The Disonance of the Wolfe Tones

I jumped at the chance to hear the Wolfe Tones, a popular Irish band that has been together for over 45 years, in concert last night. It was an utterly bizarre night, with the incongruity of raucous renditions of Irish rebel songs being performed in a swanky D4 hotel basically encapsulating the experience.

I love Irish ballads and the old rebel music. They've got passion, rhythm, fantastic instrumentation, and Biblical apocalyptic-quality imagery and symbolic references. The songs speak in code, and if you know the code, you know the history that they convey. They capture the spirit of political resistance, but they also express a deeper, human longing for family, peace, and the prosperity that comes from working the land with one's own hands. So many Americans identify themselves by their Irish ancestry above all else because of the under-dog spirit, thirst for social justice, and joy in hearth and home that the music conveys. Those universal themes are what makes the music as eternally relevant as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

I discovered last night, however, that the universal character can be stripped away when performed in a narrow, sectarian context in which the aesthetic expression of the human spirit is reduced to political rhetoric.

To give the Wolfe Tones their due, the concert was the greatest performance of Irish ballads and rebel songs I have heard. The verses were enunciated clearly over the backing of guitar, tin whistle, and banjo, bringing the stories to life. The band had high energy and played with a confidence worthy of their 4+ decades together. And their passion for the music was genuine.

Yet the aesthetic quality of the music was compromised by its blatantly ideological character. The band members are all strident nationalists*, propagating the conviction that the island of Ireland should be and will become a united, sovereign country, despite the partition between North and South that has endured since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. They advance a victim identity of Ireland, placing particular emphasis on the atrocities that occurred throughout the Troubles until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

*who grew up in a suburb of Dublin, as they should have mentioned as a matter of full disclosure

While one could protest that nationalist ideology is embedded in the songs themselves and is, at least in part, what the songs were written to celebrate and nurture, the Wolfe Tones give it an aggressively pedagogical function in their performances. Slide shows of old photographs, political cartoons, and quotations accompany the songs, projected onto a screen behind the band. Accompanying the old photographs are simplistic historical statements such as, "English Governments, Landlords drive the Irish from Ireland." The terseness and sparse punctuation exacerbate the reductionism of such claims. The band's partisanship is revealed by they way they use language, such as by putting scare quotes around any mention of the Great Famine, preferring to call it a "Holocaust" or the great "Starvation." And while that polarized and inflammatory use of language/punctuation/syntax might remind you of political attack ads from last year's election, the faded photos backed by the swelling music added a documentary feel to the performance, almost like a low-budget live imitation of Ken Burns' Civil War series and its haunting strains of "Ashokan Farewell."

I might have been able to write it off as a caricature of Irish culture put on for foreigners chasing leprechauns, if the Wolfe Tones had been performing in a wannabe-Irish pub in the US esp. around Paddy's Day, but what made the night genuinely disturbing was the way the Irish crowd ate it up. For all intents and purposes, the performance hall became a nationalist rally. Young women danced in the aisles with tricolor scarves tied around their heads. Men wore the Irish flag as capes. The audience were on their feet much of the time, shouting responses to the lyrics such as "F--- the Brits" and "F--- their guns." Part of the proceeds of the night were going for the benefit of the family of 49-year-old Kevin McDaid, murdered by a Loyalist mob in Coleraine in May; his family actually came down to Dublin for the concert.

What baffled me was the lack of any sense of irony about the lyrics or the obviously one-sided presentation of the history. Even the slide that proclaimed, "The Wolfe Tones against bigotry" was meant in earnest, despite consistently characterizing the violence that they deplored as "anti-Catholic." Sitting in the audience, I was hit with the same feeling of incomprehension and incredulity as when I encounter an American who honestly and whole-heartedly believes that any gun regulation is a violation of his constitutional and perhaps human rights. Despite my jaded comment about Irish-Americans celebrating St. Patrick's Day supra, it was only the American college students with whom I was sitting who appeared uneasy--the rest of the room was ecstatic.

So here's what was so bone-chilling about the performance: it was sophism in the form of folk music. It was hard-core morally-bankrupt Gorgias-grade sophism. Because you can bet that no matter how ignorant the cheering twenty-somethings were, the Wolfe Tones didn't spend the last 45 years under a rock. They are as aware of the atrocities committed by the IRA in the name of self-defense and civil rights as they are aware of those committed by the Loyalist paramilitaries that they decry. But by being so selective about which events they memorialize in their songs and slides, they teach their fans that [Irish]man is born into a state of oppression and denial, and the virtue of [Irish]man is to campaign for freedom [from Britain] with whatever means advance his cause most efficiently- whether that be guerrilla warfare, hunger strikes, or reluctant diplomacy.

Indeed, the scariest part of the Wolfe Tones' rhetoric lies in their rejection of the word "terrorism" in regards to the violent nationalistic campaign in the North. The refrain of one of their songs goes: "And you dare to call me a terrorist/while you look down your gun/when I think of all the deeds you have done." The government of Northern Ireland is still precarious, but one reason we can be confident in the peace process in Northern Ireland is that since 9/11, terrorism is no longer viable. Embracing the tactics of terrorism is ideological suicide. It's the one sure way to be labeled a "fanatic" and dismissed on the international stage. Whereas the IRA could once count on Irish-Americans to help fund their guerrilla operations in the North, they know now that if they reneged on the ceasefire, they would be treated as extremists, not as a marginalized community without recourse to political redress. This is a language war that has implications for real war. If the IRA are allowed to portray the violence they used to systematically undermine their government as justified and not "terrorist" in character, then they've won a language war that opens up the possibility of a return to real, bloody, schoolgirls-blown up-on-the-playground, families-burned-out-of-their-houses, Irish-car-bombs-aren't-just-a-drink War.

Irish rebel music doesn't need to have this blood-thirsty character to remain culturally relevant. Besides all that stuff about expressing universally human desires supra, the old songs feature lots of concrete and particular social injustices that persist in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. The housing inequalities sung of in the ballads about the forced dispossession of their native farmland ("To Hell or to Connaught" was Oliver Cromwell's injunction) survive despite the work of the Irish Land Commission. The Irish Travellers face miserable discrimination in the cities at the hands of the settled peoples, when ironically one theory of their origin is that they were uprooted by Cromwell himself. Ireland's rich musical tradition can still serve the purpose of rallying the Irish to commit their lives to social and political revolution.

What it is no longer relevant to is discussion of the contemporary issues facing the North. Those issues need to be discussed with sensitivity and complexity. Last week the world celebrated a great anniversary: the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It's 2009, and the walls still stand in Belfast.

Counting Lost Sheep

"You must wear your high vis vest from the moment you leave this building until the moment you return. Sign into the local Garda station as soon as you reach your territory; feel free to call them at any point if you feel you need support. We'll be calling to check in with you once an hour, so make sure that you have your mobiles on, because if we can't reach you, we'll be calling the Guards to locate you. You'll be signing out again at the Garda Station before you return here- the count concludes at 4:30. Oh, and please double check your next-of-kin info as you walk out the door so there's someone we can reach in case we need to."

It was 1 A.M. and there were a hundred of us huddled in the lower level of the Homeless Agency. We had volunteered to execute the semiannual headcount of rough sleepers in Dublin city centre. We were operating under a strict definition of "rough sleeper:" anyone bedded down on the streets, in doorways, behind bins, or under a derelict building, excluding squats (private buildings being illegally occupied by a group of individuals) and public parks or camping grounds/halting sites (which Travelers occupy in their caravans). We were given sleeping bags, chocolate bars, cigarettes, and a clipboard with maps and forms. Form A was for individuals we encountered sleeping rough; Form B was for active sites momentarily uninhabited or individuals not yet bedded down who appeared to be regular rough sleepers. We broke up into teams of 2-4 and headed out into the night.

The night was a fierce one. Driving wind and rain, so that the ink was melting off the forms by the end of it. It was unfortunate not so much because of our discomfort, but because it skewed the numbers. Individuals who would usually be sleeping rough had taken shelter in squats or in the parks. There aren't enough hostel beds to accommodate every homeless person in the city, and I can guarantee that they were all occupied tonight of all nights.

