E-books vs P-books

Because of Coetzee's mini-essay on Dostoyevsky in the last novel I read [see no. 38 in the Books 2012 (2) section], I decided to re-read The Brothers Karamozov. My reading speed has been considerably slower than my usual, not only because this is a novel that needs to be read slowly but also because my copy is a paperback edition purchased in 1962. As common for books of that era, it was printed on non-acid-free paper, which is now almost brown. This reduces the contrast between the black type and the background. Moreover, the type size is very small, and there are almost no margins. It stresses my eyes considerably to read this work on paper (hereinafter, a p-book), and I find that about twenty pages is the most I can tolerate in one go. If I haven't finished reading the work by the next time I visit the library, I will borrow a copy with larger type (if the library has one).

Or I could download the entire text from Project Gutenberg and manipulate the screen image to make the type larger--which brings me to the point of this note.

What I miss in reading e-books is the certain sense of where I am in the book. In reading a p-book, one is aware of how much one has read and how much one still has to read. This knowledge may be more sensed than thought about, but one can gauge, however unconsciously and roughly, where one is in relation to the end of the book. This knowledge is, I would argue, important to the reading of a novel. In a mystery novel, for example, the end of the book brings the resolution of the mystery, and one knows that the closer one gets to the end, the closer one gets to the solution. I think this knowledge instinctively shapes our sense of the plot as we are reading.

Such information is of course available in a e-book. Among the control buttons at the top of a PDF file is one indicating that the present page is, for example, 234/702, or no. 234 out of 702. Even in the most primitive form of e-book file some indication of where you are is available. But the point is that one has to search for this information. It isn't there to be sensed immediately. In reading an p-book, a variety of sensory inputs tells us how far we have read in the book. The most prominent clue is visual, but even in holding a book to read it, our sense of touch tells us the relative weights and thicknesses of the blocks of pages we are holding in our right and left hands. Our senses provide clear feedback on how much remains to be read. All one sees in an e-book is the text on the screen at a given moment, and one doesn't instinctively know where this text falls in the book. There is no immediately apprehended feeling of where one is in relation to either the beginning or the end of the book.

I think the same is true of all works that exist physically as one unified narrative published in a physical book. Even our reading of books that aren't meant to be read for the plot is shaped by our expectation that a narrative is rounded off at the end and that we either are or are not approaching that point. In an e-book we lose our sense of progress through a book, progress in terms of not only how much we have read and still have to read but also how quickly we are reading.

A similar point can be made about reading a short story printed on paper within a larger context, say, an anthology or a magazine. Without paging through the publication to find the end of the story, the reader has no certain idea where the page(s) now visible fall in relation to the end of the story. This knowledge only comes when one turns the page and sees that the type ends midway down a page or that there is a new title visible somewhere in the facing-page spread. Or think of an article in the paper version of a newspaper. One instinctively apprehends the size of the article if all of it falls on the same page. But what happens when one reaches the bottom of the column and finds "continued on p. X"? Until one turns to page X, it remains a mystery how much remains to be read. Or consider what must be a common experience for all readers of books--"I'll just finish this chapter and then I'll scrub the kitchen floor"--without paging through the book to find the end of the chapter, one doesn't know how much remains to be read.

So in some senses our readings of short stories, chapters in books, articles in newspapers or magazines that we are reading in paper versions are akin to reading in some electronic format. In most cases we do not immediately have available to us the knowledge of where we are in relationship to the end of the story, chapter, article. That is one way in which our reading of short stories embedded in a larger work differs from our reading of a novel that occupies the entirety of a physical book. We don't know where we are in relation to the end of the narrative, and that uncertainty can be exploited by the author (assuming that the reader doesn't cheat and check the length before beginning to read). Is what I have just started reading the beginning of a short anecdote or have I embarked on a novella? Of course we can sense when we are approaching the end of a story. But even for a skilled and practiced reader, until that reader gets well into a work, there is no sense of the quantity of material to be read.

So back to The Brothers Karamazov--this is a novel of ideas. The plot--what happens--is secondary (at best!) to the discussions of ideas. I left off reading in the middle of the biography of Elder Zossima that Aloysha wrote after Zossima's death. I can see from the bookmark sticking out of the top of the book that I am slightly less than halfway through. I remember from my previous reading roughly what happens next in terms of plot. So it is difficult for me to think myself into the position of a first-time reader of The Brothers Karamazov. I think, however, that a virginal reader engaged with an electronic version of the text would have a very different sense of the book from one reading a p-book version. It moves at such a glacial speed that the knowledge of where one is in relation to the whole of the book shapes one's sense of the book and of the portion currently being read to the book as a whole.

I was surprised in fact to discover that the Grand Inquisitor section falls relatively early in the book. I had remembered it as one of the highlights of the work and thought it far closer to the end that it is. Physically knowing where I am in the reading shapes how I view a particular episode. The Grand Inquisitor's tale becomes less a summing up of the ideas of the work and more a disquisition that will play into the reading of the subsequent text. The tale is prospective (it shapes our reading; it poses questions and ideas to be tested in the novel; it tells us something about the character who is telling the story, knowledge we will use in evaluating that character's subsequent acts) rather than retrospective (imagine if it had been the final chapter in the book--then it would have become Dostoyevsky's final comment on the novel; it would be definitive rather than open). Knowing where one is in the text provides clues on how its parts are to be read.

Later addition: Similar factors are at work in cinema and television shows. Think of a film in which the principal characters are put in peril in the first half-hour. The audience knows that, however bad things look for the leads, they will escape with their lives--they have to survive until the end.  So the 'will they, won't they live through this' tension the film tries to create around the peril is tempered by the knowledge that they will survive. This forces a shift in the dramatic interest to a vicarious enjoyment of a safe danger and perhaps the hero's cleverness in overcoming the threat or her bravery and insouciance in confronting it (peril and wisecracks are commonly paired). The good ship Enterprise will survive the nasty aliens' attack and live to fight again in next week's episode or in the next sequel. Similarly any repeat viewer of the CSI series knows that those accused of the crime and brought in for grilling in the first three-quarters of an episode are not the guilty parties. Their alibis will hold up; their DNA will not match that found at the crime scene.

I have seen a few films in which a 'star' is killed off in the first half-hour. It comes across as a shock. Audiences gasp when they realise that an apparently major character is dead so early in the film. The death seems profligate. It violates our sense of narrative conventions and increases our sense that this movie is serious. A writer's ability to subvert genre conventions depends on the audience's knowledge of those conventions. Surprise works only when we have expectations of what is normal.

