A MILLION IRISH AT PLAY, GIGGLING

In my better moments, I like to consider myself a reasonably educated young lad, but to discover, at my age, five years short of forty, that one's own language contains common words in rotation that furrow your brow and give you great pause is a humbling experience.

Humiliating? Well, I wouldn't say that. (Though I brood on it here.) As Spike Lee says in Mo' Better Blues: "I went to school; I can read." I would like to believe that my language is familiar, even intimate, with parts of myself that increase with age or experience. We've been through a lot, English and me. (Or is it 'English and I'? More confusion continues.)

Yet I read two books recently, one after the other, one fiction, one non-fiction, both by Irish writers -- The Untouchable, a novel by John Banville, and Are you Somebody?, a memoir by Nuala O'Fablain, and both contain words I've heard not once my life.

Here's a list:

dosshouse; chilblains; taoiseach; striations; embrasure; ostrichism; saurian; greensward; osseous; phthisic; propinquity; crapulous; benison; posy; pachydermal; cerculean; incunabuke; bridly; ferrule; oleaginous.

Still with me?

Some of them are vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough for me to hazard a guess as to their precise definition. And, let's be clear: these were not extracted from tomes that were made for scientific consumption, or computer textbooks -- these are words spliced and excised from books that are meant to be read. Enjoyed, even.

At first, reading the Banville book, coming across a couple of new words, I thought nothing of it. Happens from time to time, right? And the dude's Irish, so what the hell. You could read the sentence twice, three times, suss out the context, whatever. Do what I've told my students to do, and do what I've done with Japanese so damn often: Figure it out, take a leap, make an educated guess, figure out the context. All that dross.

Yet.

As the novel went on, so, too, did these new words extend and invade my meek fractured psyche. New to me, they were. Apparently, not new to the Irish! Readers, obviously, who were assumed to be comfortable, even casual, if not intimate, with the nub of their nuances and cant of their subtext. I've always believed that the great British writers have had an education that soaks them in words and their textures in a way that puts us colonials to shame. Reading books like these two, mass-market texts designed to be loved, only confirms my essential, intrinsic smallness.

We all understand that there's technical words that elude and escape our comprehension and ease. Leave that lexicon to the computer programmers and mechanics who fix our lives faults. And good riddance, I say! Who wants to be locked inside the confined, stifling cell which contains a computer's vocab, or a car's thousand parts.

But a novel!

I retreat into a novel or memoir to breathe a new world, to relax in a stream that flows through the falls and rough patches but lifts me aloft. Instead, with these new words! What to say? I'm dragged right back down, into the overflowing whirlpool of my own ignorance. (That wet, drowning place!)

I guess I must make it my challenge. Not to be intimidated. Not to cower. To attack these fresh definitions and syntax with a warrior's raw spirit. Approach them, cautiously, in the same way a hunter steps softly towards his close prey. Confident that soon a shot will ring out, and the deer will be his.

(And I'll pretend that I won't hear the muffled, giggling guffaws of a million Irish at play in the language I love, the one that still shows me who's boss.)

NOT NEARLY FROST

I saw three street kids bickering on Session Road in downtown Baguio yesterday. One of them had something that the others also wanted. Money, food. Something. They were dirty, shoeless, frantic, laughing. None of them over puberty. Teeth yellow. Smiling, though. Their smiles vacated their faces when the arguing entered, but soon they were back. They carried their grins with the same relaxed ease as they did the tattered black sacks slung over their shoulders, miniature Santa Clauses with nothing but coal in their stockings. Almost identical to the way I used to lurch my hockey bag over my shoulder, on cold winter mornings as I raced the ten feet from the car to the rink. Eager to get out of December. Into some warmth.

I can imagine these same boys on the streets of St.Catharines, taking the bus to Bill Burgoyne arena. Toques on their heads, in the Leafs' blue and white. The white breath of winter steaming out from their mouths like small gentle puffs of cigarette smoke. Hockey sticks in their hands as they descend from the bus and delight in the hour on the ice that soon will be theirs. After practice will come some X-box and sweet cocoa, with math homework to dab at in front of the tube. They will slip into bed and soon snatch some sleep, while January's mad howl, juvenile and whining, seeps through their windows and resides in their dreams, a faint, haunting shout that will wake them and make them wonder what they just heard. A pillow flipped over, and they'll slide into sleep once again. Tomorrow morning: a history test and a lab, and some assembly or other. Pragmatic concerns that no night nor its wind can decipher or alter.

