PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Just a day or so before heading across the pond for Dublin, I found a photograph of myself from a visit to Ireland in 1987—“Exhibit A” supporting my longstanding claim that I didn’t have a gray hair on my head before I became the father of three daughters.

That photo may not be a fair gauge of change for this visit . . . but inevitably I have been tuning in to various other measures. One that struck me particularly on my last couple of nights is the proliferation of taxis. Last night—my last night in Dublin, spent happily in the company of my friends Fionán and Paula and their fine children Oisín and Laoise—I needed less than 15 seconds to flag down a cab in the northside community of Drumcondra. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much to say that close to 50% of the cars driving the streets of Dublin at 1:00 in the morning were taxis. Chatting with the driver on the way back to the Burlington Hotel, I learned that this radical change came about partly because of an intense enforcement of drunk driving laws in Ireland and partly because of a deregulation of the taxi industry, which allowed pretty much every man and his dog to buy a hackney medallion and get into the business.

Another gauge, of course, is the gradual disappearance of various Dublin landmarks with literary associations—especially Joycean associations. One that I happened to notice whose days are numbered is the Ormond Hotel, site of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses . . . and until recently site of the “Sirens Bar” as well. It is now shuttered and up for sale: I imagine the wrecker’s ball and the developer’s dream will give an entirely new face to that old Liffey quay.

But some things also remain the same—including Bewley’s Café as an essential place to grab a bite to eat and a restorative cup of tea or coffee. There used to be a number of Bewley’s locations in Dublin—there are fewer now and the only one that I visited is on Grafton Street. I had a great lunch there on Saturday with my old friend Robert Duffy, who drove up from Hacketstown, Co. Carlow for the afternoon. Robert and I go all the way back to 1977 and have managed to keep our connections alive over the years by get-togethers on both sides of the pond—in Indiana, in Boston, in Carlow. But we hadn’t seen each other since 1998, so it was great to get caught up on personal, familial, professional, and writerly matters: just before I left for Ireland I read about halfway through Jack in the Box, an engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in small-town Ireland, that Robert published a year or so ago. . . . After Bewley’s, just to punctuate—or “christen”—the reunion properly, we decided to grab a pint at one of Dublin’s true landmark pubs, McDaid’s. Associated with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, among many other writers of “Bohemian Dublin” of the 1950s, it is a grand place to raise a toast to “the good auld days.” But as one more measure of change, right across the street from McDaid’s, in front of the Bruxelles nightclub, stands a larger-than-life-sized statue of the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy that rocked the charts back in my student days in Dublin in the late ’70s. It seemed apt that Robert and I pose for a shot with the man who sang on the hit single “The Boys Are Back in Town”!