Every narrative genre that foregrounds plot (novel, short story, or drama) has stereotypical ways to spread the action over the required space or time. Our knowledge of the limits imposed on the work (either because we can see the size of the book; or because we know that the dénouement of the TV show will come about five minutes before the end of the show to allow time for the final barrage of ads, a final minute showing the characters recovering from the trauma of that particular episode, and the credits; or because we know that the play will last two hours) conditions our instinctive reactions to individual scenes. Hamlet's failure to kill Claudius until the end let Shakespeare address the moral uncertainty surrounding revenge. Shakespeare would have had to find a very different focus if Hamlet had disposed of Claudius early in the play. The delay in killing Claudius forces us to think of the play in a certain way. It matters when something happens in relation to the length of the work.

Errarooey

 Tabulae mundi mihi, Times Zones

Errarooey

© 2012

After my grandfather and great-grandfather were murdered in late 1920, my great-grandmother returned to her family’s home near Dunfanaghy, accompanied by my grandmother and my father, who was then five years old. The three of them lived in a small house in an area known as Errarooey, some ten kilometres (about six miles) west of Dunfanaghy. There are both an Errarooey More (“larger Errarooey”) and an Errarooey Beg (“smaller Errarooey”). According to local records, in 1921 there were seventeen households and 83 people in Errarooey More and six households and 29 people in Errarooey Beg. My father’s family and their two servants accounted for one of those six households and five of the 29 people in Errarooey Beg. All of the others were farmers. Except for a few fields, the soil was thin, suitable only for grazing sheep or growing poor crops of potatoes.

Today much of the land lies fallow, and the residents work elsewhere. Some, like me, maintain a second home there and visit only occasionally. Other than quiet, the area has little to recommend itself. There are no noteworthy ruins, no scenery, no historical monuments, no charming bed-and-breakfasts. Anyone venturing down the poor roads that lead to Errarooey will find, with few exceptions, only the bland copies of suburban American houses now common in rural Ireland. Most passers-by, I would guess, thank God they live elsewhere and drive away with blurred images of an unmemorable place seen without interest through a car windscreen.

My father lived in Errarooey until he was twelve, when he was sent to Black Meadows to continue his education. The house in which he and his mother and grandmother lived sits below the ridge of a low hill. The land behind it slopes down to the North Atlantic, half a kilometre away. Before the house was modernised in the 1980s, it was a two-storey stone rectangle with a slate roof and chimneys on both ends. It was roughly ten metres long and six metres wide. The ground floor had doors in the centre of both the front and the back walls, with two windows on both sides of the doors. There were parallel rows of windows on the upper floor. There were fireplaces in the side walls of the ground floor. Two-thirds of the ground floor was taken up by the main room of the house, which contained the kitchen and the principal living area. Off to one side was a small room that was intended to be  the formal sitting room. It did double service as my father’s bedroom. A steep, narrow staircase against the interior wall led to the first floor, which contained two bedrooms. Until they were torn down in the 1980s, several sheds for storage and shelter for the animals, many of them open along the interior side, enclosed an area behind the house. A small building contained the well and doubled as a washroom. There was no electricity until the late 1950s and no running water or plumbing until the 1980s.

*****

‘Patrick, come here. I want a word with you.’

My father was seated behind the desk in the library of my mother’s house in Drogheda. He had arrived for his customary weekend visit a few hours before. One of his aides stood deferentially behind my father, holding a sheaf of papers. In my eyes, he also reinforced my image of my father as an authority who was waited upon.

Usually during his visits my father ignored me except during tea. At least once each weekend he would use the convenience of that gathering to question Niamh and me about our schoolwork. Otherwise, as long as I was quiet, my father paid no attention to me. He might nod if he encountered me and say my name, but the flick of his eyes towards me was commonly the only acknowledgement he made of my existence. On the few occasions I had been summoned to my father’s presence, it was for a lecture about my shortcomings and a punishment to encourage me to improve. And on those occasions, he always set a time for the appointment an hour or so in advance (so, I suspect, that I would have time to dread the meeting), and he was always alone.

The order to step into his office, with another person present, was unprecedented. It immediately sent a spasm of fear through my body. What had I done wrong? I quickly reviewed my behaviour during the previous week and could find nothing. Certainly nothing on the order of acts that had in the past provoked my mother to say ‘Your father will deal with this when he comes on Saturday’. But however much I wanted to run, disobedience was unthinkable, and I complied.

My father did not look up from the letter he was reading as I stood before the desk. After a minute or so, he picked up a pen, impatiently made a note on the sheet of paper, and handed it to his aide. Only then did he speak to me. ‘I am visiting my constituency for a week beginning on Wednesday. You are to come with me. I have already spoken to your mother about this. She will pack a bag for you. She knows what you will need. We will pick you up on Wednesday morning around seven.’ He then turned to his aide and motioned for the next piece of paper in the stack.

‘Yes, Da.’ My father ignored my response. Indeed it was not a matter for agreement or acquiescence. I walked out, both alarmed and confused. Alarmed because of the prospect of spending a week with my father. His relations with me, when they existed at all, were disciplinary. I could not imagine that he wanted me to accompany him for any reason other than to punish me. Confused because ‘the constituency’ was an important element in my father’s life. He visited it often and it was a frequent topic of conversation between my parents. My mother treated it as seriously as did my father. She often left us for two or three days to appear at my father’s side at events in ‘the constituency’. I had little notion of the substance of the constituency, but I knew that was a vital concern for my father and that, as my mother’s trips confirmed, a vital concern for our household.

*****

‘Patrick, this is Mr Boyle.’

My father usually introduced me as ‘the son’ or ‘the lad’. He would put a hand on my back just below my neck and push me forwards. That was my cue to smile and extend my hand as he had taught me and utter, copying my father’s choice, in English or in Irish, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Boyle’.

Mr Boyle, like all of the hundreds of men to whom I was displayed on that trip to the north-west, would give me that tolerant amused smile that adults give children who are trying to behave in an adult fashion and solemnly shake my hand. Most of them said something on the order of ‘a likely looking lad’ and ‘he takes after you, Bram’ or ‘he looks like a football/rugby/hurling player’ or ‘he must keep you busy’ or ‘a bit of the devil in him just like his da’. My father would accept the compliments or acknowledge the likeness or say ‘rugby for this one’ or ‘aye, he’s a high-spirited lad’.

The last remark gave rise to much thought on my part. My father had previously viewed my high spirits as something to be beaten out of me. I was now learning that in certain circumstances they were admirable. That did not, however, mean that I was to display any. However admirable high spirits may have been in theory, I was to sit quietly but attentively while my father and Mr Boyle talked. If my father set me an errand, I was to do it quickly and quietly.

