The Grass is Greener

I knew I had crossed the border when my mobile buzzed in my pocket.

“Welcome to IRELAND,” the text message read, “You’re on O2 Travel. Data costs £1.99 a day.” The message went on detailing my new mobile charges. I looked out the window and saw nothing but a very unimpressive hill and some farmland.

Hannah looked over at me. She had been napping, until my mobile woke her up. “We’re in Ireland,” I told her.

“Oh.” She pulled out her mobile and saw that she had the same message. The little line at the top of our phone, which usually read UK, now read IRE. Where was the boundary, the checkpoint, the large sign that read WELCOME TO THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND?

“The grass isn’t greener,” I said.

“Of course it is. Have you compared it to Michigan grass lately?”

“No,” I said, “It’s not greener than it is in Belfast.”

“What?”

The first week that we were here, Hannah, Mehgan and I watched a Northern Irish movie called Mickybo and Me, which was about the Troubles in Belfast. The two main characters, Mickybo and Jonjo, run away from home and end up in South. When they express their surprise, the policeman escorting them home laughs and says, “Haven’t you noticed, the grass is greener here?”

The grass was not greener. If anything, the scenery was worse.

Hannah and I perked up a bit then, expecting to see Dublin soon, but ended up dozing off again until we arrived at the Guinness Storehouse around eleven. Hannah was very excited. “I’m living every male American’s dream!” she said as she took pictures of everything in sight, poking me when she saw signs that talked about the Egyptians and their views of alcohol (I believe they discovered that yeast ferments things. But the Mesopotamians were the ones to invent beer. I think.). I spent most of my time sniffing the air, trying to figure out what hop smells like. The air smelled like warm barley, which was comforting, and the bars smelled like coffee instead of alcohol. We climbed to the top of the storehouse, where there was a panoramic view of Dublin. I could see cathedrals and Trinity College, and numerous other buildings that meant nothing to me. A few of the people in our groups stood nearby, drinking Guinness from glass pints, shamrocks glistening on the foam. One of the boys, Patrick, ended up drinking two and a half pints, and when he told Cosmin he was feeling unsteady, Cosmin cuffed him on the head.

“Idiot. When you go to lunch, yeah, buy milk, okay? Milk evens it all out.” 

When we left the storehouse, we ate a hurried lunch at a tourist pub, which played only Irish ballads on the radio. Patrick ordered a glass of milk and steadily sipped away at it. I raised my eyebrows and told him it was very admirable that he could drink two and a half pints in an hour and only be a wee bit unsteady. Actually, I thought it was admirable that he could drink two whole glasses of a beverage that smelt of coffee. We finished our food, and then Hannah and I were off to my main destination: Oscar Wilde’s childhood home.

I had looked the address up online, and Cosmin had given us a little map of Dublin, and I had found the street quite easily. However, I was not sure exactly where I was, so Hannah and I rerouted to the front of Trinity College, which was to be our home base for all operations, and found a little map.

The square was in chaos when we arrived. About twenty men were hanging out in, on, and around the Ambercrombie & Fitch store, all dressed in blue shirts and red jackets, and they were waving and cheering for no apparent reason at all. “I wonder if they’re getting paid for this?” Hannah asked. “The models, I mean.” Lying in the middle of the sidewalk, in a blue sleeping bag, was a man who had to be protesting something. And then the crowds—all over were people, on the streets selling things, walking before the green man appeared on the crosswalks, jabbing into me with their elbows. Hannah and I fought our way to the map, which was right in front of the man in the sleeping bag and a chalk message. As I stood there trying to figure out where I stood in relation to No 1 Marrion Square, the man yelled at me.

“Hey, hey, you. You’re on my drawing. Get off.”

I ducked off of the chalk message and took a moment to read it more closely, but gave up. Other feet had already smudged it, and it was a long, winding message. After another moment Hannah and I figured out that Marrion Square was basically a straight shot once we found Nassou Road, which, fortunately for us, was very close by. We slipped as well as we could through the crowd and headed towards Oscar Wilde’s home, looking up at the street signs, which all had Gaelic terms on them, and looking in at the displays of store windows.  The South is on the Euro, which meant nothing to me, but the prices startled me. One display we passed had a hat that could have been mine for 59 euro.  One store sold furs, and this was interesting only because standing in front of the store was a large stand of silent protesters, holding up signs about a fox (or something similar—I didn’t get a chance to look closely) that was being slaughtered to make someone’s coat. How Cruella DeVil, I thought, as the crowd tugged me along. (“At least they’re not throwing paint,” Hannah said darkly.) I soon learned to stop looking in the windows, but found only depressing things looking back at me. There was a plaque commemorating three people who had died in a car bomb, and another homeless man, with a cardboard sign at his feet asking for money to pay for a hostel.

