and a half. Two married couples from the midwest and five singles including myself – widows and widowers from various places in the US. Hopefully we’re all compatible. If we’re not, I brought plenty of books and am very good at faking presbycusis when needed.

Now it’s time for bed and to begin making up for lost sleep. We head out north in the morning. I haven’t studied the itinerary too carefully. Surprise me.

My bags are packed, I’m ready to go. But I’m not standing outside anyone’s door but my own waiting on an Uber to the airport. I am getting the heck out of dodge and flying across the pond to spend ten days in Ireland. Yes, this space will turn into the usual travelogue with the next entry. I don’t have a lot to say about the trip yet other than I have packing for international travel down to a science and it only takes me about half an hour to locate everything and get it all in order. I often do a theme color when I’m packing clothes for an excursion. It would be appropriate for me to choose green for this trip but I don’t have a lot of green in my wardrobe. ‘Difficult color, green’ is a line from something delivered as a bit of an insult but for the life of me I cannot remember where it’s from. I seem to be mainly doing blue and gold this trip. Stanford, forgive me.

I just finished up a brief run in a reading of a new play ‘Teachers Lounge’ for Encore Theatre and Gallery presented as a reading the past two nights. Seven middle school teachers in an inner city school and their interactions in the staff room as they deal with underfunding, indifferent systems, and try to maintain their sanity and their calling to teach the kids and help them grow. The themes, characters, relationships, and language are all there but there needs to be more – as the script develops, I hope we learn more about these people, their motivations, and their backstories. My character is detached and at the end of a long teaching career, showing up and going through the motions. A friend came up to me afterwards and suggested that perhaps he’s actually a ghost and that’s why he barely interacts. I hadn’t considered that. Might be an interesting angle as development moves forward.

I have felt the presence of ghosts this week. Not my usual ghosts of Steve and Tommy who have evolved into something more comforting and more just part of me over the years, but fresh ones to remind me of aging and mortality and that nothing, including long life, is promised to any of us. I found out this week that two men who were very much part of my past had died within the last few months. I wasn’t in routine communication with either one of them so it’s not surprising that I was unaware until relatively recently. The first was Bill. I met Bill in New York in the fall of 1987. It was my very first trip to NYC and I was over the moon at finally having made it to the Big Apple. I was there interviewing for residency programs in internal medicne – Cornell, NYU, side trips to Yale and Brown. The first night there, I attended my very first Broadway show on Broadway with my high school friend Bob Kummer – Into the Woods with the original cast (it was the second week of the run). The second day, after completing my interview about 3 pm, I headed back to Time Square and got in the cancellation line for Les Miserables to try my luck. A few minutes later, an attractive young man of roughly my age got in line behind me and we started to talk. He was interested in many of the same things I was. We kept talking. We made our way through the line and lucked into two tickets second row center. We kept talking. We went to dinner. We kept talking. We went to the show. I was falling hard which was a new experience for me.

I returned to New York to see him a few times. He came out to California the next year to see me. During all of that, I figured out he had far more mental health demons than I was prepared to deal with and that he was not a good person to have in my life. I ended up putting him on a bus back to New York around Christmas of 1988. We never saw each other again but every once in a while, he would pop back up with a letter or on social media. He became a social activist in the non-profit sector, always chasing after some elusive happiness that was always just beyond his reach. He constantly relocated to new cities and would become rapidly disenchanted when they could not render his life perfect. His mental health took a toll on his physical health and he had at least one stroke in his early 50s. He was never able to afford appropriate medical care and most of the time was without health insurance. He died in March. It appears to have been sudden, probably another stroke. The two of us would have been a disaster as a long term couple but his brief stay in my life created the conditions which allowed me to forge a successful relationship with the next man I met whom I found attractive. I met Steve about six weeks after I put Bill on that bus. I can’t say I quite understand what it was that Bill gave me, but whatever it was, it was allowed me to have the life I have had.

The second man who died in the last few weeks was Josh. Josh was Tommy’s ex. At the time I met Tommy in the fall of 2002, they had been broken up as a couple for some months, but economic necessity was forcing them to continue sharing the house they lived in. (It was Josh’s – inherited from his grandmother. Tommy’s salary as a nurse with the federally qualified health center wasn’t quite enough to allow him to move out and set up independent housekeeping). This rather peculiar situation led to my and Tommy’s budding relationship to have a somewhat more accelerated timeline than it might have otherwise and cemented us together more quickly than I might otherwise have allowed. (He moved in about nine months after our first date). Tommy and I would run into Josh occasionally over the years and relations were always cordial. There were happy endings on both sides. Tommy and I were a suitable match until death did us part. Josh eventually met his husband Greg and beame a bit of a historical footnote as Josh and Greg became the first gay couple married in Alabama when it became legal after Obergefell. I don’t know what happened to Josh. He’s about a decade younger than I am and I had not heard he was ill. Greg, unfortunately, developed a premature dementia and Josh took care of him at home as long as he could until he had to be institutionalized.