My father’s trip to the constituency had several purposes. We stopped in almost every settlement in the area. As one of the three Teachtaí Dála (deputies; TDs) to the Dáil for the Northwest Donegal Constituency, my father would hold a clinic to meet with the locals and to listen to their problems. He took careful notes during these meetings. Most of those he met needed help in dealing with the bureaucracy or sometimes even a personal problem. My father would respond by saying ‘I will have a word with X’. That was a promise he kept. After each clinic ended, he dictated letters to his assistant addressed to the various X’s. If the problem were pressing, he might even ring X. The problems ranged from requests for introductions to help in dealing with school admissions or what was viewed by the petitioners as overzealous enforcement of regulations. One tearful woman wanted my father to find her son, who had emigrated to Australia and failed to stay in contact. My father told her that he would contact the Australian embassy in Dublin and find someone who could help her. Some people just wanted a few minutes of attention from an ‘important’ man. My father listened patiently to all of them.

In every place we stopped, there would be a man, sometimes two or three, who had nothing to discuss with my father. They simply wanted to be present and to be greeted. Upon entering a room, my father would say their name loudly, step forward with his right arm outstretched to shake their hand, and ask after their family or make some personal remark that acknowledged their affairs were important enough to be known to the TD. The smaller the detail that my father mentioned, the greater their pleasure at the contact. A seemingly affectionate exchange of craic was especially prised. These men often served as the go-betweens between my father and the petitioners and formed a sort of chorus to the discussion of problems, adding their assent to complaints or supplying what they regarded as necessary information or shaking their heads at the stupidity of national and local bureaucracy as needed.

I was expected to be visibly present at the clinics and to answer questions politely and respectfully from those waiting. My father emphasised that I was to answer in the language the speaker used. If I was unsure which language to use, I should answer first in Irish and switch to English only if it was clear that the other person did not understand. A large segment of the constituency is still part of the Gaeltacht, the area of Ireland where Irish is the principal language of the majority of the inhabitants. In the mid-1950s, most of the inhabitants still preferred Irish, and only a few could not speak enough to participate in an ordinary conversation.

These meetings introduced me to new aspects of my father. I knew him as a stern, distant figure. His interactions with other adult men that I saw were limited to his assistants, whom he ordered about peremptorily. He treated them much as he treated me and my sister and often my mother. What surprised me was the respect and solicitousness he showed his constituents He was also jovial and told stories with gusto. He accepted with good cheer the gentle ribbing that was sometimes directed at him.

Another set of meetings was more political. At the local level, the Fianna Fáil party was organised into cumainn, or groups. There were several dozen of these in the constituency. At the time the heads of these local groups were much more important in politics than they are now. (Lewis tells me that they are equivalent to the old-fashioned ward bosses in American politics.) My father met with the head and the more prominent members of each cumann. Often these meetings took place in the local pub. If the subjects to be discussed were sensitive, the meeting was held in the home of one of the members.

One of these meetings took place at the local agent’s house in Gortahork. When my father, his assistant, and I arrived, the members of the cumann were waiting in the kitchen, clearly the largest room in the house, seated around the large table in the centre of the room. When we entered, the men stood up. My father greeted each man by name and shook his hand. As he did so, he made personal comments that betrayed and affirmed his knowledge of their personal life. It was rather as if my father were an old friend returning for a visit after an absence.

When he finished greeting the men, he turned to the wife of the host and thanked her for allowing them to use her house and apologised for the trouble his visit was causing. She assured my father that they were honoured to have him and asked, ‘Won’t you have a seat in the parlús (the formal sitting room)?’ She pointed to a doorway that led to a small room at the front of the house. As is still often the case, this room was kept ready for use on special occasions, the fireplace swept clean, the grate gleaming with black polish, the pictures and porcelain ornaments on the mantel dust-free, and the white lace curtains framing the window heavily starched. My father and the members of the cumann crowded into it. The host offered my father and his assistant the two chairs in the room. The two eldest men were then seated on the small sofa. The other five or six men leaned against the walls. It would have been an insult to the wife to suggest that the kitchen might be more comfortable. My father sent me outside with the admonition to behave myself and not wander off.

The house fronted directly on the main road through Gortahork. It was near the middle of one of the rows of houses that lined both sides of that street. There was no one else on the road. I leaned against my father’s car and contemplated my choices of how to occupy myself for the next two or three hours, or rather my lack of choices. I waited for a time for something to happen that might solve my dilemma. When none offered itself, I decided to walk up and down the road until my father had finished his meeting. I reasoned that as long as kept his car in sight, the walk did not qualify as ‘wandering off’.

The houses were irregularly spaced. Four or five houses might abut one another and present a row of varied facades to the street. Others stood alone, separated from a neighbouring structure by a narrow passageway or a small field. The houses were for the most part old, built of stone covered with plaster. The ceilings were low and the rooms were cramped. The smells of damp smoke and wet agriculture hung over the village, along with an overlay of ocean and fish.

Away from the centre of the village, the houses were further apart and the spaces between them grew into pastures for cows and sheep. I spent a few minutes watching a pig dozing in a pen, an occasional twitch of the ear and the regular rise and fall of its chest the only signs of life, while a chicken meandered through the pen eyeing the mud with its head titled sideways and pecking swiftly at it from time to time.  I had been wandering for about fifteen minutes when I heard the sound of a ball bouncing off a wall. As I walked past a large house, I found a boy of about my age but smaller in build kicking a football against the side of shed. Through the open door of the shed, I could see farm machinery and equipment. The space between the house and the shed was an open yard of dirt and gravel packed down by the passage of wagons and cars. Tufts of grasses grew next to the walls of the buildings.

I watched as the boy carefully placed the ball on the ground and then stepped back several metres. He ran towards the ball and then kicked it against the wall. When he retrieved the ball to set up his next kick, he noticed me. He made several more kicks before asking indifferently in English, ‘Who are you?’ He was facing away from me as he spoke, seemingly more intent on placing the ball for his next shot than on speaking to me.

I was certain that he usually spoke Irish and that English was a way of emphasising to me that I was an outsider, but, as my father had trained me, I replied in English. ‘Patrick Brennan. Me Da’s here to talk to some men.’ I pointed back up the road towards the house of the local agent. I had forgotten his name.

‘Why?’ Again, he spoke without betraying interest in any possible answer I might give.

I shrugged. ‘Some business.’ I was not about to reveal that some people (not the least the man himself) regarded my father as a man of some importance and thus claim a reflected glory for myself.

He looked at me for the first time and nodded. We both silently agreed that ‘business’ did not concern us.

‘I’m Michael Alcorn. Do you play football?’ he asked.

‘I can. We usually play rugby at school though.’

