Tag Archives: friendship

84. Surprising emotions

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Arriving into Sanlúcar de Guadiana last night, I was surprised at just how happy I felt to be home. Just a simple feeling of contentment at being back in my own home.

Our seventy-five days in the UK and Ireland were delightful from start to end. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much or for so long on previous holidays. England was a joy and I experienced very strong positive emotions when I was in Ireland, whereas in the past my feelings have often been mixed. Not because Ireland isn’t great and not because my family and friends aren’t great. It was just me and where I was in my life on previous visits home that made me enjoy being in Ireland on holiday but also eager to return to where I had come from. I didn’t feel that way this time. I enjoyed my time there, and had very mixed feelings about leaving, feeling more torn between the two places I call home than I’ve ever felt before.

So, what a surprise to feel the way I did about turning the key in the lock and walking through my front door last night. Like an exhalation…I’m home. My house is looking a bit the worse for wear after lying empty for seventy-five days and it’ll take us a few days to sweep away the cobwebs, get unpacked and feel properly settled in, but that simple uncomplicated sense of being home was there from the moment I opened the door.

Our lovely friends had been in and left some food in the fridge and our neighbour had hung a fresh homemade loaf of bread on the front door. Still, I needed to buy a few odds and ends this morning, so, after breakfast I threw on something not very presentable that I pulled out of my suitcase and went to the two shops in the village. Ten minutes of shopping took me about three quarters of an hour, from all the people I met, the welcome back hugs and kisses I received, the conversations I had comparing Spanish and Irish weather. I felt welcomed home by my adopted village.

And then, the icing on the cake – collecting Lady from her summer villa (with a swimming pool, no less) and taking her home. Now that our scruffy, dusty, hair in her eyes Lady is back, my little home is complete.

Who cares that our two kayaks are still taking up most of the living room and the suitcases are on our bedroom floors? Time enough moving them tomorrow.

51. Alma Mater

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Around this time 35 years ago, I was accepted into St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, now Maynooth University. I still remember the nervous and shy 17 year old I was on that early October day in 1990 when Daddy drove me the 25 miles up to Maynooth for registration and to drop me off in my student accommodation.

This morning I took Lily and Katie to Maynooth, Lily now only a year younger than I was then. So much has changed and, yet, so much remains the same. I took them into Rhetoric House, home of the Geography Department and scene of my encounter with kind John Sweeney. I showed them the swimming pool. They asked if was creepier than the pool in Edenderry. Definitely. The tiny post office remains unchanged, as does Pugin Hall, where we used to pretend we were theology students to avail of the free tea and coffee. The Beatle is still outside the library (a statue of Pope John Paul II blessing two children – George and Ringo). The library itself was full of students preparing for repeat exams, but we quietly strolled around – until I got us lost and we ended up in the fire escape. In my defence, it was the main stair in my day!

The new campus is unrecognisable, but the Arts Block remains the same – so tiny compared to how I remembered it. Even the lecture theatres, which seemed huge, now look tiny. From there to the canteen and sports centre and then the Student’s Union – scene of so much divilment over the years!!

Many of the friends I made in those years remain my great friends to this day. The courses I studied set the trajectory for my professional and personal life, leading me to where I am today. It was a glorious trip down memory lane, as I recounted various things my friends and I got up to. The girls thought I’d gone slightly mad and all we’d gotten up to 30 and more years ago was all rather quaint!

13. Liliane’s replacement

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We’re on the train and I’m very excited. In only a few hours, we will be in southwest London at the home of one of my dearest friends.

Sarah and I met in Japan in August 1997. I had already completed two years as an assistant language teacher with the JET programme in a little town in Fukuoka in the southwest of the country. Sarah was brand new and had come to replace my friend Liliane, who had the same job as me in the next town over. Surely, no one could replace Liliane.

I arrived at Liliane’s apartment one hot August evening to meet this new person. Sarah opened the door. I remember her holding the Arthur Hailey novel Hotel in her hand when she opened the door. Back then, I was all up myself, into the Beat poets and raving about Jack Kerouac, so I wasn’t too impressed by her choice of reading material. ‘She’ll never replace Liliane,’ I told myself.

She invited me in and we sat at her kitchen table (Liliane’s kitchen table) and started to get to know each other. Twenty-eight years later and I’m on a train to London to see Sarah. I’ve no idea where Liliane is.

