The Song in My Pocket

The son didn't sing. His father did that, guitar across his knee in the back room of M. Doyle's in Graiguenamanagh, and every time the father reached the end of a line and dropped his voice to take a breath, the son lifted a harmonica and filled the space before the next line could start. They hardly looked at each other. They didn't need to. That kind of timing isn't rehearsed so much as grown into, and I'd guess the two of them had been growing into it for a lot of years.

The morning's gale had blown itself out, and the roads outside were still mud. Inside, Jim Morrison looked down from the wall, surrounded by album covers and paintings of American rock stars from the sixties and seventies, the Mamas and the Papas somewhere over the door, and mixed in among them a few Banksy posters that made me like the room a good deal more. I had been the third person through the door. And I had a song in my pocket that I had not yet decided whether to read. I almost wasn't there at all. The invitation came on Friday, from a stranger, over espresso and  pumpkin pie. 

Joyce's in Borris, is a pub in the evenings. A morning or two a week, Thursdays and Fridays I think, it belongs to a baker who, a few years back, asked if he could rent the empty room before the taps opened. I like him already and I've never met him. Somebody looked at a room that sat idle half of every day and asked a simple question, and now the space serves as baked goods pickup and a bistro and a morning watering hole all at once, so full on a Friday that strangers ask to share your table and nobody thinks twice about saying yes. 

I got there a few minutes before nine and there was already a line, so I walked across the street to the outdoor market and asked around for rosemary, thyme, and a few other herbs. It's late September, I knew it was a longshot as it was out of season. Nobody had a thing, and a couple of them looked at me like I'd asked for strawberries in a snowbank. Back in line at Joyce's, I ordered a double espresso, a rye brownie, two pecan something-or-others, and a slice of pumpkin pie, on the theory that it would last me most of the week. The theory is likely optimistic.

Martin, a friend I'd been introduced to the week before, came in a few people behind me, and we talked a long while about him and his wife Kathy what they were doing with their art. When the tables ran out, the strangers started sitting down. Tim, a yoga instructor. David, who told me he was in the motor car industry, and a friend of his whose name I have already lost. After an hour and a half Martin had to go. I stayed.

That's when David told me that if I was really serious about moving to Ireland, I shouldn't buy a house. Buy a houseboat in America and ship it over. Substantially cheaper, he said. Live on the water in Graiguenamanagh, and when you're not living on it, rent it out.

I sat there with my fork in the pie and felt something in my chest turn over. Some of you have been reading my stuff long enough to know the phrase I carry around: don't die without a dock. It's shorthand for a lifetime of wanting a small piece of ground on a river or a lake, a wanting that started on fourteen acres along Nebraska's Dismal River when I was seven years old and has never once let go of me. I have tried to buy land on water for most of my adult life. I have run those numbers so many ways they've worn a groove. And a boat captain I had known for about an hour, a man who kayaks this river and could tell me the best places to put in, slid a version across the table I had never considered. Not the dock. The boat that ties up to it. I kicked myself a little for not thinking of it on my own. I have his number written on a card, and I'll be doing some research.

Not long after, two women asked if they could sit with us. Lulu lives around Borris. Her friend was visiting from Brunswick, Maine, and I had to laugh, because Brunswick is where the military sent me for survival training, a long time and a whole different life ago. That is not a sentence I ever expected to say over pumpkin pie in Ireland. Before they left, they told me about a poetry reading Sunday afternoon at M. Doyle's and said I should come. I said I might. I didn't know if I'd have anything to bring.

On my way out I passed the last table and found Mary and another friend, Brigid,  I'd met through the Borris lace makers. They bought me a coffee, and I sat back down. They sent me across the street to a man who'd won a world title for his cheddar. He was out of cheddar. I came back with a smoked gouda, and we ate a bit of my cheese and their olives, the kind with a clove of garlic tucked in the middle, and I walked out a little after quarter past twelve, having come in for a coffee at nine. 

Saturday I needed tools.

The course I'm currently building had gotten big enough that it wanted paper: a yellow legal pad, a red pen, a stack of sticky notes, the way I've always worked when something needs sorting out. There was no office supply shop in the village of Borris, so I drove to Muine Bheag, or Bagenalstown, about fifteen minutes away. The office supply shop there was closed. A man at a little newsstand that also pours coffee sent me four or five blocks down to a very nice department store, which by American standards would fit in the shoe section of a mall. Bigger is not better. It had a little of nearly everything, three of this and five of that, a short shelf of art supplies, all of it chosen by somebody who knows exactly who comes through the door.

I got my pad and my pen and my stickies, and a small blue hardcover notebook for one euro fifty that would cost eight or ten dollars at home. It was there that a young lady told me, "Mind yourself, love." I've been here long enough to know that "grand" doesn't mean grand, not the way a Yank means it. I wrote a whole song about that one. "Mind yourself" is the next one I'm learning.