By chance, an Austrian girl and I were assigned the sketchy side of Trinity, as it is not-so-affectionately known among the Notre Dame students who study abroad in Dublin. The region extends from the Pearse Street Garda Station (which my flat window at Trinity looked down upon when I was a student) eastward all the way to the U2 recording studios in Windmill Lane, and sweeps down to the banks of the Liffey. It is an unsavory place, even in daylight. The DART tracks run over abandoned civic buildings and the old reformatory institutions, now boarded up. There are empty, overgrown lots full of trash, empty cider cans, and smashed sharps.

"Aren't you scared?" my partner asked as we ventured down an alley, coming upon a mattress with empty cans and personal possessions strewn around it.

"No... times like these, I always just figure God has bigger plans for me, than to end it here."

But that didn't stop me from jumping at the sound of rattling cans, or the cat the bounded out in front of us. We hardly met another soul all night, even carefully shining the torch through fences and around corners.

Why did I recoil when the beam illuminated what might be a hunched figure at the end of an alley? What, was I afraid he was going to jump out and stab me with a hepatitis-contaminated heroin needle? Not likely. Was I anxious about interacting with someone who was high? No, I have to do that often enough at work. Was I afraid of recognizing someone I knew? I run into former residents almost every day.

Or was it the natural impulse, when standing at the edge of an abyss, to leap backwards and resist the vertigo that comes with looking down? The chasm opens between the man in the tattered sleeping bag, and the girl bundled under six layers against the cold, clipboard and flashlight in hand. The girl who now sits warmly in her bed, snuggled under her freshly laundered sheets.

Through the Lens of a Camera

At work today a camera man came in to film filler footage to run behind interviews he had done of myself and a few others in the Simon Community for the "Eyewitness" spot after RTE nightly news some upcoming week. Naturally, as soon as someone turns on a camera, the office goes dead- the telephone doesn't ring, I don't have to jump up to unlock the door every five minutes, no one has a crisis, so most of the action was contrived- I'm typing a fake document on the desktop and dialing a phone number that no one answers. "Can't you do an action shot for me?" the camera man asked. So I grabbed the shelter health and safety checklist and made a big production of checking for TP in all the bathrooms and clearing up all the used teacups left lying around the building, which is usually as dramatic as the health and safety check gets. So that's how my life and work is going to be presented to Ireland on a two minute segment after the nightly dose of political scandals, budget cuts, and traffic accidents.

I wonder if my generation is unique in the degree to which we view our lives from the outside: we are highly conscious of how we project ourselves on social networking websites, picasa web albums, blogs, google searches. We speak about our personal soundtracks without any irony- certain songs play in our heads when we're walking around as if walking through a continuous motion shot in a movie. Our lives are so saturated with media that some of those songs actually come onto the radio in the background during actual, dramatic moments in our personal biopics. Being so accustomized to viewing other people's lives in terms of celluloid long shots promotes a dualism in which the director part of oneself steps outside to watch the actor part perform in one's biggest scenes.

Of course everything on this blog is carefully considered and filtered according to certain principles: coherence, passion, intellectual engagement, authenticity, earnestness, playfulness, transcendence. But in selecting what I ultimately choose to display, I am limited to whatever was actually photographed, actually filmed, and the language that presses up against the limits of my world. That is determined both by the practicality of whether my camera battery was charged on a particular day and the intentionality of what I found compelling at the time, or what people expect to see, or maybe what defies what people would expect to see.


The abstracted reflection on these bizarre features of our post-modern world is simply to explain concretely why it's disappointing that I don't have photo-documentation of what are the essential establishing shots in the little reel of memories that flicker through my head of my adventures in Dublin: walking down O'Connell Street with the burden of a half dozen chasubles hanging over my arms; scampering through the rain sheltering a ukelele under my jacket; weaving through the dusky streets with my minstrel-friends singing and playing all the way home; and, yesterday, sprinting up Grafton Street in formal attire with a household plant in one outstretched arm.