Both Bill and Josh inadvertently gave me great gifts by helping create the conditions through which my two marriages came to be. We never know how the threads of the tapestry are going to turn out as we can only see the full pattern in hindsight. I hope they are both at piece and my condolences to those who knew and loved them.

It’s been an unusual week. I last wrote one of these missives last Tuesday evening. Please excuse more typos than usual in that one as I was squinting through one eye. Some hours earlier, in the middle of Tuesday afternoon, my right eye had begun to itch and tear with some filmy discharge for no particular reason. My left eye is my bad eye so, with my glasses off, I couldn’t get a particularly good look at what was going on but it didn’t have any real pain in the eyeball, redness in the sclera or major visual change (the three signs that primary care doctors like me know mean heigh thee to the emergency room) so I posted my remarks, went to sleep, and woke up to even more swelling in my right eye on Wednesday morning. I went in to work, saw a couple of patients, and then my colleagues ganged up on me and demanded that I head off to the Callahan Eye Hospital ER.

Birmingham is fortunate to have a hospital devoted strictly to diseases and injuries of the eye. As eyes are basically exposed brain tissue, it’s not something you want a non-specialist monkeyeing around with Callahan has been around for decades as an autonomous enitty but is not being enfolded into the ever widening embrace of UAB. It was founded by Dr. Alston Callahan who was something of a local legend – and I had the honor of being his physician the last ten or twelve years of his life. He was a good guy. So I figured with some name recognition and my UAB faculty badge I could probably get fast tracked through their ED. I was treated well, but they had no idea ultimately what was wrong. Either viral or allergic conjunctivitis with a great deal more swelling than they usually see. My right eye has now been photographically documented for the eddification of further generations of ophtalmology and optometry students. I always get something weird when I get something. Armed with several different eye drops and some ointment, the swelling has receded, the tearing has ended and I figure I’m pretty much back to normal. I just hope it doesn’t recur.

In the midst of all of this, I managed to get through the second weekend of Second Samuel with four more performances met with adulation from audiences. I thought about adding an eye patch to my character but decided that might confuse things a bit and make people think they’d wandered into The Pirates of Penzance by mistake. The show went very well in general. The eleven of us in the cast came together and made a good ensemble. It’s a play that very much depends on ensemble, chemistry, and the creation of a sense of community. You don’t need expensive production values or completely accurate costumes and set dressing to period. The play is about close knit community, what happens when it feels like it has been deceived, and the realization that the bonds of love, friendship, and mutual support are far more important than the little differences between us and that it’s not necessary to know the secrets of others to accept them as whole and good.

I think that the times we are in made the play resonate with audiences far differently than it might at other times. We are all needing to rebuild and reaffirm our communities to hold us close and protect us as the world becomes more and more confusing and unstable. Our society is currently celebrating transactional relationships rather than ones based on mutual understanding and respect and we all need reminders about what’s really important in life and money isn’t the be all and the end all, despite what’s being celebrated in the corridors of power. As another play that’s now some 85 years old and that also addresses the importance of family and community and mutual respect over money and profit – you can’t take it with you.

Why do I continue to perform? The obvious answer is that it’s fun to get a certain amount of respect and occasionally a paycheck for playing lets pretend. But that wouldn’t keep me coming back show after show on stage after stage (my current count since beginning to perform seriously in 2003 is about 85 stage productions). I think it’s more about being able to be a storyteller. Since the human species developed language abilities about 150,000 years ago, there’s been a need for stories and for those who tell them. Distant ancestors sat around neolithic campfires and told stories of the past and the ancestors, they anthropomorphized the natural phenomena that affected their lives and created the mythologies which still underly much of our culture. Millennia later, with the development of urban living, stories needed to reach larger audiences and the Greeks created the amphitheater and a chorus to recite the story in unison to provide the volume needed for all to understand. And then, one fateful day, a member of the chorus stepped out of line and took on the persona of a character in the story and the western idea of theatre was born.