Hannah was the first one to find the statue. I was looking at the map, planning our next moves, and knew that, while we were in Marrion Square, we still needed to find his house. “Rebekah,” she said, “there he is.” 

And, across the street, there he was. Oscar Wilde, carved out of stone, lounging in the park. “You found him!” I cried, and I had to keep myself from running across the crosswalk to get to him. When we finally made it to the park, Hannah looked at him through the black iron bars.

“How do we get in there?” she asked, but I was already walking towards the park entrance.

“Come on, Hannah, this way!” I said, and I ducked into the park, passing the trees and the children going to play on the swings. And there, overlooking his house, was Oscar Wilde. There were also two black statues, on which people had written Wilde quotes.

I had always seen this statue in pictures, and thought it was a poor likeness of Wilde. In real life, I was too happy to be there to worry about the way the artist had sculpted his face. I kept reaching out and touching his shoe and the rock he lay on, trying to convince myself it was real.

“So, where is his house?” Hannah asked, and I pointed across the road.

“There,” I said simply. 

 We left the park, and then navigated our way across the road. The crosswalks make a ticking sound like a videogame in play, and it alarmed me. Soon, though, I was standing in front of Oscar Wilde’s childhood home, standing where he had once stood.

Oscar Wilde was not born in this house (he was born in a different house down the road, which now belongs to Trinity College, I believe) but this was the one in which he had grown up. This was where he lived with his mother, Speranza, whom he adored, and his brother and sister. This was where he lived when his father endured his own scandal, and where he lived when his sister Isolde died. This was where he had attempted his first poems.

The internet had told me that I should be allowed inside, but the sign in front of the house told me that this would no longer be the case. This saddened me, but I was glad just to be standing there, and know that Oscar had walked these streets before me. This was where he had begun—and, even if he had later pretended to be a pure British man, once he had been Irish, and proud of it.

Giddy, Hannah and I made our way back to Trinity College, passing the Abercrombie & Fitch boys, who waved at Hannah. Now that my literary excursion was at an end, it was Hannah’s turn to pick a stop, and she chose the wax museum that (we hoped) was referenced in one of her favorite book series, Skulduggery Pleasant. I had been to Madame Toussand’s before, in New York City, but the wax museum was smaller. Most of the figures were kept in little cells, so that only four people could really fit in each room. We visited Queen Elizabeth I and some ancient Druids, and then brushed up again on the history of the Troubles. Each time I saw a wax figure commemorating someone from Ulster, I swelled with pride and wanted to turn to the others in the room and say, See that? That man’s from Ulster. That’s where I live!

For Halloween, they had two rooms with creepy mannequins, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, and Hannibal Lector. Both Frankenstein’s monster and Hannibal moved, and Hannah got the Dickens scared out of her each time. We moved on from there to the children’s room and the celebrities, and then back to the streets of Dublin.

We wound through Trinity College, and Hannah wanted to see the Book of Kell, which is a medieval manuscript. I had never heard of it before, but we went, and managed to catch it just before it closed. The manuscripts were very interesting, but the part that I liked best was the library.

The library had two stories, and it opened so that you could see the upstairs and the great wood ceiling curve over our heads. In the center of the aisle, where once must have been the student’s carrels, were now museum-like cases of other manuscripts, with first editions of Poe and illustrations and other books. At the end of each bookshelf was a white bust of a famous author: Shakespeare, Milton, Homer; others were philosophers, like Plato and Socrates. All of the books were handsomely bound, most small enough to fit in my hand; the others as large as my encyclopedias back home. Each bookshelf had, in gold letters, a letter of the alphabet: a, aa, b, bb, and so on all the way down. Narrow little ladders served to help you to the top shelves, but ropes blocked us off from both books and ladders.

It was like being in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I could easily imagine myself at Oxford being bullied by a beadle, or studying dark, discomforting vampiric tales. I pulled out my own pen and started trying to write down all of the details, because photography was forbidden, but a voice was calling over our heads, telling us that it was closing, we had to leave…

Hannah and I found ourselves back on the grounds of Trinity College, geeked out to the max. We had each done something related to some of our favourite authors, we had viewed an ancient manuscript, and we had found ourselves in an old library—one that, perhaps, Oscar Wilde had been in when he was a student at Trinity himself.

There was not much time to do anything else, and I was out of my mind with excitement, so Hannah proposed going to the nearby Centra to buy a sandwich for our dinner. She only had a few euros left at this point, but we went. Along the way we passed the homeless guy with the blue sleeping bag, who had moved locations. He was on his hands and knees writing with his chalk again, and when I came out of the Centra a few minutes later it read: “Once I had a job and a house, just like you.”

