Whisky Dreams

I am a lucky American. My mother owns a home in Ireland, although my Irish heritage comes from my father. Mom spends most of her time there with her partner Donal. Our 18th century home is on the main street facing a public beach and the town hall. We're also next to a funeral parlor. 

Things can get a little interesting when everybody and their cousin twice removed comes to pray the rosary next door. And let's face it, in Ireland, if you even nodded to a person on the street and they died, you're expected to attend the funeral. So, some days, it gets a little awkward leaving our house when there's a hearse next door, or a bunch of praying, smoking people leaning on our windows. 

But in exchange for a few moments of morbidity, I get to watch rainbows grow across the bay, children catch crabs on the beach, and feel the warmth of a blazing wood fire on my cheeks after a long walk to the lighthouse. 

There's whisky and Bulmer's cider  and gossip--the kind that only a small town in a nation of story tellers could come up with. Although I haven't been back for a year, I know everything that's going on thanks to Mom and her network of information. 

For example, there's something wrong with the neighbor's dog. She's a big black lab who used to be a bit high strung but friendly. She had 1500 Euro surgery on her back and since then she's been really nasty. And Connor farther down the street is becoming quite the boran player. He's also a charmer. I swear he's gotten more cookies out of my mom than I ever did as her own daughter!

And recently my mom's friend Joan was harassed on a bus by a drunk tramp. She described the man to her husband, Colin. Colin recently went to the pub with Donal and based on Joan's description of the tramp identified him at a local pub. Oxford-educated, former financier Colin, is sophisticated, incredibly soft-spoken, and has a wicked dry wit. But Donal said once Colin saw his wife's attacker, he went ballistic. Donal said he'd never seen him so mad. "Colin's built like a rugby player, if he'd have hit him, he'd have broken his jaw!"

And of course all of this has happened in the last week or so....Enough to make anyone need a stiff drink. 

Even with all this "intelligence," it can be easy to feel an outsider amongst people who have lived in the same place for generations, who can all tell you about Cuchulan or the "wee folk" as naturally as they can tell you about the Duke of Devonshire owning the riverbed and the new menu additions at Pak Fuk (no joke) Chinese restaurant. 

But whenever I come to visit, I'm always asked "how long are you home for?" I always assumed the question was simply part of the generous hospitality of the Irish, who never let me pay for a meal or a drink and tsk pitifully when I tell them how many vacation days I get in the States.

But the moment I step off the plane in Shannon, I feel something different. Maybe it's the smell of sweet grass that's so pungent even in the airport parking lot or the Sean Nos singing on the radio as we drive through miles and miles of small towns and sloping farmland. I'm home. 

Erin go Bragh, and Up Cork!

The Hard Sell

Fundamentally, most of us want to be liked. We don't need to be loved per se--though perhaps some psychiatrists would disagree. We need to be in on the joke, picked first for dodge ball, someone that people want to high-five. This is, I think why salespeople can be so insidious. After all, they not only sell us things we want and sometimes need, but more importantly, they play to our most deeply rooted insecurities about our intelligence, our beauty, and our like-ability.

"I want you to know, Chuck," says Jim Bob as he sweeps his arm across the used car parking lot, "that we get a lot of folk in here lookin' to buy cars, but I can tell that you've got more business sense than most of them, so I'm going to make you a deal."

Or Marie at the cosmetics counter who compliments your beautiful eyes and tells her comrade-in-arms, Jameka, that she wishes she had your eyelashes. Jameka, of course, agrees enthusiastically.

A few salespeople might tell you that relationships are a key part of their business--that without trust and mutual affinity they would not be as successful as they are. It's not about the numbers, they say, it's about the difference their product can make in the lives of people they care about.

Imagine the time you could save and spend with your family if you purchased Ginsu knives or used the Hawaii chair to exercise while at work!

Speaking of late night television infomercials....One late night at my mother's house in Ireland, I was flipping channels because I wanted to avoid "The Mighty Boosh." I get a headache after watching that show--too much existentialist, surrealist, da-daist nonsense for a Britcom.

There are children dying of hunger in Ethiopia and Ireland--former Celtic Tiger and one of the richest countries in Europe--has an entire channel devoted to selling greeting card making kits! ((I have since been corrected that this channel comes from England, but nonetheless...)) Someone has invested potentially hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pounds in staff, equipment, rent, and merchandise just to sell CDs with graphics on them and packages of fancy paper.

And so...back to my darkened room, I was surrounded by books, had a radio, and even could simply look outside my window to contemplate the moon's reflection on Youghal Bay. But I was transfixed by the people on the telly, so happy, so calming, so carefree. In their world, Ethiopian children don't exist...just the smaller every day problems of remembering Aunt Tabitha's birthday and determining what this year's Christmas letter should be printed on.

It may sound morbid, but I've often wondered if I were ever hospitalized for long periods of time whether I would become addicted to euphoria of QVC--the pleasant, blond people there who always have their nails done and seem to get along so well.

Indeed, being so insulated from the suffering of the world--perhaps from your own suffering--is a tantalizing proposition.

BUT--I'm not a lonely middle-aged woman living in a trailer with baked beans for supper whose alcoholic husband jilted her and who barely makes ends meet!

I have more for which to be grateful. I have a graduate degree, plenty of people I love and who love me--no alcoholic ex-husband--and thank goodness, enough food on my table and money in my bank account. Why am I not immune to the hard sell?

Am I fundamentally insecure? Do I need EVERYONE to like me? Or am I simply too passive, too easily sold something before I can firmly decline?

Some people say that prostitution is the oldest profession, but I think it would be more accurate to say sales is. Not to say that working at a gift shop is the same as selling your body. I know plenty of wonderful, genuinely good people in retail and I am sure there are many "fallen women" who have fewer character flaws than myself. But whether in a brothel in Nevada or a bookstore, most people have a dream larger than a lifetime at the till--even if that dream is being the head buyer for Gap or a regional manager for Borders.

I suppose my real beef is actually the relationship between consumerism and personal satisfaction--a problem that I think is considerably less worrisome in the slums of Venezuela or India. For those of us who have satisfied nearly all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there remains that elusive requirement for feeling whole--feeling worthy. And in America today, it seems we're more interested in buying that feeling than figuring out a way to feel it for free.