Halloween is for Hooligans

I spent the Eve of All Saints baking brownies at home and actively ignoring my ringing doorbell. I'm not a Halloween grinch--I loved trick-or-treating with my dad as a kid and passing out candy as a teenager--but I didn't really know what would happen if I opened the door. I live on a decent enough street, all 1940s era row houses populated by middle class families or grandparents who bought their house for 500 pounds when it was first built. But there are two developments of City Council housing just to the south of my street, and the children who live there are terrors. They light rubbish bins on fire in the wee hours before the garbage man comes, they kick glass bottles up and down the street for fun, they throw rocks at passersby. I have personally witnessed two Gardai get out of their patrol car, make a move to admonish the kids, look at each other, and climb back into their car without a word, beating a hasty retreat. Walking to work on Sunday morning, I noted that the children had lit a tree on fire for Halloween. It was probably a twelve-year-old tree. They had chopped half way through its trunk and then torched it, with chairs and other debris piled up around it. I also passed a teenage boy and a teenage girl stumbling back towards their apartments, emptying their bottles and leaving them on the sidewalk before drunkenly staggering towards their respective doors. This was at 8:30 A.M.

I don't particularly blame the kids and teenagers for their behavior; the utter lack of supervision suggests deeper problems in their family life, and in groups they manifest a strong pack mentality. They are growing up in an environment of poverty, and many of them are chronic truants even at a young age. But even the level of delinquency I witness walking through my neighborhood is tame compared to the heroin-riddled Ballymun Towers, high-rises just north of the city where Dublin City Council moved thousands of impoverished families in the 1960s without giving any thought to infrastructure or social services. Hearing the stories of children who grew up there, you would almost think they were doomed from the beginning. A friend my age who grew up in Ballymun is alone among his childhood friends to be drug-free and college-educated.

Given the suffocating environment, you would think that Dublin City Council would do its best to house at-risk families in a more positive environment. Instead, the public housing scheme perpetuates juvenile delinquency. Provision of public housing in Ireland takes the form of the Rent Supplement Allowance, one of many kinds of social welfare payment. [Ireland has the most generous social welfare entitlement program in Europe.] The intention of the Rent Supplement Allowance is to prevent a family's income from falling below the poverty line after they pay their rent. Currently, 90,825 households receive the allowance, a 52% increase from 2007's figures.

The problem is that the Irish government prohibits families on the Rent Supplement Allowance from renting properties whose monthly rent exceeds the amount of the standard allowance (which is adjusted based on the property values of each county). That constrains most recipients to living in the crime-ridden and drug-infested City Council housing blocks, or to renting apartments barely fit for human habitation from indifferent landlords. Alternatively, often landlords of less objectionable properties will officially list the rent as meeting the allowance constraint, and then illegally require their renters to "top up" the rent out of their private funds, defeating the entire purpose of the rent allowance.

Since the death of the Celtic Tiger, the problem of accommodation for the poor has only gotten worse. In an effort to decrease welfare expenditures, the payment amounts have been reduced this year. The logic behind the reduction is that since rents are beginning to decline naturally across the housing sector, the State will be able to pressure landlords to decrease rents for the poor by decreasing the allowance. They hope to make the rents of the housing inhabited by allowance recipients reflect the decrease in rents generally. Unfortunately, it is only the high end of the rental market that is tumbling. Those rents were exorbitant to begin with, reflecting the pretentious culture of the city centre and certain posh commuter suburbs. The middle- and lower-end of the rental market is only gradually decreasing, so the State is artificially imposing a fixed rent that the market can't respond to. And who has to pay the price? The hooligans.

Straddling the Shannon

Contentment is not an autumnal feeling. Wistfulness at the passing of another summer, restlessness watching the world turn and change so visibly, in color and in noisy gusts of wind, and anxiety at another year coming to its end usually predominate. Yet curled up in front of a peat fire on the first of the long nights, watching the sun set west beyond the Shannon left me feeling exactly that: contented.