The sight of it made me miss our homeless people back in Belfast, especially the weather-beaten one who likes to sit in front of the David Keir building.  He never speaks to us, and he never has any words written to describe his plight. He merely smiles widely at me and nods when I wish him a good morning, and the closest he comes to begging is jiggling the pence in his cup. He was a polite man who never asked for anything, and so he received. (Many of the natives seem to know him very well; he talks to them.) The homeless in Dublin seemed bitter and angry and wanted everyone to know. Blue Sleeping Bag guy annoyed me. This is probably not very nice—I’ve never been homeless, and I don’t know what they go through, but I can’t imagine myself in a situation where I was friendless and jobless and penniless. (At least, not in America. I can easily imagine myself huddling under a tree in a foreign country.) But all of Dublin had this kind of feel to me—people yelling, without being heard. One of the songs from Les Miserable started to whisper inside of my head: At the end of the day, you get nothing for nothing, and that’s all you can say for the life of the poor, and the righteous hurry past, they can’t hear the little ones crying…

I tried to shake off the feeling. Hannah and I went back to Trinity College to wait for the others, and looked around at posters. A lot of Dracula-themed events were being promoted for Halloween, as Bram Stoker was also born in Dublin.

“You really can’t do Dublin in a day,” Hannah sighed. We wandered around Trinity some more, taking in all of the buildings and statues. They were all old, and reminded me of something I would see in a Jane Austen movie.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that Oscar would have seen the same view when he lived here.”

“Yeah,” Hannah agreed, “but I don’t think there was a Tourism Centre here when he was alive.”

I laughed.

Cosmin arrived then with some of the other students, and he started talking about the history of Trinity College. It is now a Catholic College, but it was once Anglican, and used for English students who wanted to study in Ireland. The way Cosmin told it, Queen’s University Belfast is to Trinity College is to Oxford is to Harvard. I preened again.

We left just before six. It was already getting dark when we left. The British change their clocks tomorrow; I will be able to sleep in an extra hour, for which my body will be grateful. I tried to sleep on the bus, but it was impossible, and I just kept replaying the day in my head. I stood where Oscar Wilde once stood, I kept thinking. I can’t believe it. I’m going to have to do this again—I’ll go to his private school, in Northern Ireland, I’ll map out his American tour, visit every single city he visited, I’ll go to Reading Gaol and I’ll visit his grave in Paris.

I could write a book. Just like Tom Reiss did, travelling the world over to research Alex Dumas—only, I’d be writing a biography of Oscar Wilde!

I thought again about Blue Sleeping Bag Man, sleeping on the colds streets of Dublin. Wasn’t there anyplace he could go? Couldn’t the government help him? Why did he have money for chalk, but not food, or shelter?

My mobile, once again, informed me when I had returned to Northern Ireland. I pulled it out to check the time and the little IRE strip that had been at the top was replaced with UK. I smiled.

What were the differences, I then asked, between the South and the North? The architecture was the same, although the names were different. The South had Gaelic words everywhere. The North did not. The North named everything after Queen Victoria. The South did not—at least, that I saw. But the signs looked the same, the roads the same. They both shopped at Tesco and Centra and Spar, and ate the same crisps for lunch. But their accents were different. In the North, they talk fast and light, and in the South, it was deep and harsh. When I said this to Hannah she objected and said, “You didn’t really talk to anyone,” but that was the impression I got, just the same. The Dubliners stayed to themselves. When we stepped into a bookstore for a quick look-around we weren’t even greeted. When we go to No Alibis, David, the owner, always asks us if we want a cup of tea or coffee.

As I stared out of the window, looking at passing cities lit up in the night, I wondered what would happen if Northern Ireland ever did leave the UK. Would they join the Republic, or are their differences too large now to be overcome? They sound different, act different; their governments are different, their values are different. How would Northern Ireland do on their own? But then, I reminded myself, I am only a visitor here. I have been here only a month. And I may never live to see the outcome of Northern Ireland.

In the dark, a brown sign appeared. Belfast, it read, and then gave a set of numbers, kilometres or something similar, telling me how far away it was. Above it was its Gaelic name. Bael Feirste. Mouth of the Sandy Ford. Even after all of this time, I realised, someone still thinks of Belfast as the mouth of the sandy ford. Even though there is no more sandy ford, as the waters have changed and construction has changed the landscape, and the British bastardisation of the Gaelic reigns supreme on maps, someone still calls Belfast bael feirste. And while I believe the grass is greener in Northern Ireland, that sign gave me hope, that it will all turn out right in the end.