He scowled at me to show me what he thought of rugby. ‘I’m practising. Can you be the goalkeeper?’

For the next hour or so, we played an odd game of football. The ball was old and lacked spring. The irregular surface of the yard proved a hazard and sent the ball in unexpected directions. I defended the wall for a while and then played a fellow team member passing shots to him to kick for goals. I took off my coat before we began to play, and my cap flew off my head shortly thereafter. Before long, several of my diving attempts to deflect the ball from the goal had muddied my shirt and trousers.

Michael played with an intensity that was new to me. For him, it was far more than a way of passing the time. Football was a serious pursuit. Before each of my passes, he explained in detail how he wanted me to kick the ball to him. He practised each shot over and over until he was satisfied with his performance.

I was so caught up in the game that I lost track of time. It was only when I turned towards the road to run back into position that I saw my father and several other men standing there watching us. Suddenly I became aware of the dirt on my face and clothes and my dishevelled appearance. My shirt had pulled loose of my shorts in the back and hung down. My socks had fallen to my ankles, exposing my calves. My shoes were muddy. My cap lay trodden on the ground. I came to an abrupt stop and gaped at the unexpected appearance of my father. I expected his next words to be an angry shout. He was clearly impatient to be on his way and irritated that I had run off and that he had had to seek me out.

I had just finished making a running cross-field pass to Michael, who had successfully kicked the ball into the goal. ‘You’ve got a good lad there, Bram,’ one of the men said before my father could speak. ‘I could see some of your old moves in him. I can remember when you used to run like that. You taught him well. He’ll do you proud one day.’

My father nodded to accept the compliment. ‘But not half as proud, I’m guessing,’ my father pointed towards Michael, ‘as this lad will make his father.’

One of the men standing with my father smiled briefly and then glowered at Michael. ‘Aye, well, I don’t know about that. He’s always after kicking that ball when he should be working. Come here, Michael, and say hello to Mr Brennan, our TD down in Dublin.’

My father shook hands with Michael and thanked him for watching after me. To me he said, ‘Get your coat and cap, Patrick. We need to be in Falcarragh. Your mam will have something to say to you about that dirt when she sees those clothes.’ While I ran to get my things, he talked with Michael about football, treating him as if he were an adult and valued his opinion. When I returned to the group, my father grasped me by the collar of my coat to prevent me moving away. He stood there, discussing sports with the group, for another ten, fifteen minutes.

******

We arrived at Errarooey late on Saturday night. The two Errarooeys lie on a U-shaped road off the N56, the road that runs between Falcarragh and Dunfanaghy. The two ends of the U join the N56. Most of the houses are along the upper ends of the two uprights close to the N56. The entrance to the path to my father’s house is at the centre of the bottom part. The sections of the road nearest the N56 are more heavily travelled and they were flat and gravelled. Away from those sections the road quickly degenerates into two ruts worn into the dirt with a hump of grass in the centre. It is what is called a boreen in Irish English, although at the time of my first visit there, it barely qualified for even that name. By custom, that portion of the road is traversed from west to east. There is no room for two cars to pass.

The cumann meeting in Falcarragh was followed by a visit to a pub, which lasted almost until closing time. My father had left me in the back seat of the car, and I stretched out along the length of the seat and fell asleep waiting for him. We were parked across from the pub and I was awoken from time to time by laughter and singing from inside the pub or by the conversations of passers-by. When my father came out, however, I was lying down sound asleep and he didn’t see me in the car. After he finished saying good night to the members of the cumann, he walked over to the car and jerked open the door. ‘Now where has that child run off to?’ he whispered to his assistant. He was angry and irritated, but kept his voice low to keep from being heard. ‘How are we going to find him in the dark?’ 

I pushed myself up. ‘I’m here, Da.’

‘What are you doing hiding like that?’

‘I was sleeping.’

My father grunted and got into the car. His assistant came from Falcarragh and was staying at his sister’s house. After my father dropped him off, I was alone with him in the car. It was a dark, overcast night, and the lamps on the car revealed only a short distance ahead. The darkness was only occasionally broken by a light from inside a house. We met no other car on the road. My father had to slow the car to a crawl to find the turning for Errarooey. He did not move much faster along the Errarooey road. The car lurched over bumps and sunk into hollows. Farther in, the grasses growing on the central hump brushed against the undercarriage of the car. Nothing was visible except the cone illuminated by the car lamps. Only short lengths of stone fences were visible at the sides of the road and those seemed to grow increasingly close to the side of the car. It is slightly over six kilometres from the turning to my father’s house, but it took us about twenty minutes of careful driving. I realise now that my father had had a lot to drink and was driving with the exaggerated care of the drunk. At the time, it seemed like we were travelling into the unknown without a guide.

Eventually he stopped. He pointed to a gate in the stone wall and said, ‘Hop out and open that.’

The air was damp and cold and smelled strange. A rusty chain was looped around a post and the bars of the gate. The chain was in the shadows and it took me several tries to disentangle it and get the gate open. The metal was cold and gritty. I would discover later that it left red stains on my hands. When I finally opened the gate, my father pulled in and drove ahead. I thought at first that he was leaving me there, but he stopped about ten metres in and turned off the engine. He got out, carrying a torch, which he shone towards me. ‘Well, shut the gate, Patrick, and mind that you put the chain back on tight. If any sheep get out, you are the one who will have to chase them down and bring them back.’ (One of the local farmers grazed sheep on the fields surrounding the house.) ‘This is as far as I want to drive in the dark. We have to walk the rest of the way.’ He opened the boot of the car and lifted out his case. He shone the torch briefly on the inside of the boot. ‘Get your bag. You will have to carry it. And bring your books. They’ll get damp if you leave them here.’

We set off down a path that was nearly invisible in the dark. I dogged my father’s footsteps, worried that I would lose him in the dark. I was carrying my book satchel in one hand and my suitcase in the other. The suitcase hit me on the ankle with almost every step. My stockings had fallen down around my ankles. Long, wet grasses overhung the pathway on both sides and rasped against my bare calves. I desperately wanted to stop and pull my stockings up but was afraid that my father would get even farther ahead of me.

‘Mind where you put your feet. There’s mud here.’ My father shone the light briefly on a puddle at a low point on the path. From there we walked up a hill and over the crest and then down. That was the only thing he said until he halted abruptly. ‘Here we are then.’

I peered around him. ‘Here hold this so I can see the lock.’ He handed me the torch. I was glad to have an excuse to set the suitcase down. I aimed the light at the keyhole while my father unlocked the door. The black paint on the door was cracked and peeling. The wall surrounding it was made of grey stones. That was all I could see in the light from the torch. The lock yielded reluctantly. My father had to lean his weight against the door to get it open. ‘Wait here, until I light the lantern.’ My father took the torch from me and walked into the house. He shone the torch around the room until he found what he wanted. There was a scraping of a match and then the light flared as he lit the wick. Like the other country houses we had visited, the door opened into the principal room of the house, the combination kitchen and living area.

