April 17, 1994
"Every soul shall have a taste of death."
The Koran
I had breakfast this morning in the hotel's main dining room. Every time Maggie and I came to Donegal, we would usually eat there. If the weather was nice, we would sometimes have a picnic at the old, abandoned pier in Moutcharles and watch the seals as they played and bobbed in the harbor.
Mountcharles is a dim, non-descriptive village about five miles from Donegal, the kind of place you drive through without noticing. As we drove through the village on our honeymoon, Maggie suddenly yelled for me to stop and then told me that she saw a sweater in a shop window she wanted to look at - it was an Irish sweater with a hood, which she bought. The shop was Gillespie Brothers Tweed Shop and over the years we became good friends with owners and bought many things there, sport coats, sweaters, blankets and shawls. Yesterday when I went to the shop it was closed, so I took the small side rode that leads to the harbor and went to the old pier, where I watched the seals.
A thought: if Maggie decided to come to Ireland to look for me, she would know where to find me not just in Donegal but in Dingle, Limerick, Youghal, Gort and Drumcliffe - for she knows the patterns of my behavior and wanderings.
There are a lot of people from Northern Ireland here this weekend, as there are most weekends. You recognize them from their accents and license plates. The businesses in town except British currency and at the end of the day, I usually have more British coins in my pocket than Irish coins.
At Mass this morning I remembered my nana Frawley who was born on this day in 1892 - my she rest in peace. After Mass I took a walk along the bay and visited the town cemetery on the grounds of the old Abbey. When I saw a tombstone of somebody who had died during the past twenty years, I would think about where I was that day, what I was doing and who I was with. The people buried there once walked these sidewalks, shopped in the stores and drank in the pubs. I have probably sat in the same bar stools as they did, maybe even drank out of the same pint glass. One man died on the day I was married and a young girl died on my birthday. We are all children of God and the sadness of death is that it separates everyone from each other.
As I walked through the cemetery, a huge blackbird stood atop one of the ruined archway's. Every time I looked at it, it would stare back at me and every time I turned away, it would give out a piercing shrill as if announcing the coming of the angel of death. It reminded me of Poe, his raven and the line,"and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming.
During my stay at the cemetery, my soul could not only taste death, but could feel it, see it and touch it. And in the blackbird's crowing I could hear the sound of death coming to get me.
3:00pm - The Olde Bar - Donegal Town, County Donegal, Ireland
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