It’s an incredible privilege to be a storyteller. To get others to stop what they are doing in their busy lives and gather together to watch and to listen. Whether in a church basement or a sophisticated stage with motorized scenery and hundreds of lighting insturments, magic is created for a time. The story is passed along. The words may be centuries old or written last week. The story may be ripped from the headlines or one that has been told many times in many ways and with which all are familiar. But each time, there is a new spark of understanding that passes among performers and audience. We don’t know what will become of it. Some are quickly extinguished. I’m now performing regularly with young people who saw a show I was in fifteen or twenty years ago and that experience was one of the things that led them to seek out their own adventures. I won’t be able to keep it up forever. My eyes will make wandering around in the dark backstage dangerous. My knees will keep me from doing certain kinds of repetitive movement. My brain will stubbornly refuse to retain and regurgitate my lines in the way they’re supposed to come out. I’ll hold on to this gift as long as I can.

Those currently in charge who are dismissive of the arts want to create a far poorer society for us. The arts help us understand things in new ways so we can problem solve (look up the story of Mendelev and how he came up with the periodic table for a good example). They are a mirror in which we can see ourselves, the noble, the good, and the ugly and begin to fix our problems. They are what nourishes our right brain – which is just as large and complex as our STEM oriented left brain. They can gut federal and state funding for the arts. They can close museums or try to force new rules for interpretation. They can censor or forbid certain types of artistic expression. It won’t work. It’s never worked. As long as their is human imagination, there will be artists and they will be compelled to create. Creation is one of our most basic instincts and not subject to political whims.

It’s going to be tough times financially for awhile. Basic costs for food, housing, and energy are skyrocketing while uncertainty in the political and economic landscape dries up opportunities. If I prioritized money over all else, I’d dial way back on my support for performing arts in this community. I have no idea what my financial future holds any more given how all the rules are changing. But I hold on to the old adage Radix Malorum est Cupiditas and, like Ephraim Levi, I’m going to treat my money like manure – not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

I survived birthday weekend which included four performances of Second Samuel, a trip to the Birmingham Jefferson County Civic Center to see the touring company of Beetlejuice – the musical (enjoyable, but not good material. At the end, I only had one word in my brain – Why?) One group of friends took me to brunch, another group of friends took me to dinner, the family called, and I had something approaching a thousand well wishes on various social media platforms. I am busy reading and responding to them all it. It may take several more days to complete the task.

I secretly love social media birthday rituals. Everyone emerges on that day to leave a quick greeting and then vanishes again and the result is, at least at my age, a cross section of the intricate tapestry of life. The prize for longest acquaintance of course goes to my father who has witnessed all 63 years on some level, but I also heard from my childhood best friend whom I met when I was three, other neighbohood kids, middle school and high school classmates, people I crossed paths with at Stanford, at U of W School of Medicine, in the Seattle of the 80s, the Sacramento of the 90s, patients, families of former patients colleagues, and all of the endearing oddballs that make up the core of my life whom I collectively refer to as Bohemian Birmingham. There are well known opera singers, Broadway names, semi-famous authors, clergy, physicians, automotive mechanics, and the woman who used to work behind the counter at my dry cleaners. When I see my past unspooling in that way, I almost feel that maybe, just maybe, I’ve made some sort of positive difference in the world and that’s all any of us can really do.

I’m not sure what positive difference the latest series of journal entry essays are going to have on anything. I haven’t figured out if they amount to anything yet or if they’re just so much ephemera which will eventually disappear amongst the forgotten bits and bytes of random storage. The Covid writings, as they had singular focus, hold together. Attempting to create some sort of coherence out of the collective insanity roiling the top levels of our society just seems like a fools errand and way too diffuse to tie up in a neat little package. Perhaps I’ll repurpose some of it in someway. I just write what my publisher tells me he needs…

Most of the noise this past weekend in regards to the news cycle is about the flagrant disregard of the emoulements clause of the constitiution and the gift of a garishly over decoraded 747 by the Qataris to the president. I’m not overly disturbed as the object in question appears to be the world’s gaudiest white elephant gift. To bring it up to the standards required for the executive jet would require about a decade and billions of dollars in retrofitting and upgrades. It has no practical purpose other than being a shiny new toy and even Trump is unlikely to use it much once he again becomes a private citizen and responsible for flight costs. (No, I don’t think he’s going to be god-emperor for life…)

I have been much more concerned about the news leaking out on the health front (and I am not referring to the nation’s highest ranking health officer taking a bathe with his grandchildren in what amounts to an open sewer – if he wishes to find out the realities of bacteria, let him. I just hope he’s the one who gets sick and not the kids). I am referring to the information coming out about the massive house budget bill which is intended to formalize cuts so that the first term Trump tax cuts to the fabulously wealthy can be extended.

