Remembering Dublin

Last December, I went to Dublin for a three-week "vacation."  It's not exactly a vacation because I just couldn't imagine myself, doing nothing for 21 days.  But, truth be told, it was the best three weeks of my life since I arrived in Europe.
I arrived to a community that has experienced a bit of a storm lately and I'm just lucky to be there during the quell, on a sort of ceasefire that accorded me a bit of a space to put myself in.  Actually, every member is just nice and lovable in own way, with ticks and a charming quirkiness or two, enough to keep them interesting but not too much to scare me away from them.  It's a bit like living in a sitcom, really, where each has a personality that isn't at all one-note and is downright punchline worthy.  My favorite is of course, Father Raphael which is in many ways my best friend in Europe. He's the most Irish person you'll ever meet in Dublin, but at the same time, he's never a stereotype Irish.  At all our travels, he sang me nationalistic songs that always involved a story of a very specific woman, which I find very fascinating because, embarrassingly, the only traditional irish song I know is Cockles and Mussels, which I only learned later to be a song about a prostitute. We went to pubs, the proper Irish ones and was introduced to hot toddies and dark beer.
At other times, when Fr. Raphael couldn't accompany me, I never ran out of people to help me go around. Thanks to Renoir, Ben and Mary, I was able to go to Duleek, to Galway, to Drogheda....  With them, I scoured museums and parks and churches and theaters.  We watched the traditional Christmas concert of Handel's Messiah and were among those who stood up while the choir sang the composer's trademark Halleluiah. I walked the length of the river Liffey.  I hang out with Filipinos, too, who, despite the years of staying in Dublin have stayed Filipino by heart.  In fact, on my last night, I was with them till dawn, belting out Pinoy standards on karaoke machine.  But what marked me well was the spiritual side of my vacation.  For the first time, since I arrived in Europe, I felt truly a priest.   I celebrated Mass (the new translation which really sounded unelegant, if my opinion matters) and heard confession and prayed and shared tea with the local Catholics, like a true pastor would.  I guess it helped that I can speak a bit of English.
Truth be told, Dublin haunts me even until these days.  The seedy pubs, the crumbling monasteries, the moldy tombstones, the ubiquitous Celtic filigrees, the medieval melange with the cosmopolitan feel of the city, the charming accent and the ready smile of its people.  But most importantly, the Irish Catholic faith, a faith that knows how to forgive and to ask forgiveness, a faith that is alive and well and is practiced in every aspect of life, a faith that is homegrown but well-informed and well-worn by countless prayers of novenas.  It suffice to say that when I went there, a place which is way much nearer to the North Pole than La Mure, I have never been more warm, I have never been more blest, I have never been more at home than any other place in Europe.


Nursing a mug of the dark brew,
I am reminded by the West Liffey wind
of how I traded hops and malt
with Mass bread and wine.
I held much of my dignity, however,
announcing with a borrowed accent,
my love for all things green and medieval,
only to be reminded that a year ago,
the closest I can get to Dublin experience
is buying a bar of Irish Spring.

About Bread

There are about seven bakeries in La Mure.  For a village of a population of 4000, that's not too bad.  But if you consider other shops, you'll be surprised:  five pastry shops, three driving schools, 15 bars, three pizza takeouts, two decent restaurants, a barbershop, two florists, a greengrocer, four banks, two butcher-shops, two sporting goods store, six bookstores, a pharmacy and two tobacco-and-newspaper outlets.  The fact that there's almost as many bookshops as bakeries and bars are twice as many might make you rethink the priorities of this little commune.
Buying bread is one of the few reasons why would I dare go out on a street with at least ten centimetres of snow.  French people can't have a meal without their baguette.  A curious thing, baguette, which is an average size of bread to be consumed by three persons on a normal meal, baguette literally means a stick. The smaller version, ficelle, means a string, while the "family"-sized ones are called flute, which means, well, a flute.  The huge ones, the size of a body pillow are called boulot, roughly translates in English as "the works."
Curiously, bread here only lasts a day, not because they spoil easily but rather, they become rock-hard and uneatable if they are left exposed in air. They can become so dry and hard that you can seriously hurt someone if you hit him with a day-old baguette. (note to self: keep one by the door, for self-defense). Thus, bread has to be bought daily (now the idea of a daily bread makes sense!), freshly baked and carried home under one's armpit.  Which brings my compatriots here in France to call them pan de kilikili. Which brings me to another trivia.  Monay here in France is actually called brioche.  And brioches are eaten like desserts or snack.  In fact, in the expression, "Let them eat cake" wrongly attributed to Marie Antoinette, the cake in question is none other than our humble monay.
Baguette however have no Filipino equivalent and I don't think there will ever be a local version.   It's not the kind of bread that you spread coco jam on.  It's more like rice for French meals.  But the real purpose for baguettes is for wiping.  Yep, wiping.  A spoon rarely appears on a French table, and it is only used for soup.  So the bread is usually used to drain sauces on plates and then to wipe them clean afterwards.  If in my home country, wiping one's plate almost equates to being patay-gutom, here in France, a picked-clean plate after the meal is a must.  And the best tool for the job is a slice of a crusty baguette.
By now, I know which bakeries serve the best bread and which ones give out the crappy kind.  Each baguette roughly costs 80 cents (roughly 40php) and we consume about two and a half baguettes a day, so that means 3 euros worth of bread is eaten in my community daily.  I buy them usually at l'Anthracite, which is not a name you usually associate with freshly baked bread.  Anthracite is a rock-like but shiny kind of coal mined here in La Mure until the early 90s; it is so hard, it's almost like diamond.  One fist-sized rock can last a month, burning on a fireplace.  The bakeshop used to belong to my very good friend, Brigitte, until, in 2010, she decided to sell it to a younger couple.  They used to have a saleslady who was fired for regularly stealing from the cash register.  Ironically, the couple who bought the bakery re-hired this saleslady and Chantal is still there, everyday, smiling behind the cash register.



(while at the young priests' gathering, listening to Armand's rantings)

Huddled under the warm yellow light,
our eyes shone brighter at the background
of black coats and heavy air.
We broke barriers without lifting a finger
in declaring who are those at the margins
and that we owe them a welcome.
The unfortunate bottom line is that,
under this same yellow light,
we conveniently labelled him who hides
at the periphery's shadow.