My coffee grows cold as I linger at the kitchen window.
Dawn is never an afterthought for me. I’m up by 4, ready early. Yet I’m not alone in my vigil, even in the lightly populated eastern Sierra foothills of Northern California.
Dawn welcomes us – me and a blinking measles of drones, a nattering pestilence migrating alongside newcomers, mostly San Francisco urban refugees.
Dawn is Verse One, the stage setter. It so empowering to this dreamer that I’ve commandeered one of those sky-riders, infusing it with dominion over time and distance.
We’re soon at the next daybreak in County Tipperary, Cashel, the Ireland of my DNA, my Taylor blood in its fields and bones in The Rock’s cemetery.
I alight inside The Rock’s north chapel wall, resuming a mystical union that I initiated in 1996 on a visit with my then 14-year-old son Corey.
I arch my back against the carved stones, splay my hands against it as if a victim of the fiery slaughter of the 1647 Sack of Cashel.
Needing nothing visible, my spirit is again flung into the sky, majestic, soaring, triumphant, timeless, an indescribable force of healing and memory. Blessed assurance. You will be, someday soon, a vagabond repatriated.
Below, every furrow and bog of the pastoral flatlands encircling the Rock are plowed with the mayhem and mystery of druidic and Christian conflict and celebration.
Here, axes slammed skulls while famines fed excesses and exodus. Most doings and undoing’s known but to God.
Here, art, heart and soul are earned by hauling out calves born on cold, lantern-lit winter nights, by knotting your don’t-fail-me-now legs around iron girders as you marry them with office towers.
And here, writers like me are valued for words crafted smartly like Waterford crystal or as ignoble as spittoon spillage. No matter. Whether it’s owing to Ireland’s historic loyalty to the literary arts or its prayers for better breeding by the artisan’s next generation, wordsmiths are cut a fair piece of reins to wander.
My drone has commenced to wobble. Am I the one droning?
Where shall my bride Judy and I spend a handful of nights?
If the Cashel Palace Hotel allows, would there be no better place? It would be our only time, a favor to ourselves in a season of goodbyes, heralding visits by other Taylors. A reprise of Corey’s 1996 visit, only now with his family. A first visit to Cashel by Erin and her family; we missed it on our 1991 family tour.
Surely, we’ll find handicap-accessible rooms at the Cashel Palace as age has reinvented our definition of step-dancing.
Are there particular rooms favoring dreamers? I write daily and will post online as Judy imagines the caps she’ll knit. Colleagues once gifted me a shirt proclaiming, “Lord of the Blogs.” I’ll be wanting to hobnob with the staff, fellow guests.
And we want to throw a grand party for all the Cashel Irish Taylors and kin. I gave up the drink more than 10 years ago and know there are many ways to create grand – perhaps a fiddler, bodhran player and a singer’s warm voice? Some Palace Hotel feast, with dessert, surprises. And a photographer, for sure. Can we find a Cashel teller of Taylor tales?
All the Taylors and relations together, wrapped around Ollie with us nearby. Josephine and her Jack, Mark, Paul and Donna, and families. Mary and Paddy. Paudie. Sonia. Tom and Jennifer Taylor’s, Paul and Marie Kenrick’s. And the kinsmen I’ve yet to commit to memory.
I’ll ask Paudie Taylor for his advice. I know he loves, lives, and breathes his Cashel town. Maybe he’d walk about with me, slowly and patiently, pointing out wonders, worries and joys.
Paddy, Paudie and Tom could give me a tour of their farm, the grand horses that Tom showcases, with music, on Facebook.
We’ll want to meet the artists and handcrafters, the witty and the wise -- extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Maybe we’d wrap up the bouquet with Judy joining Ollie and the ladies, perhaps invading a yarn shop. Judy will treat everyone to a fine cup of lunch, forever deleting the memory of a 2005 meal – gosh, 20 years -- at a burn-tourists-at-the-stake Cashel eatery called Ryan’s Daughter. I’m sure the ladies would have a monumental craic.
We’ll need lucky charms, or luck and charm, to birth all this. But now a night’s mist is lapping at my drone’s wheels, encouraging my departure.
I’ll see you again on the morrow, dear family, dreaming at the kitchen window, coffee cold but I’ll be glowing, hugging you and my Cashel memories close from afar. Merry Christmas, God bless and love you!
John G. Taylor is a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA.