A Summertime Double

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

A Summertime Double

June 6, 2008

The West's Awake by Cormac MacConnell

THE lazy, hazy, crazy days are here again in all their golden glory. They are especially crazy for me just now because my doppelganger Professor Mark Feinstein and his wife Carol are over for a few weeks. Since they arrived last week I have been accused several times of being in two places at the same time. We have become friends of course, the four of us, and the likeness is uncanny in more ways than the bearded biologies.

There is no way at all in which there could be a shared bloodline because Mark’s father was Russian and my Sandy never left Ireland. Explain then why the party piece of both was the (Percy French?) song called “Ivan Skibinsky Skibar?”

Explain why their sons share the relatively rare weakness of being successive sneezers? When we start to sneeze we have to leave our company until we have “a-chooed” a minimum of 22 times! We worked that out over bacon and cabbage in the cottage the night they arrived.

Mark is over doing some linguistic research so complicated that I cannot explain it further than that. He’s a cognitive arts scientist of some fame, and first arrived in Ireland about a decade ago to assist our own agricultural scientists in the matter of the language used by our mountainy sheep. Before that he wrote the definitive work on talking dogs in the Southern Hemisphere!

For the few days they stayed before locating in Galway to begin work even our cats Tuppence and Thruppence were bewildered. I am normally the one at whose shoes they proudly lay the poor little field mice they have murdered in the garden. They switched over to Mark’s brogues as often as not when he was there.

Neighbors on the road rolled down their windows when he went for a walk and roundly abused him in the way they normally slag me.

The three others went to the splendid Mountshannon Arts Festival one night I was away, and the lovely Dingle musician Brendan Begley instantly greeted him with my name and wanted a song there and then.

Meanwhile, I was up in Galway to open an exhibition for my gifted artist friend Philip Morrison in the Bold Art Gallery in Augustine Street. Some very donnish gentleman there welcomed me back to town during the evening and praised me for the magnificent work I’d done for Teagasc on the stress language of mountainy sheep.

The next evening we went down to the Honk for a few pints, and our poor dead fathers were grossly slandered in their graves, especially Mark’s, because he had emigrated from Russia via Istanbul to the U.S. and, said the locals, clearly enjoyed a Shannon stopover along the way.

Crazy days indeed.

On the day they left I had to make a rare trip out of the west to travel to the flatlands of Co. Longford and the long serene town of Ballymahon for the 24th Goldsmith Literary Festival. I was involved on a panel discussing Irish comic writing in the intimate Bog Lane Theatre.

I told them that comic writing in any area along the west coast simply involved reportage of the zany things that happen here. And I told them about what it is like to have your doppelganger in your house and pub.

And about poor Joe Fada being knocked offa his bicycle years ago by the flying eye of a whale Galway County Council had to dynamite when it began to smell after being washed up on Furbo Beach. And about seeing the Inverin men pumping up a sick cow through the udder with a bicycle pump (a vet in the audience confirmed this was an effective enough quack cure), and about the cupboard of skeletons that used be in Spiddal Garda Station, and, generally about how often western facts were stranger than fiction, and we had a great evening altogether.

And on the long flat road home through Athlone and Ballinasloe I got a call from one of my Connemara sons to say that a fairy wind (Gaot Na Suiogai) had happened that afternoon (a kind of mini-twister that is common enough around Galway Bay), and it had landed a hundredweight of mighty mackerel in a field 300 yards from the beach and, yes I thought, that’s the way it happens in country that Goldsmith knew very little about.

When I got back home the Dutch Nation was still awake and quite excited. She was walking the retriever Anika earlier in the day and, as always, the cat Tuppence was bouncing along behind, and dammit if a large bird she thought was a barn owl did not appear in broad daylight and try to turn the Tuppence into her breakfast!

Owls, I was certain, do not hunt in daylight but, when I checked next day, I discovered these nights are so short that sometimes they do if they are still hungry in the mornings.

Said Tuppence is licking my bare ankle under the table as I write with her sandpapery tongue. I know what that usually means — “I have a gift for you!” — and I have not looked down yet to see the latest victim of these lazy, hazy, crazy days.

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