An informal poll of my Irish coworkers indicated that the bank holiday this weekend was in celebration of either Halloween (a week early) or Daylight Savings Time (not early- Europe adjusts its clocks a week before the United States). Whatever the excuse for the three-day weekend, I threw some clothes into my backpack, grabbed my camera and took a bus to Athlone, the city that straddles the River Shannon in almost the exact middle of Ireland. West of the Shannon is the land of thatched cottages, mortar-less lacework stone walls, breath-taking cliffs and relentless winds. The Midlands are middling: they are not characterized by such extremes of culture, contours, and climate.

I spent the weekend with the Athlone Simon Community Volunteers, baking cookies, enjoying the countryside, and in general taking a much-needed respite from city life. We hiked up to Lough Ree, the 16 mile long lake fed by the Shannon, and walked among the graves of Clonmacnoise in the exquisite evening light. But just as cheering as the glow of sunbeams streaming over the green banks of the Shannon, was that of the dancing flames of the candles stuck into old wine bottles on the volunteers' kitchen table. And the story painstakingly cut into the stone of the celtic crosses in the graveyard is the same one woven as intricately as a celtic knot into all the stories we told of ourselves, watching the wax spill over into heaped ribbons under the guttering flames.

One night we walked into town for pints at Ireland's oldest pub: Sean's Bar, est. 900 A.D. A man sitting near the door took one look at me and asked: "Are you French?" Inexplicably, "Nein!" popped out of my mouth. "Oh, no, German then," he responded. As we pushed farther into the crowded public house, I struggled to understand the exchange that had just occurred. My only guess was that he thought my hat looked a bit like a beret, and being in the company of three Germans and one Michigander, I got confused. Oddly, when we got up to leave the pub in search of a chipper, on the way out two other men addressed me with "Sure, now, that's a fine grand cap on you lassie."

The greatest adventure of the trip, however, was horseback riding with KC, my friend from Michigan. I had never been on a horse, and several friends gently teased me that I was risking life and limb, given my misadventure in Kenmare two years ago. I am proud to declare that I came through the experience unscathed, though with a rather sore tail from bouncing up and down on the leather saddle. My steed was a fat, fickle horse named Bob. Yes. Bob. Don't laugh. I quickly learned that he was so fat because he was always after eating the vegetation along the tracks through the woods and fields, although he could trot at a quick enough clip when he had a mind to (usually quite suddenly and despite any direction to the contrary on my part). We rode through the countryside for over an hour, through pastures and into the woods, red berries bursting against a background of skeletal trees, the last rusty leaves disintegrating away. We came out from the woods onto a peat bog, the turf cut in strips and piled along the perimeter. We wandered past a derelict turf cutter with flowers growing out of its tractor seat. Best of all, we found ourselves passing Moydrum Castle, which I'd been looking for without knowing it for years. It's the ruined castle on the cover of U2's first album, but it was also photographed for the cover of a cassette tape of Irish music I've listened to since I was a child. I never knew its name or where it was, until I happened to ride past it in Westmeath.

Fall is fading fast. The nights are long and dark- before the earth tilts again, the day will die at 4 pm. We survive the darkness on hot soup, brown bread, and steaming cups of milky tea by fragrant peat fires.

Cá as duit ó dhúchas?

I'd realized I'd been lying for four months straight.

Still, “South Bend, Indiana,” I blurted out, with a loud articulacy that carried almost a hint of aggression.

“Is that near Boston?” came the typical and innocent reply, because with the Irish, an interrogatory is always the reply.

“Nope, about two hours due east of Chicago.”

Chicago. That gave him something firm to grasp.

“Aye, sure now, I have a cousin in Chicago,” came the follow-up, because with the Irish, citing a relation in America is always the follow-up.

And the conversation continued on as a monologue, leaving me far behind, as the speaker expanded upon the wonders of the windy city, a city I've only seen a handful of times and then mainly just the inside of its O'Hare International Airport.

“Your man Obama now...”

