So I Thought He Was Dead Again

Today, I thought Chris was dead and at just the same time he was ready to kill someone. It was a bit of an off day, the kind of day when you realize you’re absolutely blessed to have so very many days of vacation. One of the things that was so stressful about nearly running out of gas in the middle of somewhere not on a map yesterday was that the car was wheezing and limping along like a soldier who can only drop to his death but wants to free himself of the actual battlefield before he actually lets go. When we were finally pulling out of the gas station, it sounded as if we were pulling along Oscar the Grouch and his garbage can behind us and when we made the tight turn into Crescent Close the terrible scraping noise resumed. It was loud enough and of enough concern that Chris and I both got down on the ground to see if we were, in fact, dragging ironworks behind us but there was nothing visibly obviously wrong with the car. Chris decided, for safety sake, that we should return it to the rental agency in exchange for another car that worked and he took off this morning to do that. He mentioned that the office was on the way out of town, but Galway City is small, so I anticipated it might be an hour or so before I saw him again. I took a shower, practiced the tin whistle, read my book, tidied up, looked out the window, wondered where he was and read my book some more. An hour passed and then two. We only have one key to our apartment and he had it with him so I wasn’t able to leave. I looked out the window some more and wondered some more where he was. A played through a number of scenarios: one in which he was lost because he didn’t have a navigator in the passenger seat; one in which he  experienced irreconcilable differences with the rental car agency and had to take public transportation back to the apartment; one in which he was distracted by something shiny like traditional Irish music; one that looped and looped again: that he had run into car trouble before he even reached the car rental agency and was either desolate on the road somewhere out of town or—of course—dead. A third hour passed and I wondered how one contacts the authorities when one doesn’t have a phone (or a key to their own apartment, for that matter). A fourth hour passed and I wondered if my sister would come to Galway to help me with the body, even though she was just in Ireland last month and it would be an expensive proposition. And when there was a knock on the door, I thought perhaps the authorities were alerting me and dreaded to answer, but Chris was on the other side of that door, though he no longer had the key to the apartment and he was no longer as happy as he was when he left.

His time had been different from mine because there was no reason for him to think that I was dead. He had made it relatively easily to the car rental agency, only taking one wrong turn or two, but when he arrived, he wasn’t met with the kind of customer service he had hoped for. Every day here, we’ve talked about how stunning and simply soothing people’s kindness here is, but that isn’t what he experienced. Instead of doing an easy switch of cars, the agency had Chris bring our rental to a service station, where he had to wait while the mechanic replaced the brakes on the car. The mechanic mentioned that he has the rental agency contract and the car was long past due for service. It was maddening enough that Chris was losing precious hours in Galway sitting at the Irish equivalent to a Midas, but the mechanic then took the car out for a spin with him to check out his work on the brakes and discovered that the unfortunate, grinding, ripping sound that motivated us to bring the car in the in the first place continued and the mechanic deemed it unsafe to drive. He dropped Chris back at the rental agency and drove away in the broken car… with the only key we had to our apartment on the ring. Only after several hours did the agency then give Chris a different car, and they drew him a map to get himself back to the service station to pick up the key to our apartment. Unfortunately, the map was a straight-ish line, a curved line and a line that ended in a hook. The verbal instructions didn’t help and Chris never made it back there so our key was lost, probably quite a bit after he lost his good mood.

Luckily, he found some humor in our attempt to get an additional key from our host, Ugne, who wasn’t home at the time, and her worker George asked us for our key so that he could run out and make a new cut of it. We finally got that settled and, with new car parked in the lot and new key in our hand, we went for a walk to re-start the day. And it was a beautiful afternoon, full of sunshine and breeze. The Galway Arts Festival is currently running so there are musicians playing everywhere in the streets and music spills out of pubs, so a walk through the neighborhood is like a progressive concert. We went to music stores searching for bouzoukis for Chris to bring home and found a bakery from which we could buy brown bread and raspberry muffins that we started to eat even before we crossed the threshold back to the street. We had dinner at a tiny place with pub food and Chris had shepherd’s pie and I had bacon and cabbage. The meals started with seafood chowder for him, which had huge chunks of fish in it, and vegetable soup for me, which was delicious and between our two entrees we had six scoops of mashed potatoes and probably an entire head of cabbage. It was good comfort food after a stressful day, even if we did leave behind four scoops of mashed potatoes.

We ended the day at the pub across the street for the session there, in which a fiddler played, a squeeze box, a flute and a drum and then another fiddle when Chris joined in; I love it that the music is communal and anyone can play, and I’m sure Chris likes it all the more. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere outside of Galway to take advantage of having the stupid car that we have… maybe southwest. We’ll see.