Forty Shades of Green

“I feel I must have a talent for doing something, but I’m still not terribly sure what it is.” Ronnie Drew

I turned a corner at Trinity College and the years just melted away.

This was early on in a vacation I had taken to Ireland with my sister and niece, Victoria, who has been studying at Trinity for the last year.

One Left Turn...

Our two-week adventure was an absolute blast. We met great people, saw fabulous sites, got to cuddle a lamb and I connected with a new spirit animal.

I hadn’t taken a trip of any kind since December 2019 when I visited my Uncle Joe and his wife in Los Angeles. And we all know what happened a few short months later.

This was a return trip for both me and my sister, as we had visited the Emerald Isle in the Eighties. I had stayed at Trinity during a summer screenwriting class that had been organized by the School of Visual Arts.

I was a little disoriented when we first walked through the gates of the 430-year-old school. The place looked vaguely familiar, but I didn’t feel any real connection to my past life.

And then we walked through as narrow passageway, and I instantly recognized the building where I had stayed 40 years ago.

I remembered the classes with Ernest Tidyman, who wrote The French Connection screenplay and the Shaft novels, and the drunken nights with my new friend, Sal, and the rest of my classmates.

I recalled how I had to light a small heater every morning for hot water, how on my first day I couldn’t bear the thought of having to do this, and how I quickly got used to doing this very thing without a second thought. Then and Now

I remember the train ride to Cork and a wild all-nighter that ended on a beach somewhere and me hitchhiking back to Trinity.

And now I was back here with my family.

One of our stops included Giant’s Causeway, an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns located along the northern coast of Northern Ireland.

The location is nothing short of breath-taking, and on the way back to our bus we spotted a seal bobbing in the ocean.

“He has no hair like somebody in our group,” my niece snidely observed as she looked in my direction.

I was all set to lose my temper, but then I learned that people with the seal totem are “imaginative and very creative.” They also like to have fun and live in the moment.

This is quite unlike me, as I tend to worry constantly and rehash the past, but my sister said that’s only because I’m resisting my inner seal.

I had once decided that the coyote was my spirit animal after spotting one of the critters near my uncle’s house in L.A.

However, that was back in 2019 BC—“Before Covid”—so I reckoned that a new age rates a new spirutal guide.

And this was not my first seal sighting in Ireland.

On our first day, when we went for a jetlagged stroll around our hotel, I spotted a sign outside a Dublin pub that featured a man adjusting a clock as he balanced on an ostrich and—yes, that’s right—a seal.

On the Road

Our trip included a 5-day tour of the south and west of the country.

I was nervous about the tour—big surprise--but our fellow travelers turned out to be a fabulous group of people, hailing from such locations as Belgium, Australia, and Canada.

The bus was built to accommodate 16 people, but there was only 8 of us, so we had plenty of elbow room.

Our guide, Jerome, who had been a cop for 30 years, was a great guy who really knew his stuff.

Among other places, we hit Cork, Ulster, Galway, Kilkenny, and Blarney Castle, where I stood behind a couple from my neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and where all three of us most definitely did not kiss the Blarney stone.

We returned to Brooklyn on Saturday, and I’ve been having the expected difficulties adjusting to getting back to my life.

I remember how miserable I was when I returned to New York in 1981.

I was such a dreamer back then, so convinced I was going to be a big name in the movie business.

That didn't actually happen, believe it or not, but I’m not going to look back in anger or regret. I’m going to make like a seal and keep on swimming.