MY FATHER HATED GOLF. He looked down on hobbies of all kinds.
He was a doctor during the day and a bringer of my Italian immigrant
mother to discount clothing stores at night. She didn’t drive, so my
father aired her out in the evenings. He lived to make her happy. And
me as well. So when he suddenly died, we were leveled. For nearly
two years my mother and I smoked cigarettes and did not smile.
I flew to Ireland to write about golf, knowing nothing of the game.
My colleagues spoke of the high holy grounds—Ballybunion and
Lahinch and Portmarnock. Unlike those men I had no space in my
life for hobbies. I had only my mother to drive around, a job to mind-
lessly attend, and slippers to leave by my father’s bedside in the
event that he would one day need them again.
After getting into my tiny rental car, I began the long drive to
Belmullet, a little village on a peninsula in the northwest. The
greens on either side of the road were the limes and emeralds of
fairy tales, of hobbit homes and swearing. As in, Holy fuck, this is
fucking gorgeous. I had never driven on the opposite side of the
road or been through a roundabout. In several quiet hamlets I likely
prompted more honks than had been heard in a decade.
I arrived in Belmullet, with its pastel houses and its quiet, rocky
beach. Along the roads I saw few people, but the ones I did see were
all smiling. I was the only guest at the inn where I’d booked a bare
room, so the innkeeper, a garrulous woman in a denim apron, had
time to watch me try to jam my too-large suitcase through the door.
The next day I went to see the course, Carne Golf Links. This
place had been built by men who had been laid off from their
machine-operator jobs. Most had never played the game in their
lives, which lent Carne an ungolfish, working-man air. And yet I am
positive the rugged dune-scape they molded above the wild white
Atlantic is the best golf course in the whole world.
At night the builders drank Guinness and played darts in a place
called McDonnell’s Bar & Undertakers. It was not an ironic name.
The bar was also the site of the McDonnell family’s undertaking
business. If a patron dropped dead from over-imbibing, his body
needn’t travel very far.
The owners let me bartend, sling tall pints across the wood to the
men. I laughed while I listened, spilling Guinness, and they all
thought I was a cheerful, beer-ignorant American. But the father of
one of these men sniffed it on me—the gaping wound of a loss.
He had a long white beard and extraordinarily warm eyes. The
younger men joked that he would soon make his way to the otherside of the establishment. He wasn’t as jolly as the rest, and he
looked very tired, but he was the most present person in the room.
In the months before the trip, I’d been exploring the afterlife. I
couldn’t accept my father’s death. Besides the slippers by the
bedside, I had also not tossed his drugstore cologne, his roll-on
deodorant. I was paying psychics to tell me I would see him again.
My last night in Belmullet, I had to cut through a great fog to get to
the light of the welcoming pub. Inside, the old wizard took my
hand. He looked deeply into my eyes, and I began to cry.
“Young lady,” he said. “You don’t know shite about golf or
Guinness.”
“I know,” I said.
“But it’s nice to have ye here.”
“Thank you.”
“And ye know why it’s nice?”
I shook my head.
“Because none of the arseholes in here know a thing about loss.
There’s a man making up the icy faces of our dearly departed, but he
doesn’t know a thing about what yer feeling. Who was it?”
“My father,” I said.
“Was he a good man?”
“The best,” I said. “I can’t accept that he’s gone.”
The wizard shrugged. “So why should ye?”
“Everyone says I have to.”
“Everyone is an eejit. Look around at the eejits in here. Well-
meaning? Sure. But you goin’ ta take advice from eejits who drink
with the dead?”
I shook my head again. The bartender brought him a beer, and
the old man passed it to me without looking.
“You’ll see him again,” the wizard said quietly. “Who knows how
he might come back? For fuck’s sake, he might be in this bar right
now, right under yer very nose.”
I looked around, trying to spot someone who might be looking at
me the way a father looks at a daughter.
Smiling, the old man rose and excused himself. I waited a while
for him to return until I remembered there was a back exit into the
foggy alleys of a town where no one was mean. Eventually one of
the builders asked me to play a game of darts, and I asked him about
laying sod for the course.
I was leaving the next morning and knew I wouldn’t see the old
man again. But he’d given me something stunning in the short time
I’d known him—the freedom to keep grieving. So what that my
family, my therapist, my friends said I had to get over it? That I was
an eejit for leaving my father’s car chamois on the step of the
garage, exactly where he’d left it? So what? That nice old man said
“so what?” to all of that, and I started taking my mom to those
discount stores in my father’s car, and we began to have something
of a fine time, once again.The Irishman
At a pub in County Mayo,Lisa Taddeo receives the kindof gift only a stranger can give