‘Well, come in. It’s cold enough in here without you letting more air in. You’re upstairs in the room on the right. Bríd (the wife of the man who rented the fields) will have made up the beds earlier today. I will be sleeping down here.’ He pointed to a room off to one side. ‘Up you go now. Take your things. Don’t leave them lying about down here.’ He lifted the lantern and walked up the staircase. I followed him and found myself in a small room with a short narrow bed. My father lit a candle that stood on the window sill. ‘Be sure to blow that out carefully before you go to bed. I’ll say good night now. Don’t forget your prayers. And don’t expect to lie in tomorrow. We’ll be going to early mass.’ He picked the lantern up and left, leaving me in the darkness. The candle gave off more shadows than light.  

I opened my bag and found my pyjamas. There was nowhere, at least nowhere I could see in the dark, to put my clothes. So I folded them and balanced them on top of my satchel. I took out my toothbrush and tin of tooth powder, but there was no water. I debated calling down to my father and asking how I was to manage that task. I could hear him moving about below. In the end, however, I decided that not reminding him of my existence and my problems was the better course. I knelt beside the bed to say my prayers. The bare boards were cold and unyielding on my knees. When I finished, I folded the covers back and then blew out the candle.

The bedding was rough and the blanket was thin. Even though it was August, the night was cold. My earlier nap in the car had taken the edge off my sleepiness and I lay awake for about an hour. My father went to bed shortly after leaving me. When the sounds of his preparations for bed ceased, I became aware of the silence. The house at Errarooey was, and is, a quiet place. It lies almost in a cove in the hill and is sheltered from all but a direct wind from the north. As my ears adjusted to the silence, I heard a sound almost like someone breathing heavily but at a great distance. The sound was repeated two or three times a minute. I couldn’t place the source. I was alarmed at first, but the very repetitiveness of the noise and the fact that it remained at a distance reassured me. I thought it must be some machinery. In the morning I would discover that it was waves breaking on the shore to the north of the house.

Despite my father’s concern that I would oversleep, I awoke long before him. As soon as it became light around 4:00, I got up. I was too cold to sleep. I dressed and then sat on the bed until around 6:00  By that time, I needed to take a piss badly. I crept down the stairs. My father was snoring lightly. I knew from overhearing my father talk that the jacks was in a shed behind the house. He was fond of contrasting the hardships of his youth (‘no nice clean water closets for us’) with the effete luxuries of my mother’s house. The back door was bolted shut. I was afraid that the noise of pulling the bolt out of the hasp would awaken my father. So I went out the front door as quietly as I could. As soon as I stepped outside, my bladder demanded immediate relief. I ran around the side of the house, unbuttoned my flies, and loosed a stream against the wall of the house. I sometimes wonder at the meaning behind my target. Was I marking my territory like a dog or expressing my contempt for my ancestral home or simply relieving myself?

By daylight the house revealed itself as a rectangular structure, built of roughly dressed stones of varying sizes. The spaces between the stones were filled with mortar. In the 1950s this style of building was still the most common one found in the rural areas of Donegal. Perhaps because it was uninhabited most of the time, my father’s house was not as well kept up as other farmhouses. The plaster was chipped and cracked, and the roof sagged. When I wandered into the back yard, I discovered that several of the sheds were falling down. When I pushed open the door to the jacks, I was greeted not by the usual stench but by a faint odour of mould. Only the well room was in good shape.

My investigations were cut short by my father’s opening the back door to the house and stepping out. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Oh, good, you’re up. Comb your hair and put on clean clothes. We’ll leave for Mass in a moment.’ He stepped into the jacks and shut the door.

The walk from the house to the car took far less time than I expected. They were much closer together than I had sensed in the dark. My father drove into Dunfanaghy. He spent the time before Mass chatting. When the priest entered the confessional, he sent me into it. He did not confess that morning. We ate breakfast at the house of one of his cousins after Mass. None of the local shops was open on Sunday, and his cousin gave us a loaf of bread and some cheese and cold meat for our supper. My father talked briefly with everyone he met in Dunfanaghy but did not linger there. We were back at the house by early afternoon.

As soon as we stepped in the house, my father said, ‘I want to show you the place. Put on those clothes you were wearing yesterday. You can hardly get them any dirtier than they already are.’ When I came back downstairs, I was surprised to find that my father had also changed. I rarely saw him in anything other than a suit, but he had on a pair of ancient trousers that bagged on all sides and an old work shirt, heavy boots, and a torn coat. The only item in good shape was his cap.

‘I want to show you where I grew up so that you know the people you come from.’ My father spoke Irish to me that day, and the word he used for ‘people’ was muintir. The other Irish word commonly translated as ‘people’ is daoine. Muintir is far more laden with meaning than daoine. Muintir is ‘us’ as opposed to them or people in general. It is ‘family’ in the sense of all those relatives one feels a bond to. It is one’s fellow villagers, or townsmen, or people from the same county. It is in the broadest sense ‘we Irish’ as opposed to the rest of yis. It is those people with whom one feels a bond of emotion or duty in whatever context.

I once introduced a Japanese acquaintance to my father. A few minutes into their conversation, my father asked him, ‘And who are your people?’ What he wanted to know was the man’s family background—Were they farmers or workers or merchants or in the professions? Had he been speaking Irish, my father would have used the word muintir. The poor man understood ‘your people’ in the sense of daoine, the Japanese in general, and struggled to convey to my father the difficulty of reducing an entire nation to a few descriptive words.

In later years, since I have achieved an adult’s understanding, I have wondered if the intent behind my father’s insistence that I accompany him on that particular visit to the constituency was to make my heritage and his role in my makeup clear to me. I lived with my mother, in a house identified as belonging to her family. My father’s presence in the house and in our lives was confined to weekend visits and to a few changes of clothes. We inhabited the house, he visited it. He must have felt at times that I did not know him or appreciate him.

‘The room you are sleeping in—that was my grandmother’s. My mother and the girl slept in the other room upstairs. This has always been my room.’ He opened the door to the other room on the ground floor. It was the smallest room in the house, barely large enough to hold the bed, a clothes press, and a small table and chair beside the one window. The only decoration was a crucifix on the wall over the bed. ‘The boy slept on the floor before the kitchen fire.’

‘Boy?’