Those dirty street kids. Here. On these streets. Never touched ice. Back home a few weeks ago, on the outskirts of Ottawa, I saw a teenage boy wait for the orange bus that would take him away for the day. He looked bored, irritable. Sick of the winter snow and the wind, and the Christmas break that had yet to begin, and might never come. Highways and farmland, nowhere's domain. Anywhere but here, he seemed to be thinking. Take away his toque and his scarf, and his jacket and knapsack, and drop him right here with these boys straight from Baguio. Stinking, streaked with grunge, grime. Sockless. Walking on pavement, their toes sliced by stones. Pissing in alleys. Rummaging through tin cans for food, some scraps for a snack. The park as their home; a bush as pillow, with thorns in the ear for a late-night tickle or two. Getting cold at night, but not nearly frost.

I can hardly imagine them meeting -- that Canadian kid and these young Pinoy boys, in some realm of existence much kinder than ours. A collision of worlds. (Three meals a day, with chips and pop in between!) Stuck in a room, the smell would be strong, the stink of some skin that has never sought soap. Would that stench be the grounds for some kind of detente? Perhaps it could be used to break that strong ice, a conversation's sly start. Kids are kids, after all. They must have a link they might relate to together. Give them a desk, some chairs, forty minutes. A few Cokes. They have similar anxieties, hopes, disdains. Three are homeless, discarded, rummaging for food, a quick high, while the other is pissed at his high school's computers. (They're always logging off, crashing. Parking lot is always full, too.) The weather is different, the seasons inverted, mutated, but other than that: what a world of connection!

If I left them alone, flashed a large smile, gave them space, four kids the same age, something might shift. The malleability of youth, and all that. We are all one people, that deal. A dialogue might commence. Some downcast eyes, coughs, sighs, sure, but kids are kids. Eventually they'd connect. Might even bond over tall-tales they could tell of illicit booze they'd once snatched, the Canuck from his mom, the Pinoys from some gutter. They'd understand their commonalities. Realize that they are not so distinct from each other, as society insists. A bath and a comb, some shoes and fresh socks, boxers or briefs and a white-buttoned shirt -- given these gifts, who could tell them apart? Who?

(If you answer 'I could', then I suspect we are doomed.)

MY STUFF WHEN IT'S MINE

Oh, give me a taste. A swig. Just a swill, straight from the bottle. I won't leave you no backwash. I ain't wired that way. I'll just down it all in one gulp. Pretend it's like water. Might make me wince, but shit. That ain't nothing to be shamed about. Hell, I wince when I swat a fly off my wrist. Just the way I am. If it hurts me, physically, and it hurts me, mentally, I'll kind of shut my eye a little bit, my right one, like I'm winking, and that's how you'll know. That something's got to me. A drink like the one you got, I think it might make me shudder. Like when you take a piss and you can't help but shiver. Never could figure out why that happens. Kind of a wake-up call to your body, I guess. If you see me shiver like that, a piss-shiver, when I down that poison you call a drink, well, it might just make your day. Give you a laugh or two. I know you like your drinking. I like my stuff when it's mine, too. But I could use a drink of that swill you're hoarding like a cub with her pups. You still got half a bottle left. I ain't going to sample but a third of a third. I get a little, you get the rest. I don't know if I can make it through the rest of the night without a shot of that warm stuff. It's cold out there. You want me driving around in the cold without some of that fire in my belly? Just a tiny taste or two. Can you give me that? You want to refuse a man a drink? You think Jesus in the desert, if he was pounding back the jay-dee, the Molson's, whatever poison he preferred, would neglect to provide a snort or two for a thirsty beggar who crossed his path? I ain't saying you have to be pure like him. I mean, I don't think he even drank at all, unless it was wine, and even that, he turned to water, from what I heard. Or the other way around. My head's getting to me. Wind's too cold. Shut the window on your side, if you can't even be bothered to liquify a friend. I'm just saying that there are worse things you could do than give a man a drink when he asks for one.

SUBTRACTIONS OF SELF

What do I get when I give out some coins to a bent-over old woman, haggard and brown with the ray's of a lifetime's harsh sun? What does she want? Some cash or some contact? Shuffling through the park, clad all in purple, her bonnet bright blue, her big stick for support: is this where we all go, when time takes us down? Our only connection a tug on a sleeve for some cash, just a bit, thank-you please.

(Putting yourself into somebody's mind is a game played by fools, by us, the humans, earth's ultimate knobs. We read books, watch movies, write poems, sing songs, punch teeth, stab ribs, swap tongues, lick ears, flick nipples, and all for the sake of some kind of transference. Good, bad, whatever, whenever. I can feel what you feel; you can sense my true love; I must show my great anger; you will know my wild wit. We can't know anybody (let alone ourselves!), but we crave a constant kind of touch, vicious or tender. Sometimes both, together. If only for variety, originality's poor cousin.)

I give her, this old hag, somebody's grandmother and lover, some coins. They drop in her hands like metallic m&ms. She looks at the colour of these shapes, the faces, the value. Checking their worth (and her worth? and mine?). She leaves. I watch. She's played her small role, to beg; I've completed my part, to give. She's done what's been built to do -- accept. She slowly stumbles away through the park, towards others like me. Ones with clothes that fit well, and hair freshly trimmed, and washed, and smelling of soap store-bought just days ago.

A little after noon. Six, seven hours more of sunshine to go. (No daylight-savings time over here! One can beg for one's dinner for hours upon hours! Woohoo!) More than enough time to gather more loot. I feel guilty for giving. One would think the opposite emotion would hum. Yet if you give, just so that your own errant guilt takes a form of sabbatical, who's kidding who? A remorse will grow, then fester. ("Oh, aren't you a kind one! Compassion's true friend, valiant and noble! Portraits deserve to be painted of your humane strong visage! To think! He gives twelve cents to the wretched, and asks for nothing in return! Write a song for this man, melodic and resonant! Let's build a statue in the square, marble and gleaming!")

Oversimplifications abound, of this sort, when charity runs its fingers through the long hair of excess. A simple act should -- should it not? no? never? -- result in simple rewards. Giver gives; taker takes. One plus one, and the answer is two. Instead, what I find when I age is that math plays no part in this human(e) equation. Additions result in subtractions of self. Ostensibly generous acts make oneself feel petty and vain. Multiplication divides. The other stays 'other', with 'myself' cut in two. (Three? Four? I've never been good at math.)

Sunny new days, in this place, as the year begins. No more resolutions or goals, not on this day. (If only, connect!) Old ladies in rags, hunched-over and half-dead. Caked in their own dirt, hands out and begging. Or simply asking. For what, I can't say.

WATCHING KIDS FIGHT

A bonk on the knee by a fist tightly clenched. With all the force of a judge's gavel, banging its verdict with a small hollow echo. A pinch of skin between thumb and forefinger, enough ouch to enrage the most hearty of hearts. Children can endure unaccountable hours of boredom, if required to by edicts on high from parents' tight lips, but the flesh of one's flesh, squeezed like a zit about ready to pop? Cries like a coon trapped in iron cages may ensue. Mewls, almost. More than tit-for-tat, the fight that will follow. It's everything in us, our spite, even hate, unleashed in pure form. (No additives needed, not at that age.) Nothing filtered, withheld. An easy access to instincts us adults smother, then bury. (Except in dreams, where pure sex and raw violence torment us sweetly.)

This ease of approach; this fearless unleash of all that is fluid and direct might almost be sacred, if its agents weren't kids. Those tiny love munchkins! Those smiling cherubs. Those angelic small masks that we pose for so long to get photos that erase all signs of the truth -- that, beneath those great grins, the most forceful of smiles, natural and honest, all our old impulses, ancient and ready to rise, (should they be summoned) still exist. Each child knows what we dampen, and wipe clean away upon waking like green slinking snot. All the red rage. They bring it forth, the kids do, with a spit bubble's gross ease.

We've all lost what they enter into with nonchalant fuss. Biting, pinching, kicking, taunting: What we express through lovemaking, 'safe' and quite coy, a 'roleplay', we call it, trite and all plastic, harmless and staged with awkward poses and angles, they dive into with relish, expectant and proud. In waking life, should we try such attempts at clumsy violence against our neighbour -- that prick -- the police would be called, with forms to be filled out. (In triplicate!)

Kids, though. Kids can go at it with the strange grace of a grass blade being pulled from the soil. (Some tiny life has been severed, but no matter! There's more fields of this stuff.) To give in to those dark impulses we big-folk stash away (like coins in a pig to extract, later, when the collection has grown with the weight of our postponed deposits), why, that's what these tiny blessings of ours, these young creatures of flesh can call up, with no second thoughts of remorse. Blind, black rage, aimed at that other, one who shares their own blood, their same smile and forehead. Their breakfast, their toys, even. The ultimate defense, this primal mad swing: You may want what is mine, but it's mine, so retreat. A sensible, some might say moral reaction. Only later, we learn, to divide our sweet pleasures with those we love most: I'll give you this, and thus expect more of that; you grant me those, and I'll allow you all these. A bartering of small treasures, that our ego allows in the name of 'civility'. (What we must lose to exist, in this society of family and friends!)

What is taught to the young'uns, so they, too, might become the empty shells of us adults, who monitor emotions and rescind our base impulses! Not entirely useless, this shell with no stuffing. Think of a seashell on white sand, for example. You can fill it with with junk, knickknacks and such, hear the ocean at all times, its wind mournful and empty, evoking empty beaches at sunset, its tide sneaking out. (That this wind that we hear is an illusion, a crustacean's odd gift, a sea lacking water or presence, is a reality best left unexamined this time.)

Still.

To be full like those children, full of rage and entitlement. Willing to defend a small truck or blond doll with the wrath of a god newly spurned. Almost noble, that impulse. One we must forfeit for life in a world of kickbacks and compromise. That often, if not always, a child's selfish rage is replaced by a smile and a laugh that so readily erupts like a firecracker ablaze with its own frenzied light is small proof that our best selves will ignite after all. Given space, time, and just enough prodding, and the gentlest of sparks.

MISSING TWELVE HOURS

A loss of twelve hours should not linger so long. That feeling of departure. Leaving one land, aloft in the air, suspended in space, a leap over time -- the stuff of our lives, modern and vital. What is half a day's absence, in light of this thrill? One life left behind, replaced by another; a journey through sky, swiftly but strangely. This motion of movement, a light-year in brief. (The plane rattles and shakes like a train shifting its tracks, with the difference of 'up' and the descent of 'down' giving a carnival touch to the entire trip, the strangeness enhanced by the absence of any outside sign of progression. Through a bus window we watch a world slowly passing us by -- garter snakes in their grass, poor people in backyards, laundry on lines, the stray sight of a skid-mark streaking some stranger's old gotchies being blown by the wind like a fart's quiet soft flutter, but a plane ride is a ride where all movement seems forced, bionic, a roller coaster's coy hustle. In we go, up we rise; shake; occasionally, lurch. (Are we nothing more than martinis?) Down we descend. Another country to greet us, the runway's pavement our rude and quite bumpy cheek kiss. We are here. Yet something from behind still demands we take notice.

To end at a place so remote from our origin is an experience we shrug off, a twenty-first century perk, life vital and viable. After all, what strange joy can a jet ride give us in full, when the click of a mouse and the drain of accounts gives us a world of new plastic stuff to stack our self-worth. (And to think that a computer's small mobile console, attached to a cord, should now be aligned with a gray furry rodent! Man has come quite a ways.) Left behind, mute, like a dull child who can't keep up with the pace of a his classmates' quick wit: a piece of our souls, a small slab of self still stuck at the airport back home, refusing to board.

Now: in this warm place, in mountains above small wisps of white clouds bearing no hint of dull ash -- just a few days before I was elsewhere indeed, squat in a cold space, crunching through snow, the sky not blue like today but instead shrouded in gray, that colour of rubber erasers all smudged and dark-stained from sweaty good use. (Erasing the unnecessary.) Twelve hours ahead, I've somehow leapfrogged through time.

Where did they go, those hours? Literally, I mean. Lost like loose lint from my pocket. Somehow I've convinced myself they still exist, in some form meant distinctly for me. Locked up in a vault that gamely shuttles its route on its own from my homeland to Asia, straight above that Pacific. (I gave up this part of myself to that safe, somewhere over Russia.) Inside its shut doors, buried beneath my own memory, a crude form of a bridge, could, if erected with care, and the right brand of tools, serve as a track that might make crossing over an option. Back and forth, from time to time. I could link two separate selves across that wide ocean, for I think, with the passage of years, they might just get along. If I could find those missing twelve hours, multiplied.