The kind of money necessary to free up the hundreds of billions of dollars required to make the math work is not going to be found in most of the Doge shenanigans. The National Park Service, the Corporation for Public Broacasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the like are all a mere pittance. The big money exists in a very few pockets – the Department of Defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP. The first target is Medcaid where the goal is to trim 880 billion dollars from the program over the next six years. The total Medicaid budget for 2024 was about $607 billion so the $88 billion a year is about 14.5%. These cuts will remove about 10 million Americans from the Medicare rolls. Of those, about 3/4 will be unable to find replacement health insurance, taking the uninsured population from the current 27 million to about 34 million (or from about 8 to 10% of the population). The details of just how these cuts will be implemented and what programs will be cut are not entirely clear. There are likely to be new work requirements – I’m not sure what industry is going to be hiring nursing home residents or the chronically ill homebound but there does seem to be a shortage of air traffic controllers in Newark. There will likely be new and substantial copays on most services. Most who live in poverty live on very tight budgets and all these will do is make people forego services unless their health is in dire straights. One thing I’ve noticed about congress is that none of them acts as if they’ve ever known an actual impoverished person. I have known many and worked within some of the poorest regions of the country over the years and I know just how devestating even small economic bumps can be.

I’m not saying there’s not fat in the system. There is. Quite a lot actually. The USA spends about 18% of its GDP on health care. No other advanced nation spends more than 11%. We are an extreme outlier and our health system is awash in cash. It’s simply a question of how and what we spend it on. Our current spending trends have gotten us over the last fifty years or so from number one in the rankings of health outcomes internationally to number 37, between Costa Rica and Slovenia.

The current mandarins of no public health experience that have been put in charge in DC have discovered that we are spending an enormous amount of our health care dollars on the management of chronic disease, far more than the rest of the advanced world. They are busy touting vitamin supplements and other panaceas without paying any attention as to what it is about our health care system that is so different from everyone elses. Part of it is the idiotic tying of health care to employment which came about in the 1940s by historical accident and which prevents a singificant portion of the population who cannot be employed (the young, the elderly, the infirm) from accessing health care without laws and federal programs that grant access such as Medicaid and Medicare.

THe biggest difference, however, is embedded in our cultural DNA. We, in the USA, are afraid of aging and death. We regard the perfectly natural processes which lead to our senesence and ultimate demise as being diseases which, by definition, must have cures. We regard death as a failure of the health care system to perform properly. If it all worked perfectly, we’d all go on forever, sort of like Cher (who will turn 79 next week). Our system is mortality based. We expend our resources to prevent death. It’s been estimated that up to 3/4 of an individuals total health care expenses over their lifespans are spent in the last six months of their lives. Preventing death is very expensive and ultimately futile. The mortality rate for society has stubbornly remained at 100% no matter what interventions we have tried.

Most other societies base their health care systems around morbidity, not mortality. They spend their resources on trying to keep their populations healthy. They do not spend lots of money to try to keep a dying person from dying. The societal compact accepts that this is not a wise move and no one asks for or expects prolonged ICU stays for the dying or continuing dialysis in the terminally demented, or one last round of salvage chemotherapy in the semicomatose. To keep their populations healthy they have all hit upon some common themes: an understanding that healthy adults come from healthy young people come from healthy children come from healthy infants come from healthy parents. This is ensured by making healthcare easily accessible, free, and arranging social supports so that children and their parents can be properly nurtured with parental leave, free childcare, access to appropriate nutrition and the like. Healthcare is designed around primary and preventive care rather than around specialty and high tech care. Health systems are controlled by clinicians and public health authrorities with years of training and experience, not by administrators and corporate executives whoss expertise is in the maximization of profit.

MAHA, having discovered chronic illness, has a tried and true playbook for its reduction called the health systems of the rest of the advanced world. Instead of persuing any of this, they’re planning on increasing the uninsured rate by 25%, putting new financial barriers in place between patients and health care access, shutting down long running research programs that have taught us an incredible amount about what chronic disease is and how it works, and discrediting most of the advances of public health of the 19th and 20th centuries. We can return to 18th century public health standards if we so choose. 50-70% of children did not reach their fifth birthdays and those that did make it to adulthood were generally dead before the age of fifty (unless they were in the miniscule aristocratic population that had access to basic sanitation).

I have a lot more to say on all of these subjects. Maybe this is the next book. I’m not going to say it now. It’s late and I feel like curling up with a book and a cat.