‘Yes, we had a boy to help with the work. He was one of my grandmother’s relatives, the grandson of one of her cousins on her mother’s side. He came from a large family. They couldn’t feed all their children. So he worked for us. In exchange for food and clothing, he did the heavy work on the farm. They gave him a shilling or two every month or so. He was about twelve, I think, when we came here. His name was Tomás. The girl came from another poor family. There were five of us in the house.

‘There used to be more things in here. I didn’t need them for myself. So I let them go. Aine took most of them. Her and Bríd.’ He looked around sadly, as if seeing missing memories.

‘Now out here,’ he opened the back door and stepped out. ‘This is the well room. It is always cold and this is where they kept the pans of milk. When the cream rose to the top, my mother would skim it off and make butter with it. She used to sell what we didn’t use in town, in Dunfanaghy I mean. Her butter was famous. Arnolds Hotel always bought as much as she had to sell.

‘The cow spent the night in that shed. That’s where the boy milked her. It used to be in better shape. There weren’t those holes in the roof.  We never had animals in the house, like some. The chickens found shelter wherever they could. Every morning and evening, it was my job to find the eggs.

‘We kept our bicycles in here. We had three of them. Two were fairly decent. The other had seen better days. I used one to ride to school. It took about a half hour each way but I had to allow more time in the morning. The roads were even worse then. I was always having to stop and repair a tyre and I had to leave enough time in the morning to fix a puncture and still get to school on time. The teacher didn’t accept excuses for being late. We kept the repair kits and the pumps right with the bicycles. Only a fool would ride off without them.

‘The rest of these sheds—they were used for storage. We never threw anything away.’ He pulled open a flimsy door and peered in. ‘Some of this stuff probably has been here for over a century, rotting away. When my grandmother and mother weren’t watching, I used to explore these sheds and try out everything I found. They worried that I would hurt myself or break something. We didn’t have much. So I was always hoping to find a pot of gold buried under all this junk. Money that someone had hidden from the agents and then forgot. Never found it.’ He picked up an old spade. The blade was rusted. ‘I used this when I was a lad to dig potatoes. I had to work hard even when I was young. I had my schoolwork to do too. We weren’t allowed to play. That man yesterday in Gortahork who said I played football when I was your age was wrong. I never saw a game until I went to Black Meadows. We didn’t have time for games and running about kicking balls.’

He set the spade back in place, bracing it against the wall to make sure that it would not fall over. He lifted the door into place and closed it carefully, checking that the latch was secure, as if the shed held something of value. Again, this trip to the northwest was revealing a side of my father that I had never seen before. When I look back at him, I would say that he had little attachment to objects. He was not a person who valued owning things for the sake of owning them, and he never defined himself in terms of his possessions. With one exception—the farm at Errarooey. When speaking publicly in the constituency or in the Dáil, he often referred to himself as a ‘poor farmer from Errarooey’, adding ‘That’s a small village between Falcarragh and Dunfanaghy. So small you’ll not find it on the map.’ He seldom mentioned that he was also a very successful lawyer who made a prosperous living from his mastery of foreign trade and business practices. In some ways, this was a political pose. It was expedient politically for him to present himself as a farmer from Donegal. But it was also the way he thought of himself. He may have been a lawyer, but in his mind he was a stronger man because he was a farmer from one of the poorest, most blighted regions of Ireland. His roots in Errarooey gave him an advantage over men who had grown up in better circumstances.  

That Sunday I saw my father in a role that was new to me, and I had to revise my sense of him. In Errarooey and in the constituency at large, he was not a stern father whose weekly visits were dreaded. He was someone people respected and liked. And in Errarooey, he had something he valued, something he wanted me to value as well.

‘Now through here are the fields. We grew potatoes in this one. It’s the only one with decent soil. There were cabbages and onions too. Every year we went done to the shore at low tide and raked weed. We had to wheel it back up the hill in barrows. It was hard work and dirty. Your hands got wet and cold. It didn’t help to wear gloves because they got wet. It was worse than working with bare hands. Every hill of potatoes had to be covered with weed. It was the only fertilizer we had. They said it helped the soil. Maybe it did. I never knew.

‘That field was for the cow. The other we rented out for grazing sheep. The field at the front was for sheep as well. I don’t know how much rent my grandmother charged. We got part of a sheep when the farmer butchered one.

‘It wasn’t an easy life, Patrick, but we survived. We had more than most, even if it wasn’t very much. There was money coming in. And we had enough food, which is more than some could say. The uncles paid for my school fees. So I didn’t have to go to work when I was twelve.’

He led me down the hill to the ocean, as usual striding ahead and walking much faster than me. I had to rush to keep up with him. He didn’t stop until he reached the shore at the bottom of the slope. The day was heavily overcast and the sea was grey. The two merged at the horizon. Even Tory Island, which can usually be seen from the shore at Errarooey, was invisible in the murk.

My mother often took Niamh and myself to a beach near Drogheda during the summer. The Irish Sea there is placid and calm, at least on the days we visited, and busy with ships passing north and south. That did not prepare me for the seeming infinity of ocean that met my eyes at Errarooey. The tide was in, and the sea was choppy. There is an outcropping of shale just offshore from our land. A chute in the rocks on the seaward side forms a natural pathway for the waves. Each incoming wave forces water into this funnel and shoots it skyward. That day a storm at sea had roiled the water, and a spume of water was flung towards us with each wave. The waves shoaling and cresting on the narrow strip of sandy beach sent foamy water surging up on the land. A short distance out, a flock of seabirds circled over a school of fish, screaming and diving into the water.

I had never before confronted such a wild scene. I instinctively grasped my father’s hand for safety. He let me hold his hand for a few seconds. Then he glanced down and realised what I had done and why. ‘Don’t be daft, Patrick. You’re not a child.’ He shoved my hand away. ‘You can stay here if you like. I have work to do. Just keep in sight of the house and come if I call you.’ He turned and strode off, leaving me there. I knew better than to follow him, although I would have liked to go back to the house and sit within its secure walls, away from the sea.

I moved back from the shore and found a rock on which to sit. I stayed there for several hours watching the ocean, until my father called me to tea. That night he told me that I would stay at the farmhouse while he and his assistant made their final calls in that area of the constituency. Those three days were the first time I had ever been alone for such extended periods of time. My father left after breakfast to drive to Falcarragh to pick up his assistant and then on to their meetings for that day. Often he did not return until it was dark. He made sure that I had enough food and showed me how to work the paraffin burner so that I could heat water for tea. But other than that he left me alone. He said no more than a few words to me each day, chiefly admonitions not to make a mess and to wash whatever dishes I had used and to put them away. He showed no interest in what I done during the day. He never again discussed his childhood with me, although I would hear him tell others stories about it.

