I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(31)

“You should socialize him better around dogs,” the lady yelled from her back door. “If you pick him up like that, you’re just enabling his fear.”

Her words enabled my fear. But I forged ahead, plowing the stroller through the gravel with my son perched on my shoulder like a baby monkey, the dog slobbering and pacing at our side. I introduced myself to a couple of people, and they nodded and turned back to their conversations already in progress. In the woman’s living room, everyone was talking about a parade happening downtown later that week. One mother asked another beside me, “Should we meet there? Maybe get lunch first?”

That was my opening. I could have said, “Hey, can we join you?” Maybe it was the run-in with the dog, or the fact that other than yelling at me across her driveway, this woman and her friends had mostly ignored us, as if we were strangers walking past their private party, but shyness overtook me.

We stayed for about an hour. I stood at the edge of a few groups as my daughter sat at my feet and my son hovered at my knee. If I’d mustered a bit more extroversion I’d have gotten up the courage to ask a question or two. But the questions I wanted to ask seemed too big and unwieldy to inject into their conversations. I couldn’t seem to get out, How old is your baby?—much less, How are you different here? What will you do when it’s time to go back? Will you go? Are you afraid?

We didn’t go to any more group meetings.



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Babies need sleep no matter which side of the ocean they’re on, so our existence in Ireland still revolved around naps, and the kids and I didn’t stray far from the house for long. Because I’d put all my freelance work on hold while we were abroad, there was little distraction from the basic tasks of caretaking: making meals, reading stories, playing with toys, bathing, dressing, rocking. While—don’t get me wrong—that sweet, loving contact is precisely what I wish I could get back for just five minutes now that my kids are teenagers who refuse to curl up in footie pajamas on my lap and let me read to them, it wasn’t exactly a shake-up from what we’d been doing back in Atlanta.

And although it was a fun change of pace to see John more in the evenings (back in the States, he’d traveled so much that we often didn’t see him for days at a time), he still traveled a good bit from our Irish home base. He woke early and went to work, sometimes hopping a train or a plane, and there I was, back home with the kids.

Our daily lives had not transformed with our relocation, except perhaps to get a bit lonelier.

I had not transformed, either. And I didn’t realize, until that thought dawned on me with some disappointment, that I’d wanted to. I’d thought I might become someone a little more glamorous, a tad more interesting. But this time, a change of scene didn’t change the whole movie. I was still pretty much the same character in the same film.

Looking back, I can see that when I had envisioned our life in Dublin before we left, it was just a concept, not a life. It included adorable vignettes like my baby tasting corned beef for the first time, my preschooler gazing contentedly out a train window at cows grazing in pastures, all four of us holding hands and skipping through fields of four-leafed clovers. It was photo ops, scrapbook entries, Facebook posts.



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I want to fit into whatever culture I find myself visiting, whether that’s a place or a group of people. And this desire isn’t just about wanting to be liked—it’s about wanting to show that I know the culture, that I’ve succeeded at passing as an insider. I have a new identity. This means that when I travel, I research the conventions where I’m going: What do people wear? How do they greet each other? Do they hold their forks this way or that? I can’t stand the idea of standing out as a gauche American. It’s just so lazy and rude—and wrong—not to at least try to do as the Romans do. Right? Unfortunately, sometimes I get so distracted by trying to mimic the culture correctly that I miss the forest for the trees.

John and I went to Italy once, years before Dublin, with two other couples. One of the first things we did after arriving in Florence was take a car out to an olive grove in Tuscany. We got to taste thick green olive oil on little shingles of country bread. I ate it up and memorized every fact our guides taught us. That way, at every dinner afterward, I could discuss olive oil brilliantly with waiters and enjoy it in an educated way. (“Mmm, definitely cold-pressed. They must be keeping it in dark glass. Great soil.” What an asshole.)

One night we stumbled into a trattoria and were seated at a table in a crowded room. The waiter brought a bottle of olive oil and a hunk of bread. Noticing a little empty bowl on the table, we poured some oil into it and began dipping our bread. Mmmm, nutty? Fruity? When we polished it off, our waiter came back, chuckling, and offered us more.

We ate and ate, sopping up every last drop, wiping the bowl clean with our crusts. You don’t want to waste that stuff. It’s liquid gold.

It was then, as we sat back with bellies full of bread and oil, that I looked around the dining room and commented on how funny it was that in Italy people could still smoke in restaurants. We’d gotten used to dining in a haze. And then I noticed the smokers in the room—all at one time, seemingly—tapping their cigarettes into little bowls in the center of their tables.

We’d been eating out of an ashtray.



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