Internally I winced as he hit his full stride. Two years ago Chicago was a safe, neutral topic, one that could be disposed of after about five minutes of lauding its museums or skyscrapers or proximity to Lake Michigan. Now having returned to Ireland five months into the new administration, I was realizing that mentioning Chicago had become a reliable catalyst for a discussion of American politics. And with the Irish any question proffered about American politics was not intended as an inquiry so much as an introduction to their own long-winded views on the subject. The speaker having taken up the subject of Chicago's favorite adopted son, I was free to retreat into myself, nodding occasionally but knowing that any input on my part would be perceived as an interruption.

So I returned to the epiphany I had a few moments earlier, during the introduction.

In fact, I have never had a postal address in South Bend, IN.

I had spent the golden years of childhood in Richmond, on the eastern border of the Hoosier State, in Wayne County, and ever afterward had to deliver brief lessons on southern Indiana geography: everyone I met in my adult life assumed when I said 'Richmond' I meant Virginia. I was given one of my first insights into the way the rest of the United States views the Midwest when I discovered that some of my unwilling pupils had never heard of Quakers and thus had no point of reference for the infamous “Fighting Quakers” vs “Hustling Quakers” nomenclature dispute of the late '80s at Earlham College.

Having moved away on my eighth birthday, I have to confess that there wasn't much that I could say concretely about the town. Most of my description was a romantic gesture at small-town American life: we could walk to school, to the jungle gym in the park, to church, to the post office, to the grocery store, and even to the library once when our old red Toyota van broke down in the middle of the road near the train's overpass. I used to cut through the neighbor's driveway across the alley opposite my own on the way to school, and sometimes he would have an apple for me that he had picked himself. One fall he gave my family what seemed like bushels of popcorn still on the cob, and our sore thumbs were flicking it into jars from Halloween until Christmas. And of course the Quakers—I could say literally and non-redundantly that my closest childhood friends were Friends.

I say southern Indiana geography not because Richmond was much nearer the southern border of the state than the northern, but because it tended more towards the redneck aspect of Indiana's dual personality disorder. There was no Catholic high school in the town, and the drop-out rate at the public one was disproportionately higher for girls than for boys because of the inordinate number of teenage pregnancies. We didn't get our Halloween pumpkins and Christmas trees from the grocery store but from pumpkin patches and Christmas tree farms. The Hoosier nasal twang was pronounced and slightly foreign to me, being a St. Paul girl by birth. And you didn't think of someone uttering the word “ya'll” down there as a poser, but “all ya'll” would have been going too far.

On my eighth birthday, we loaded up the Toyota and drove a few hours north through the barren corn and soybean fields to a place bound in snow and ice with brutal, snot-freezing winds. This was St. Joseph County, our new home. Now for a letter to reach me you had to put 'Mishawaka' on the third line of the address, but as I always stubbornly pointed out, the “Mishawaka welcomes you” sign with the picture of the Indian princess was posted several yards outside of my subdivision. Technically, we lived in the county, giving us the right to burn our leaves in the fall if we so desired, although we never did.

As I just mentioned, I lived in a subdivision now, not a neighborhood, still in walking distance of my elementary school, but of not much else. None of my new neighbors could walk to work, like my dad could in Richmond, and on Sunday mornings everyone piled into their cars and drove to different parishes. Instead of a two-story Tudor house with a big screened in back porch as we had in Richmond, we lived in a little single story ranch house in a development of windy streets and tall oak trees that had been built in the early '70s. We didn't have a porch anymore, either, but a garage, which was a new concept to me.

As the winter wore on, I heard my mother's ceaseless refrain of how grateful she was to have a garage so that we didn't have to scrape the van down in the mornings or worry about freezing latches. Four years later her song of gratitude would take up the theme of our air conditioning system, which was put in along with a new furnace when our radiant floor heating system failed in the middle of a January fortnight of subzero temperatures and near-blizzard conditions. I was always gleeful at such severe weather conditions, since Richmond had never provided us with snow in such quantities. As I honed my snow fort engineering skills and snowman craftsmanship, I liked to think that a dormant natural affinity for the white stuff was being called up out of me. The sight of swirling snow and the way it hushed the noise of the world, and the smell of it as it gusted through a hastily opened door became as evocative to me as the quality of summer light at sunset, the whining of the cicadas in the August heat, and the scent of Mom's front yard roses and lavender.