What I did during the day was wander around. The first morning, after I was sure that my father was truly gone, I investigated all the rooms in the house, including his bedroom. I was looking for something that would give me clues about him and his family. I found nothing. The rooms were deserted. The furniture was old and decrepit, the leavings that no one had wanted. What remained was the minimum necessary to allow the house to be occupied occasionally—a bed in each of the three bedrooms—the one in the other bedroom upstairs had no mattress, just the bare boards, which were cracked and warped—wooden chairs and tables with uneven legs, a press with my father’s old clothes, a few cups, plates, mismatched cutlery, several tin boxes in which my father stored food to keep it from the mice. The fireplaces held only cold ashes and not many of those. The pot hooks on the kitchen fireplace were rusted and clearly had not seen use in many years. I could not open the iron door to the oven built into the side of the chimney.

When I finished with the house, I went into the yard behind the house and searched the sheds. As my father had done many years before, I examined all the things I found in them. Unlike my father, who at least had seen many of these tools and implements being used, I had no idea of what most of them were. A few items were clearly of recent manufacture. I learned later that the man who rented the fields stored some of his tools there to have them at hand. But most were old. The metals parts were corroded, the wooden pieces disintegrating. When I lifted one bucket by the handle, it fell neatly apart, the individual staves radiating around the base in a starburst pattern. Worried that my father would blame me for destroying the bucket, I gathered the pieces and hid them in a dark corner.

I explored the shore and the rocks, collecting stones and shells and curiosities left by the waves. I still have several of the rocks I found. I quickly lost my initial fright when I realised that as long as I stayed back from the waves, there was nothing to fear. What most impressed me about the sea was its changeability. There were sunny periods when it was a blue expanse. At other times it became grey or green or even black. The waves ranged from small ripples on the surface to thunderous curlers. I spent hours simply gazing out at the sea. My love of sailing dates to this trip. One morning I saw a pair of white sails a few miles out from the shore. The boat itself was invisible. All that was visible to me were the sails tacking against the wind. I knew then that I had to learn to sail and experience that seemingly effortless flight over the water.

I walked all of the land that my father had identified as ours. I never saw anyone on those walks, not even the sheep that were supposedly pastured on the front field. The silence of that space stretched to the horizon. There simply was no noise beyond the wind and the ocean. It seemed to me to be a perfect form of freedom. There were no demands on me. I didn’t need to be anything.

I think it mystified my father when, on the drive back to Drogheda, I asked him if he would take me to Errarooey again. It also pleased him enormously. Each summer thereafter I spent several days in Errarooey, sometimes even a week. He never allowed Niamh to visit the farmhouse for more than an hour or two. ‘It’s no place for a girl,’ he would say. ‘You will stay with your mother at Arnolds Hotel in Dunfanaghy.’

By the early 1980s, the house had begun to decay badly. Much of the mortar between the stones had fallen away, leaving gaps in the walls for the wind and rain to enter. The roof leaked, the floors and windows were out of plumb, the staircase to the upper floor was a hazard, and the plaster on the interior walls was blistered and cracked. The house had been electrified, but the electric lines ran along the surfaces of the walls rather than inside them. Water still had to be hauled up from the well. My father spoke of tearing the house down and selling the land.

I had published two novels by then. The sale of the movie rights to the second had given me money to spare, and I offered to buy the property from my father, with the understanding that he would reimburse Niamh in his estate for her share and that I would leave the property to her children. Our relationship had become fractured, and I expected him to refuse my offer. To my surprise he accepted it and even seemed pleased by the arrangements I proposed. I think he was glad that the property would remain in our family, that his muintir would continue to own it.

Rather than demolish the older structure and build a completely new house, however, I chose to have the original structure rebuilt and strengthened and then extend the house along both sides and to the rear. The additions were faced in stone. The stonework of the original walls was left untouched. I simply had the walls remortared. I modernised the electrical system and installed running water, indoor plumbing, and a basic heating system. I removed what remained of the sheds and had large glass windows built on the side facing the ocean. The yard at the back was paved with shale and made into a patio.

My father refused all invitations to visit. The most acknowledgement he made of my changes was, ‘I am told that you have made a palace at Errarooey. Well, it’s your money. Foolish to spend all that when you’re only there a few weeks each year.’ As far as I know, he never went to see the new house on his occasional visits to Dunfanaghy. I spend a total of two or three months there every year. Niamh and her husband and children come for a week or so every summer, less because they enjoy it, I think, than to assert her family’s eventual claim on the place. Even my mother, while she still drove, used the place as a base for her excursions with her cousin Aoife.

Lewis is less fond of the place. I have made a comfortable house, I think, but it is not part of his heritage or something the two of us share. For him, it is a place to visit because I am there. He tolerates it because I like it. It is my favourite place to write. It is quiet and no one interrupts me. For me, it is home, of a sort. It is not the site of my and Lewis’s relationship, and it does not partake of the emotions found in our joint spaces because they are ‘ours’ and because they are ‘joint’. It connects me to something else, something I define as mine. If one could say of a house that it is muintir, it is my muintir.

Of course, I live there in far greater material comfort than my ancestors could have imagined. I do not, unlike them, live at the mercy of the land and of the world. I suspect that I live in far greater silence than they ever did, though. They had large families and were often in one another’s company. Except for the few days each year that Lewis or Niamh visits, I am alone there. I have to remind myself to turn the radio on in the morning to listen to the weather forecasts. I check for email only a few times each week. The road in front of the property is still a boreen. My neighbours on the Errarooey road seldom drive past. I often go for days without seeing another person.

Everyone assumes that Errarooey is where I connect with my family’s past, that it is my way of finding my ‘roots’. They are wrong. Errarooey is what I make of it. It means freedom to me precisely because it is for me not a past but the possibility of a past, the possibility for a past. It is because I can create the Past there that I value Errarooey and live in it. That first visit with my father was not a journey to my ancestral home but a voyage out of the present into a place that exists only in my mind. Out of my ancestors’ land, I have fashioned a haven for myself and found the silent space in which to create the fictions I would live and the people I would live them with.

A Day of Small Things

Tabulae mundi mihi, Times Zones

A Day of Small Things

© 2012

‘Pancakes? Are you making pancakes? When did you learn to make pancakes? Oh, that smells so good.’ Lewis beamed at me with pleasure when he emerged from the bedroom and saw me standing at the stove in the kitchenette and carefully easing one of the disks over. The top was only slightly burned along one edge. The pancake looked gratifyingly like the picture on the package.

‘I used a mix. It isn’t hard. I just followed the directions on the back of the box. Your mother said you like them. She gave me the names of the kosher brands. She also gave me a list of things you could and could not have with them.’ I pointed to a sheet of paper held to the refrigerator door with a magnet.

