Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.
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The after-party, no matter how marvelous the marquee event, sometimes proves even better.
Such was the case when My Better Half and I took a walking tour in Dublin, Ireland, that included historic Trinity College’s Old Library, including The Long Room, aptly named for it stretches 213 feet. By any measure it is one of the most beautiful libraries on the globe, a cathedral more than a library really, with more than 200,000 books filling 300-year-old molasses-dark oak shelves accompanied by rolling ladders tall as trees soaring skyward to a curved vaulted ceiling. Too, white marble busts of philosophers and writers and other eminent figures hold sentry.
Jimmy, our tour guide, was as Irish as the Blarney Stone and possessed the gift of gab magically afforded all who kiss it. Indeed, he was nearly as good a storyteller – seanchai in Gaelic meaning “bearer of old lore” – as anyone in the nearby Dublin Writers Museum, a ladder-tall claim considering it features James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats to name a literary handful. When our afternoon tour concluded at Dublin Castle, Jimmy well deserved a monetary tip.
Alas, MBH and I found ourselves with no Euros bills and our collective coins were too embarrassingly small a sum to hand over. In a pinch, I asked Jimmy if we could tip him with a pint at a nearby pub.
“Brilliant!!!” he replied with at least three exclamation marks of enthusiasm, further proving his Irishness.
Eschewing the pubs at hand, Jimmy, a Dublin native in his late fifties with a twinkle in his eyes and a youthful spring in his step, took us on a roundabout half-hour stroll through his home city en route to his favorite drinking hole. Along the way he pointed out sights that had not been on the earlier tour and regaled us with new tales.
Passing Stephen’s Green Park, for example, Jimmy shared a memorable story from the 1916 Rising when British troops had seized the high ground atop a building bordering the park while insurgent Irish Citizens Army forces dug into trenches across the way – “and bullets whizzed back and forth.”
And yet each day at the stroke of high noon the park keeper, James Kearny, walked directly into the heart of the war zone and coolly headed to a large pond. He had negotiated a daily ceasefire and for one hour both sides allowed him to tend to his duty of feeding the ducks!
By the time we arrived at Jimmy’s preferred pub we were hitting it off like, well, ducks and water. Serendipity again winked at me for The Palace Bar has a long history as a “writers’ bar.” The age-darkened paneled walls are adorned with framed photographs and painted portraits of famous Irish authors – and newspapermen, too, especially from the 1940s and ’50s when this had been a hangout after putting the paper to bed.
Directly above and behind our table, as if he were eavesdropping on Jimmy’s enchanted storytelling, hung a large portrait of James Joyce. At one point, Jimmy raised his quickly emptying pint glass toward James and said, “To old writers I’ve read and a new writer I only just met – slainté (health)!”
So enjoyable was this private after-party that when our three glasses emptied Jimmy phoned a friend to delay their dinner plans elsewhere and we ordered a second round. On a priceless day that included seeing The Long Room and the celebrated Book of Kells, circa 800 A.D., the highlight proved to be running short on cash for a tip.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.