My grandfather's dementia, my niece's sweet laugh and my nephew's mad crashes on carpet, manic and joyous, my overall family's understated good heart, and the sound of my skates on a rough patch of ice as a puck leaves the blade of a crudely taped stick, slicing cold air, Canadian, its jab -- all of this stuff, I'm convinced, exists in some form almost Platonic in structure, above the earth's limits, preserved in that space where lost time resides as a taunt that we turn to at night, when sleep slips away.

Perhaps those hours we lose from such long forms of crossing intersect with our lives at stray points in our future. (If the door to that safe in the sky somehow cracks open.) I often wonder, on some future flight, bored by the movie, sick of the small salty pretzels couched in slick plastic, if I might look out my window and spot, for a moment, those hours I've lost track of over the years, hovering, then drifting, just past the wing. They will exist as physical, floating things, those memories I've missed out on, and the real ones, preserved. New memories as solids, as concrete as brick. Only these moments would act as small forward regressions, highlights from life that I somehow missed living. Surely, if we lose twelve hours of life simply in some kind of movement, within those minutes themselves exist what we might have enacted. Laughs had, friends met, kisses granted, promises exchanged, vows destroyed. Snow that fell, dew that glistened. The natural stuff.

I think those hours are there. (Existence, as a whole, cannot divert or discard its treasures with ease. I'm betting on this.) That time that was taken I'll make do my bidding. Dreamer that I am, in my own lunatic logic, I can hoard those hours again, crack the key to that vault that soars through the sky, examine its treasures to see if I left any life far behind. In those minutes I might find something I can take forward, even covet.

TRUE PATRIOT LOVE

A rectangle of white, bordered by red, centred within by a leaf all in crimson. Maple in tone. The sight of which gives my heart a small jolt. From a young age, this surge of affection for all that I know, encapsulated so neatly in such an odd form. A tree's own debris, one that falls with the cold that defines our wide land? Why should this stir a young soul with an erotic full force. Perhaps we latched onto our country as we would to our mates -- because it was so damn familiar, recognizable. There.

Being abroad for so long only intensifies notions of sweet special access. This land is my land, not your land. I come from a zone that activates my emotions with notes from a song. I know, I know, you don't have to shout: you do, too. But this is the thing, the 'thing' you can't get -- my place is better, and fuller, and musical in shape, almost aquatic in tone. It does things to me, this place does. Your so-called 'country' may do the same, but not to me, and that distinction exists as the fence I can't cross. You stay on that side; I'll stay on my mine. We'll both sing our own songs, and tear up together, but I won't look over your way, and please, don't glance at my path.

Perhaps this truth that I sense is not as plain and banal as I once believed with such force; that we all hate our own neighbours, and despise those small gaps that remind us of us. My neighbour's fence touches my grass five inches too far; China's ships coast through waters too near to Japan. Cambodia fears (with a fury!) that Thailand covets its land; Canada grumbles at the States' indifferent ennui. The fences look different, their paintjobs unique, but come on. Let's be real. We don't like the looks of those folks in that house next to ours. That's all we need to be real to forge our small hatreds. I once saw this as simple, but now I think not. Something within us demands an allegicance to the land that sustained us.

Yet I think of a 'me' born in my country of birth, but elsewhere, a place that smells of fresh piss, and booze bottles uncapped, freshly drunk, then discarded. Hallways that echo and moan with the clump of tired shoes. Guns fired nearby; drugs snorted so close. My country exists as nature's playground and small lab, but the cities, too, are valid and squalid in equal small measure. Suppose straight from my birth: my land as that building, decrepit and dangerous. When I saw the police patrol those dank streets each night (or not!), what I would think, as a child, of this country so wide? Not for me, that breadth; not for me, that 'nature'. (Of course, urine is natural, as is the need for another small swig of that tiny brown bottle.) If I lay out in bed, and stared at my ceiling, and heard the fresh fight of the couple upstairs, would I feel the pride in my land that sticks with me still?

For now, I'll let the question subside. Easier that way. Best to stare at my flag, and feel that small lump in my throat and know it's not cancer. Instead, it's my country's sweet song rising up from within. Reminding me of my youth, and my hopes that this ground that I tread on allowed me to dream.

Easier that way.