Lewis eyed it with trepidation. ‘And what did you choose?’

‘She said butter was a must, so I got that. She told me to remember to take it out of the refrigerator in time to let it soften. I did that. It’s on the table. Should be soft by now. And she said you liked jam rather than syrup. Either strawberry or grape but preferably strawberry. I bought both. You can choose what you like. I found Golden Syrup and real marmalade—the bitter kind—for myself at that British grocery store on Seventh. She warned me against meat. But I’ve noticed that when I’m travelling and I see people order pancakes for breakfast in restaurants, they always get bacon or sausage. So I made some bacon for myself. You don’t have to eat any.’

‘Oh yum, honorary chicken strips. I like those.’ Lewis tried unsuccessfully not to grin. ‘I suppose I shall have to eat a few. Now that you’ve made them, it would be rude of me not to force down a few “rashers”, as you call them.’

‘There is no need to be polite.’

“Oh, there’s every need. Politeness trumps all.’ Lewis laughed. He enjoys outwitting the rules.

Lewis had taken the train from Boston to New York the night before to stay with me. It was the winter reading period at Harvard, and he had no classes to teach. We were to have two weekends and the week together. I had to work during the weekdays, but still it would be the longest time we had spent together alone since I had had a week’s holiday from my job at the Irish Times the previous summer.

It was just after New Year’s and the weather was cold. I had a small, two-room walk-up apartment on the fourth floor of an old brick building. It was heated—intermittently—with steam radiators. I had opened the valves on the radiators as far as possible and they had clanked and hissed all night long. In the quiet of the night, one could hear an air bubble start from boiler in the basement and trace its noisy progress towards my flat until it passed through the radiator in my bedroom and continued to the floors above me. I suspected that even at full bore the radiators would not provide enough heat for Lewis’s comfort and had bought an electric fire. It followed him from bedroom to living room and back as he moved about the place. Still, that morning he was dressed in thick woollen trousers and a heavy Fair Isle–style sweater and rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. When that proved futile, he thrust them under his armpits and hugged himself, hunching his shoulders forward as if to make himself a smaller target for the cold.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that it would get this cold. We can go out later and buy an electric blanket.’

‘I don’t want to go out today. I want to spend the day with you and no one else. Besides, you kept me warm enough in bed. I don’t need an electric blanket.’

‘I can’t guarantee that I will have the same enthusiasm tonight. It left me a “mite tuckered out” as you Yankees say.’

‘Oh, I think I can guarantee enthusiasm.’

‘Can you now?’

‘I may need to have more of those chicken strips—just for energy.’

‘You can have all of mine, then.’

We didn’t go out that day. We sat at the table the entire morning talking. At some point we cleared the table and did the washing up. Then we sat back down over cups of cold coffee and continued talking. I don’t remember what we discussed. Probably our work. Lewis would have told me about his family and would have enquired after mine. Even though he hadn’t met my mother or Niamh at that point, he was always careful, because I was important to him, to ask about people he assumed were important to me. We would have eaten lunch and later dinner.

At some point that day we may have broken off to do some work. Even on holiday, Lewis had work. He was a sub-editor of a mathematics journal at the time, and I remember that he brought a thick bundle of proofs on long sheets of dun foolscap to read. That sticks in my mind because he had so many questions about publishing and he mistakenly thought my work on the newspaper made me an expert in typesetting. That was at least two decades before computerised typesetting, and complicated mathematical formulae were frustratingly difficult to set by hand. Lewis is usually a temperate man, but he swore and cursed at those proofs. I wasn’t able to help because the composing room of the Irish Times was on the other side of the Atlantic and I had never been in it. I knew even less than he about the subject and could offer him only sympathy and mugs of strong tea.

I was working on my first novel. The writing was going well, and, as much as I wanted to be with Lewis, I also wanted not to lose my momentum. On weekdays, when I had to work, I set the alarm for 4:00 so that I would have a couple of hours to write before I had to leave for the office. I tried to squeeze in another hour or two at night. I didn’t begrudge Lewis the time we spent together, but occasionally my mind drifted towards the stack of oversize yellow tablets that held the much revised manuscript of what would become Stand Up and Take Note and I would feel the need to follow up on a sudden thought before it escaped.

I do remember that that night we went to bed and talked for some time before we fell asleep. In the event, the honorary chicken proved less of an aphrodisiac than Lewis anticipated and we were interested in companionship rather than sex. It wasn’t the first time we had shared a bed without having sex, but I think that night and the ten days we were together that January marked a new stage in our relationship. It was then that we became a permanent couple and not just two men with a special friendship.

That Saturday took place during our fourth year together. We had spent much time with each other by that point. But we had always regarded those shared moments as dates or holidays. Something had always marked our time together as special and out-of-the-ordinary, hours of privacy stolen away from other demands on us and sequestered from society’s expectations of how two young male friends behaved. I like to think of that Saturday as our first ‘day of small things’, to use the wonderfully pregnant biblical phrase. A day of nothing more momentous than two people joined by the quiet domestic comforts of food and conversation, and work and sleep.

When we first got together, we knew that something special had happened in our lives. But we didn’t envision that it would last. Neither of us knew of two men or two women who had lived together for many years as a couple. As far as our limited acquaintances of other gay men provided examples (we knew no lesbians), couples were a rarity and a temporary arrangement. During our first two years, my impending return to Ireland seemed the likely end to our relationship. I had even composed a noble farewell speech in my mind encouraging Lewis to forget me and find someone else. (I would have been disappointed had he agreed or, even worse, had he acted on the suggested readily. I anticipated that both of us would languish because of our unavoidable separation and indulged in a dramatic fantasy of Lewis’s forsaking his career and joining me in Ireland.)

What I never expected to have were days filled with small things. I thought our shared moments would always, because of the strictures surrounding gay life in those days, be set apart from the ordinary. For many years, I assumed that the geography of our jobs and the accidents of citizenship and the business of work visas and passports would eventually cause us to separate. We often occupied the same space—one of our apartments or his family’s holiday cottage on Cape Ann. But we weren’t living together. This lent our time together an aura of something distinct from the everyday. We were both conscious that these limited times had to be intense and enjoyed for every moment. Our life together was not normal, it was not prosaic.

Lewis and I have been together for forty-one years now. We have had many remarkable days, days of the sort that should form the high points of our biographies. I remember those days vividly. But they are less important that the days I don’t remember. It is the normal days, the prosaic days, the days of small things, that are the backbone of our life together.

I found a recipe in an American cookbook for those thick, fluffy pancakes they make in the States. We are besieged by cold weather and snow this week, and I think Lewis will enjoy them.