Sarah’s first year in Japan was to be my last. We quickly became firm friends and giggled our way through that year, having all sorts of fun. A year after I left Japan, I returned to visit her for a few weeks the next year and when she returned home to live in London, our friendship only deepened. She came to Ireland and met my family and I went to England and met hers.

We met our future husbands at around the same time. I still have the letter she wrote to me about the cute Spanish guy she met while she was in Boston and how he stuck a Post-it note to her work computer, asking her out on a date. She sent me that letter around the same time I sent her a letter about the cute English guy I met while I was studying in Aberdeen. Her wedding a couple of years later to Luis remains the best wedding I’ve ever been to.

We became pregnant with our first babies within months of each other and Lily and Isabel have known each other since they were tiny. Then I had Katie and Sarah had Daniel and our four kids – now all teenagers – get on like a house on fire.

Rarely a year has gone by when our two families don’t spend time together – her English-Spanish family coming to spend a few days with us; my Irish-English Spanish-speaking family spending a few days with them. These annual visits are a highlight of our year. The fact that our children all get on so well makes it all the easier for Sarah and me. Over the coming days, we’ll hang out, go places together, she’ll tell my kids stories about me and I’ll tell her kids stories about her – all from the days when we weren’t a whole lot older than they are now. And we’ll part ways after those few days, our friendship renewed and, despite a few more wrinkles than last year, the two of us feeling, just a little, like we’re in our 20s once again.

Now, I wonder what ever happened to Liliane?

9. All the time in the world

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I’ve been spending a lot more time with Angela in these last few weeks, since she was given her terminal prognosis. My weekly visits for morning coffee have evolved now into twice or three times a day visits. I know our time is short. I will leave to go to the UK soon and she will simply go. I call in at 11 each morning and again at 1:30 and maybe again at 3pm. Sometimes she’s asleep and I simply check on her and leave again. More often than not, however, she wakes when I come in, I help her to sit up, go to the kitchen to pour her a cold drink and make myself a coffee, and sit with her and chat.

Despite being noticeably more frail with each passing day, her memories are as sharp as ever. She quotes Tennyson and Shakespeare. She recalls a book on Pembrokeshire written by someone called Loxley that she borrowed from the library 61 years ago. She tells me about her first ever time on an aeroplane when she accompanied a patient from London to Trinidad and got drunk on gin and coconut water when she got there. She tells me about being a trainee nurse in London in the late 1950s and writing letters home to her parents in Leicester every day. Despite our weekly get-togethers over the past number of years, I learn more about her every day.

But I’m also in a rush. I’m leaving home soon and I won’t be back for ten weeks, so there are preparations to be made, the fridge to clear out, everything organized for the dog to go spend the summer with friends. I will be working all summer while I’m away, so I need to remember to transfer all my work from my computer onto my laptop. On top of that, I have an unusually large amount of work on my plate with various deadlines looming, so I’m trying to keep four different editing and writing plates spinning at once. Five days before I leave, a neighbour dies and the next day another. That’s two funerals now that I want to attend. On the day the first neighbour dies, another friend is rushed to hospital. Her husband is at a loss and asks me for some help. I wake up the next morning to discover that one of my kayaks has been stolen. I discover the next day that it’s been abandoned over the river, so now I have to go retrieve it. To say things are frantic and chaotic in these final few days is an understatement.

Yet, in the midst of it all, I continue to call to Angela two or three times a day. On Monday, she’s feeling weaker than ever and her every movement is slow and laboured and requiring lots of breaks. When she’s finally sitting up, with a glass of drinking yoghurt in her hand, she smiles at me and says, ‘It’s alright. We have all the time in the world.’ And you know, she’s right.

For all the mad rushing around, the lack of sleep, the ‘not-another-thing-piled-on-top-of-everything-else’ sort of week, here in her bedroom, time is meaningless. It’s just her and me, sharing our stories as always, making each other laugh, making each other think.

On my last day, as I finish up my work, finish packing, finish prepping the house to close it up, and count down the hours till my 7 o’clock departure, I decide to embrace Angela‘s insight that we have all the time in the world. When I visit her mid morning, she’s asleep. I don’t wake her but neither do I go home. Instead, I make a coffee and sit with her for half an hour, feeling time slowing down and my shoulders beginning to relax. When I return a couple of hours later, she’s awake. I help her up so that she’s sitting on the edge of the bed and we talk and talk and talk. For that hour, in that room, we have all the time in the world.