rted first of all back to my earliest days in Boston, in 1984—specifically to my first visit to The Black Rose, a landmark Irish pub near Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market. One of the distinctive features of the pub at that time was a large painting (probably 4’ x 7’) of faces and profiles all blended together into a sort of Chagall-esque expressionistic dreamscape. The painting, by O’Docherty, was titled Finnegan’s Sleep , an obvious allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—that “lingerous longerous book of the dark”—and featured many recognizable figures with literary associations in particular: Joyce, his character Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Seamus Heaney. . . . Needless to say, I found the painting both eye-catching and intriguing . . . and I was prompted to arrange for O’Docherty to have a show of his paintings at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston. A quarter-century later, most of the details of that event have faded from my memory, but I do know that the show included Finnegan’s Sleep. I bought a poster of that piece and it has hung in my office ever since. . . .But I was also transported back to some point in the past decade when I happened to be in the vicinity of Downtown Crossing and my ear was drawn to the sound of an Irish jig being played on a tin whistle. I had not seen David O’Docherty since the mid-1980s, but I immediately recognized him as the man behind the music. I am quite sure that he was not busking —he was just playing his whistle for the joy of playing and for the joy that his playing gave to others. After a few minutes we made eye contact and then we had a nice chat: he was a gentle and generous spirit. Reading his obituary this morning, I remember with happiness that chance meeting by way of his musical talent so many years after we first crossed paths by way of his talent as a painter.
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