THE HIGH KING OF SANDYCOVE . . .

Under ordinary circumstances, today’s highlight would have been our visit to Joyce’s Tower.  But for some of us that may have been trumped by our subsequent several hours spent in “Fitzgerald’s of Sandycove,” a classic old pub with a very tasteful Joycean theme located at 11 Sandycove Road. Before we all crossed the big pond for the old country, I lined up novelist Ferdia Mac Anna to read for us from his recently reissued first novel The Last of the High Kings (originally published in 1991), but I had not figured out a venue for the event. As soon as we got to Dublin, I thought of Fitzgerald’s—which I had seen before but had never been inside—so I fired off an email to the pub. The manager, Will Agar, responded enthusiastically, graciously agreeing to reserve a corner for us—so we were all set.

So . . . after our visit to Joyce’s Tower we headed off en masse to the pub where we were welcomed by plates of Irish smoked salmon, cheeses, and crackers, compliments of Fitzgerald’s—a great start!  Coincidentally, Ferdia Mac Anna lives literally just around the corner from the pub, so he was right in his element . . . and so were we when he began to read from his fine coming-of-age novel reissued by New Island as part of its aptly-labeled Modern Irish Classics series.  The passage Ferdia read was itself “classic”—sweet, funny, subtle.  We were all engaged and enthralled.

Did I mention that Ferdia and I are old friends?  I’ll do so now, because that will help to make some sense out of what happened next.  We first met in 1977 when we were classmates—briefly—in the M.A. Program in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin.  Ferdia left the program to pursue the alternative life of his alter ego, retro rock ‘n’ roller Rocky De Valera.  I was at the debut performance of his band, The Gravediggers, in January of 1978—and we next crossed paths 27 years later, in 2005.  This event was thus another reunion, of sorts.  So why not invite a few more friends to join the mix?  Those friends ranged from a guy named Eugene whom I had just met in the pub, to Brendan whom we had all met a few days earlier at #15 Usher’s Island, to UMass Boston alumna and old friend Rachael (a native Dubliner), to old friend and master photographer Fionán (who provided the snaps for this post), to another old friend from my UCD days, Bairbre.  And there was one more—poet Catherine Phil MacCarthy, who had read at UMass Boston about 15 years ago and will probably read on campus again this coming Fall.  So . . . what happened next was that when Ferdia heard that she had in her bag the galleys for her new book, he invited her to join him in the reading corner and share with us a couple of poems—an unexpected bonus.  We were all smitten by her as well, and everyone subsequently engaged in a very rich Q&A with both Ferdia and Catherine.

Afterward we all hung around and talked with the clock turned off.  For perhaps the first time on the whole trip, we all experienced what I call “Irish time”: with no bus or train to catch, and nothing scheduled for later on, we had started the event late and we ended . . . eventually.