I was in a bookshop on Grafton Street recently when a man from Co Fermanagh whispered in my ear.
“My mother never hugged me in her life,” he confided.
“That’s terrible,” I replied.
“It is,” he agreed, “but you see, there was nine of us, and not much time for hugging in those days. Although, when she was dying, I leaned over the bed and tried to tell her how much I loved her, because the nurse said that the hearing is the last sense to close down. I told her she was a good mother and that we were all grateful to her. And do you know what happened next?”
I said I didn’t.
“She spoke,” he said. “She spoke my name. ‘Martin,’ she said, ‘would you ever stop talking?’ And those were her last words.”
Other customers were staring at us.
“What do you make of that?”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “My generation wasn’t cuddled or hugged all the time, but it doesn’t mean we weren’t loved.”
The male barber
Later that day I had my hair cut by a barber at Bus Áras as I waited for the Cavan bus. I enjoy having my hair cut by women. I like the sensation of their combs and their fingers massaging my scalp, and I usually avoid male barbers.
But the offer in Bus Áras was good value at €10, and the dark-haired barber seemed like a very kind person. He asked me if I would like the hairs in my ears cut and my eyebrows trimmed. I said, ‘Go ahead’, although it felt a bit intimate. When I was leaving, I thanked him. He just said, “No problem.”
Everyone in Ireland says “no problem” if you ask them anything. When I asked a man in the queue what time the Cavan bus pulled out, he said “5pm”. I thanked him, and he said, “No problem”.
I was dozing on the bus and didn’t notice a slim woman in jeans and a grey blouse across the aisle until she turned to me and say, “Hay-low,” in an American drawl. Her nut-brown eyes were bursting through round-rimmed spectacles as big as windowpanes.
“Oh dear God,” I said, “it’s Joan Baez.” And she laughed, because of course it wasn’t Joan Baez, but she had wonderfully delicate skin for a person in her late 60s and her hair was loose and long, and she looked like Joan Baez.
At least that’s what I told her when we first met in July at an international conference on AVP in Maynooth. AVP stands for Alternatives to Violence Project. It’s a movement that began with Quakers but now exists all over the world, in prisons and conflict zones, offering people alternatives to violence as a method of communication.
How I met Joan Baez
I was registering for the conference at a long table inside the main entrance of the seminary. The woman who looked like Joan Baez was wearing a cardigan. She ticked my name on a list and gave me a welcome pack.
“If you follow the signs along the cloister,” she said, “you’ll find the bedrooms.”
“I don’t need to follow any signs around here,” I said, smiling. “I spent my youth in this seminary, wandering around cloisters decked with photographs of dead clerics.”
So we became friends for the week of the conference, and she explained a lot to me about AVP, and about the workshops they offer to communities torn asunder by war. But it was her skin that interested me.
I refused to accept that she was 65. She said it was goat’s milk that kept her looking so good.
I told her that I have a friend who drinks lashings of goat’s milk every day but it does nothing for his skin. He looks like an old coconut. I find him sometimes at the other side of the ditch when I go to west Cavan. He is an unlettered man who never went to school and whose conversation is riddled with archaic idioms of the 19th century.
On the bus to Cavan, the woman who looked like Joan Baez crossed the aisle and sat beside me. And when the conversation petered out, she leaned her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. It amazed me that someone I had met only once before seemed to have become such a close friend.
"You don't mind if I lean on you a bit?" she asked, smiling. "No problem," I replied as I imagined her singing Amazing Grace in my head, all the way to Cavan town.