'Evocative'—it's the only word I have for the wide roads bisecting unbounded cornfields, rotted wooden barns in the distance; for the spare, rectangular restaurants and shopping centers springing up from them, their placards towering over one another in bold primary colors, their smelly, sticky parking lot tar covering over the once-fruitful fields. My college friends would shake their heads in incomprehension as we drove those roads when they realized I could tell them when each retail outlet had gone up, each hotel, each chain restaurant. But even after they were built, there was a sense of endless space. The parking lots were so big that instead of walking from one end of the strip mall to the other, you got into your car, drove it across the lot and parked it again to do more shopping. Friends who came from the west coast or the Appalachian Mountains would sometimes confess to me that my state's topographical predictability made them feel restless, trapped. But that I never understood, because we had the sky. The sky went on forever in all directions. The clouds revealed its liberating infinity, inhabiting its space in masses and layers, tinged by every tint of blue-gray on the spectrum. Perhaps they could think only of the December through April permacloud, the gray-white sheet pulled over the state until the spring tornado season. They hadn't spent entire summers like me, sitting on the tenth floor of a tower office building, watching the clouds build and darken until they were almost black, the humid air pregnant to bursting with rain, which would finally break in a fury of thunder and lightening. Or walked languidly in the cool of a spring evening, under-dressed for the persistent chill, so eager for the warmth of the summer around the corner, drinking in the sunset behind those whisps and swaths like spring rain. Or caught sight of the distinct tint of blue of the clouds' dark gray underbellies on an early October day and known, like they could not know, that despite the deceptively summery temperatures, it was irrevocably fall.

Nor, for that matter, could this chattering Irishman conjure such cumulus images, such sense of space. It's hard to criticize the physical beauty of a country whose postcard perfection is its most profitable natural resource. I tried once to explain how I longed for the clouds of my own country, which met with confusion and derision at the end of the wettest July on record in Dublin. Sure, it rains so much that the fields glow with 40 shades of green, but the sky of the Liffey valley is flat, the clouds hang oppressively low, and even when the rain bursts forth, the clammy feeling of the air is not dispersed.

When pressed to explain why an American would ever move to Ireland, I appealed to the similarities between my Midwestern upbringing and the strong rural tradition of Ireland. Yet like most of the kids who grew up in the county, I didn't know anything about farming. I knew a handful of farmers' kids from going through the county's rural public school system, the P-H-M Township, since my subdivision fell in neither the School City of Mishawaka nor South Bend Community School systems. But the quaint rural reputation of the Midwest entered my life only in the respect that to get anywhere on family vacations, we drove through hours of fields and pastures, counting the cows and horses to pass the time. I was one of the many who bore a sense of futility in college and into adulthood in identifying myself as a Midwesterner while not having grown up on a farm or even in a small town. It seemed that the only begrudging respect that people who were from Somewhere—namely the east or west coast—bore for the Midwest was for a yuppie pastoral ideal of locally grown organic produce or one-horse towns where everyone knew everyone else's business.

But my claim on South Bend didn't arise simply from a need to address that futility of county subdivisions, of burdgeoning Walmarts and Applebees. I felt like I had a stake in the town, even if I didn't pay city taxes. I went to a private high school a few blocks from the city zoo for six years. I volunteered in the homeless shelters in high school and college. I worked in some of those hotels and restaurants. I was a passenger on the city buses regularly. I spent countless summer evenings at the pseudo-Irish pub downtown, one of which landed me a picture in the South Bend Tribune, our local paper, when there was a gas leak and all of us regular patrons moved the party out onto Main Street for three hours. And unlike most of the student population at Notre Dame, I could correctly pronounce such place names as “Potowatami,” “Pokagon,” and “Twyckenham.”

As I said, in trying to explain my presence in Ireland, I often described South Bend as small and rural, which baffled the Irish when I confessed that its population was 104,000, since Galway's total population hovers around 65,000. But population statistics cannot convey the way a place feels. To me, South Bend was still bathed in the light of a 1920's flash bulb. The Studebaker mansions, the restored Palais Royale, and the shop fronts downtown still hung with the dust of the Roaring '20s. I remember having an irrational sense of loss watching the old Uniroyal factories get imploded one summer in my early teens. The architecture and the landmarks carried the history of the town in a vital way, so that the defunct Studebaker empire was still a part of the living present. Studebagels tasted better than all other bagels simply by virtue of their name.

South Bend was a microcosm of Indiana's larger identity crisis. I felt this as early as the second grade when intense arguments would break out on the playground between those who loved and those who loathed country music. The University was the main source of tension. The two largest employers in the 'Bend were the University and the hospital. That, combined with the fact that 11 out of 13 of the most economically significant weekends of the year for the town were dates on the University's academic or athletic calendar, naturally gave the University a certain amount of clout. Much of the town resented the cost entailed by the extra police presence required for University events, the congested traffic on football Saturdays, and the drain on ambulance service that drunk students created August through May. Though their whiny editorials in the Trib often came across as a case of bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you, I could understand why the townie population, especially those who did not staff the University and had no hope of their children being admitted, might view the University culture as entitled, self-absorbed and disconnected.

If Richmond harbored Indiana's southern culture, then Notre Dame was its prosperous Yankee cousin. St. Joseph County was clearly better educated, wealthier, and more politically liberal than Wayne County. It was telling that on Election Day, the only counties to go blue in this state as red as a Hoosier's jersey, were the greater Chicago metropolitan area, which absorbs Indiana's northwest corner, and a handful of college counties, St. Joseph foremost among them. Of the 92 counties, President Obama only managed to carry 15 of them, though granted those 15 are home to nearly half of the population. I was informed by one of my Notre Dame classmates in the run up to the election that she had registered to vote in Indiana to save us backwards Hoosiers from ourselves.

I went to school with a lot of faculty and staff brats like myself: contrary to the mindset of much of the state's population, we all expected to leave Indiana for college or professions. Some of us even had passports. Thanks to Notre Dame's international stature, St. Joe County was practically the UN compared to Wayne County. In Ireland, I often feel that I give a false impression of the Midwest, in the fact that I have ventured abroad, a thoroughly Yankee-Hoosier sort of thing to do. These Irish tourists who jet from Boston to LA can't believe that many of my friends would grow up expecting to always live in Indiana, to raise their families where they themselves grew up, and to leave the state only for annual family vacations.

If I had gotten a job in state after graduation, I could have applied for a stipend to supplement my salary, as a part of the state's effort to counter the Hoosier brain drain. They have a hard time holding onto their college graduates after commencement, so they developed a program of financial incentives. And while I'm sure my education and my experiences could contribute to the well-functioning of the city, I can't help but think that their money might be better spent in staunching the lifeblood of their culture: for all my education and middle-class background, I can't answer the simple question “Where are you from?” I cannot recite a single James Whitcomb Riley poem, and I have never seen frost coating a pun'kin on a chilly morning. I'm too much of a Yank Hoosier to call it a “pun'kin,” for that matter. Why should Yankee Hoosier pretensions to grandeur dictate the trajectory of the state's development? How many knowledge capitols does the country need? I'd be prouder to be the corn capitol, the soil that still roots the Amish and the Quakers, the land that lacks topography but offers easy tillage. Why should a university that used to accept pigs as payment for a farm boy's education aspire to the Ivy League? And where did the Indians from whom we stole those unpronounceable names go?

“Come here to me, you say you're from Chicago?” the Irishman interrupts my reverie.

I sigh deeply.

“No. South Bend, Indiana.”

Downward Dog is Man's Best Friend.

I CAN TOUCH MY TOES. For the first time in living memory, after three months of weekly yoga practices, I can touch my toes. I am so delighted that when I first wake up every morning, I get right out of bed and bend over and touch my toes. Yet much like when I first discovered I could play guitar and sing at the same time, it seems like the most natural thing in the world; I can't believe there was a time when I couldn't do it.