Here, to mind something is to look after it. You mind the children. You mind the shop while somebody runs an errand. What I'm doing in Clasheen, an Irish person would call minding the house, and minding Pip. So "mind yourself" isn't a warning to watch your step. It's closer to "look after yourself the way you'd look after something you care about." The "love" on the end is simply how people talk here, handed out to the postman and the man buying a notepad alike. Put together, it's a small piece of care given to a stranger on his way out the door. I carried the notebook out like I'd gotten away with something, and the phrase along with it.

Sunday I woke to rain, and then to more than rain. Gale force winds, I learned later. I did what any sensible man alone in a house does in a storm: I cooked every piece of meat I had before any of it could turn. Four pork chops, four lamb chops, and a few rashers of what the Irish call bacon, which, in all fairness to my homeland, is far better than ours. Wide, fat left on, closer to a thin chop than a strip. By eleven the wind had blown itself out. By twenty past, the kitchen smelled like Sunday dinner for six, and I was standing at the window deciding whether a poetry reading was worth the mud roads. It was.

I walked Pip and got in the car. The GPS picked a route I haven't forgiven it for, a single-track road with more curve than straight, pretty in the way things are pretty when you can't take your eyes off the road long enough to look. I couldn't find the place and had to message Lulu, a little embarrassed. The back room, she said. Doyle's on Main Street, Graiguenamanagh, near Duiske Abbey. The names alone have a bit of poetry in them.

Lulu had brought flapjacks and chocolate tiffin. A flapjack in Ireland isn't a pancake. It's an oat bar, something like a homemade granola bar cut into squares. Tiffin is a no-bake cross between a chocolate bar, a biscuit cake and a refrigerator cake, dense and crunchy and fudgy all at once. Which is how I came to be sitting there, tiffin in hand, watching a son fill his father's breaths with a harmonica.

My grandfather carved whistles and flutes for us kids out of cattail, willow and elderberry. The first music I ever made came out of something he made with his hands. Grandpa Nate played the harmonica, too, and his myna bird had a musical contribution of its own, letting fly a well-chosen expletive on occasion, most often when Father Mike was over for coffee. He was no musician, not in any way he would have claimed. He just knew that a hollow stem and a little patience could make a sound, and that a kid would keep blowing into it long after everyone else wanted quiet. Watching those two, I thought about him, and about my mother playing guitar when I was young. Music handed down by hand, from one set of fingers to the next, the way it has gone for as long as there has been music.

Then the son read one of his own poems, and it was about AI. The heart of it, as near as I can remember, was that what a machine makes is not music. I wish I'd recorded it. It was good. And there I sat with "You're Grand" in my pocket. I wrote the words as a poem during my first ten days here, about asking a man how he was doing and hearing "Ah, I'm grand," and answering "I'm fantastic!" the way only a Yank could. Then I typed those lyrics into Suno, picked my custom style, and let a machine make the music. It's the song that goes with this week's post.
I didn't read it. It was longer than anything anyone read that day, and it wasn't the same kind of thing. Those are true reasons. But I'll be honest: after that poem, with that father and son a few chairs away, I was glad to have them.
I thought about it the whole drive home, which I took the other way, the way I'll stick with from now on, toward Borris and right at the cemetery by the sports field.

He isn't wrong about what's missing. The heart of a song is the failing. It's the scratching out, the verse that won't sit right, the line you cross through three times on a yellow pad or a napkin until it finally tells the truth. It's a hollow stem that squeaks for a week before it ever whistles. Typing a style into a box skips all of that for the music, and I felt that absence sitting a few chairs from two men who had clearly failed their way into their songs together. To me the lyrics and the music are two different things. Often times scratched together, but for me, many times not. Sometimes the tune comes first and the lyrics dont come until later, sometimes never. Then other times the lyrics come crashing out in search of a tune.

You're Grand. Lyrics by TO music and production is Suno.

The way I typically write songs, articles, courses or anything else. Sticky notes and a yellow legal pad.

But can I say it isn't music? I can't. I can't say it isn't art, either. What people make with AI can be good or bad, lazy or honest, and that's worth arguing about. Whether it counts is a different question, and I think it does.
I sit somewhere in the middle of the AI debate. I find it a useful tool when it's the right tool. Most often I write first with a yellow pad and a red pen. I'm neurodivergent, and something about the tactile quality of writing that way suits me. After that, AI is a much quicker way to edit, especially if you're one who struggles with grammar. AI is my grammar coach, for sure. It's the same on the art side. I much prefer analog to digital, but in a lot of cases a blend makes the most sense.

What I won't defend is how these tools came to be. They learned on other people's music without asking, and that's wrong. I'll say it plainly. I also know we're past putting that genie back in the bottle. So I hold both. I use the thing, and I don't pretend it came from nowhere. The words were mine, though. They started on paper. On Saturday I drove fifteen minutes and walked five blocks for a yellow legal pad, and no machine does that part for me. I don't want it to.

That evening I talked to Allison, and then to my parents, who have been making a life together for nearly seventy years. Then I wrote some notes, read back through some journals, and listened to the sounds outside my window as the countryside bedded down for the night.

Mind yourself, love. I'm learning the language one grand at a time.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio