It only takes a minute to be discovered. It could be our insistence on yellow mustard on our burgers. Maybe it's the printed t-shirts we wear (it's quite unfashionable out here for one's t-shirt to have anything to say), or maybe it's some of the things that come out of our mouths,

"Oh, dude! My cell phone's back at the apartment!*"

You can feel it coming:

"Ah, sure you're not from Athlone, are ye?" Followed quickly by, "Are ye on holidays here?"

To which we have a ready reply, "No, we've just moved out here. We're from just down the road . . . and across the water." The ensuing conversation usually leads to a friendly inquiry about what we think of Athlone and a prediction of the number of months we'll "last." (Amusingly enough, the predictions are usually for less time than we've already been out here.) Of course, now we are getting to know folks and are more likely to be greeted with a friendly wag of the head** than a curious look. We're even being recognized around town as "that band from San Francisco . . . have you heard your woman sing?"

It's strange for us to think back to our arrival last November. The months before the wedding are a blur, our trip round the world is a dream . . . it feels like we're only waking up now to discover ourselves miraculously transported to a charming little riverside town in Ireland. Did we actually get married, travel round the world and move to Ireland?

Somebody pinch me. (ouch!)

So it was mid-October last year when we bought our first international ONE-WAY tickets (that's scary, try it sometime) and arrived in London on our good friend Nancy's front stoop. She took us in, fed us, gave us use of her living room futon and showed us where the local internet cafe was. We did our best to help her celebrate Halloween in proper American style and she acted as our personal cheering section during the first part of our struggle to get a life started. It took a few weeks . . . searching on the web, the frustration of chasing dissapointing "virtual" leads . . . for us to finally figure out that if we wanted to be in Ireland, we should just go to Ireland; Irish opportunities, if there were any, were bound to be found in person or not at all. So we rang a few Dublin recruitment agencies to make interview appointments, bid a reluctant farewell to Nancy and we were off!

Our cousin Eammon picked us up at Dublin airport and we hit the streets with our best feet forward: shiny re-vamped resumes (that's a "C.V." to you, Mr & Mrs America), haircuts and interview clothes in the latest "euro" style . . . and four fistfulls of crossed fingers. But luck wasn't forthcoming. We were told repeatedly that the end of the year wasn't a good time to be looking for work, we were better off trying again in January.

It only took a few days to get disillusioned with Dublin.

We shed the cold, the crowds and bustle to take our good friends Jackie and Mark up on their invitation to stay with them in the Irish midlands. Their town, Athlone, is located at the geographical equivilent of Ireland's bellybutton. They had just finished building a house outside of town and pointed out that Athlone's central location offered easy access to anywhere in Ireland we might need to go for interviews. We were assured that their new place had plenty of extra bedrooms and our company would put "a bit of life into the new place."

As it turned out, it was more than just a "bit" of life we had in store for us. On the bus trip out of Dublin Mark rang our cell ("mobile") and asked if Seán had brought his guitar? He had? Well, would we be interested in playing a show that night? If we had a guitar, Mark had all the other necessary equipment . . . and there was €175 for just two hours of work, if we wanted it. Thus it came to pass on our first night in Ireland we ended eight months of unemployment by playing music. We've been singing for our supper ever since . . . but more on that later.

Almost a month went by with our incredible hosts. It was all a jumble of nights filled with music and days filled with the exhausting search for employment. There were innumerable bus trips out to Galway and Dublin for job interviews. Eventually we found ourselves growing rather frustrated, not just with the job search, but with all the uncertainty. Each day offered new opportunities at various corners of the island . . . Cork, Galway, Donegal, Dublin . . . WHERE were we going to call home? We had now been on the road for eight months and the appeal of living out of our backpacks was wearing thin. To top it off, Christmas was fast approaching and your favorite newlyweds were desparately longing to have a place of their own to share their first Christmas together.

Just when it seemed most unlikely, Mark told Seán about a little stone cottage he discovered outside of town that could be rented on a weekly basis. Seán moved quickly, stocking the pantries and decorating the place for Christmas (complete with tree!) without telling his wife. Jackie drove Kim out to the cottage that evening, telling her they were just going to meet one of her friends. Kim came through the door and . . . "Seán??! What are YOU doing here? Where's Jackie's friend? Who's house is this? . . . oh my gosh . . ."

The look on Kim's face at that moment was priceless. For that matter, so was the look on Seán's face when he tasted the honey-glazed duck his wife cooked for Christmas dinner a few nights later. So, the cottage lacked central heating and hot running water, but it wasn't anything a few glasses of eggnog in front of the portable heater couldn't solve. Unfortunately for them, Kim's folks came to visit at this point and got to enjoy our little icebox of a cabin during the coldest winter the midlands had seen in two decades. Poor Sue would spend the mornings wrapped in blankets, dancing in front of the little heater. Her husband, on the other hand, would emerge from the bedroom, scrape a bit of the ice from the inside of the cabin windows before grabing a hot cup of tea and heading outside (in just a t-shirt) mumbling something about it not being all that cold.

Fate has a funny way of working things out. We had come to Athlone because it offered us easy access to everywhere else, but in spite of our intentions to live elsewhere we found ourselves growing to like the place for its own charming aspects. When Lucia, the manager of the local internet cafe, noticed we were there almost twenty-four hours a day she started asking us to watch the till when she needed to pop out for a few things. We should have seen it coming: in a month's time, not only had we found ourselves covering all the extra shifts at the shop, but we had been enrolled in a european technology-training certification course and found ourselves handling all the web and design work that came through. It hasn't been a small amount of work. In fact, it's been enough that the incorporation of Lightholder Productions, Ltd is underway.

In the meantime, we had moved out of our countryside icebox and into a modern flat located in the city center. A block from the river and literally in the shadow of Athlone castle, it didn't hurt the charm of our surroundings that the Guinness book of World records had certified the pub next door as the oldest pub in Ireland. It's also a sweet bit of irony that the pub is named "Seán's Bar." Heheh.

Just a week after moving into the new place, Seán's parents came to visit. His mother appreciated the 24-hour adoration chapel next door, as well as the close proximity of the cathedral just down the street. His dad (and everyone involved) appreciated the fact that Athlone is small enough that he could take off wandering and not get lost. Seán got to live his dream of walking with his dad through his father's childhood neighborhood in Dublin and Kim got the satisfaction of her mother-in-law asking for some of her recipes (a compliment to any wife's culinary technique).

It's only been a few weeks now since Seán's parents returned home. In that time, our work has begun propogating itself in the form of websites, business logo designs and local restaurant menus. On top of that, Kerbside (our band) has been playing at least once a week in local pubs. In the absence of his guitarist, Mark (of Mark and Jackie fame) has begun playing shows with us, giving our music the added aspects of three-part vocal harmony and instrumental breaks.

Sometimes the distances of today's world seem so small, what with jet planes and email messages whizzing around our heads the way they do. Sometimes it seems like we could stroll around the corner to that little Cambodian cafe with the geckos near the light fixtures, or jump in a jeep and find ourselves in Jones Meadows in a couple of hours. Who knows, those mighty bridges rising against the moonlight in St. Petersburg may have been just down the river from the San Francisco Bay Bridge and visible from the space needle in Auckland, New Zealand.

 

* * *

 

* The proper midlands way to say this would have been, "Ah feck! Me mobile's up in the flat!"

** See "speaking Irish"