Eshtine

A Christmas story

This hapened while I was in Ireland a few years back, a trip I took on the off-chance that the world would come to an end.
It was 1999. It is of course possible any year, any moment of any day, for the world to end, but somehow it seems more likely for such a thing to occur when there's a bunch of zeroes at the tail of a date. So I asked myself--what's the one thing I want to do before the meteor hits? And the answer came back--go to Ireland. So I did.
I went backpacking, stayed in youth hostels, visited hill forts, sang songs in a Donegal pub. But what I seemed to do the most was pay too much for transportation. I was forever buying roundtrip bus tickets without ever taking the return trip or getting single rides when I should have gotten long-term passes, that sort of thing.
So that's why I tried to be dishonest.

I was on the bus back from Lough Derg, St. Patrick's Purgatory. This is a very unusual place--an island popular for its penitential retreats. You wouldn't think a penitential retreat would be a popular thing to do, but it is. Thousands of people go every year to fast for three days, walk around barefoot, and then cap off their stay with a 24-hour prayer vigil. And it's not a sackcloth-and-ashes type of crowd, but folk from every walk of life--one girl who looked about my age told me she'd gone one year, thought she was nuts for going, then found herself going back the following year.
So anyway. I was Little Miss Irish Pilgrim, so I went to Lough Derg. There's something charming about seeing everyone in dresses or jeans or nice pants--and bare feet. And it was fascinating to whisper the subsribed set of prayers while turning circles around stones or while standing at the water's edge--knowing that this has been done for years and years, most likely with the prayers addressed to rather different deities first. All very nice, but I didn't think it was all that life-changing.
I'd boarded the bus for Lough Derg in some town whose name I can't remember, and I had a return ticket, a roundtrip ticket. But when we got to that town I decided to stay on the bus. I felt justified in this decision because, as I said before, I'd given a lot of extra money to Bus Eireann at that point.
Unfortunately, 1.) I'm really bad at lying and 2.) I had the same driver that I'd had on the way to Lough Derg. He recognized me and remembered where I'd boarded the bus. But he didn't say anything until I tried to disembark in the town further down the road.
"You had a return fare for-- (that town whose name I can't remember)", he told me.
I acted like the confused American that didn't understand the fares. He didn't buy it. I offered to make up the difference. He wouldn't take my money. He just shook his head at me. "How could you try to defraud the company after going to Lough Derg?!"
A lecture! He chewed me out, up and down. He dropped me off in that new town and I walked the streets and felt my cheeks burn and the corners of my eyes sting 'cause it was all so humiliating. I'd gotten myself all nice'n'penitential on an island in some Irish lake, I'd done all the walking barefoot, fasting, I'd gone to confession--and here I was not twenty minutes removed from the experience, and I'd told a baldfaced lie. I'd hoped the sheen could last a little longer than that! What--did I have to go to confession again?
And that's when I got startled by--well, I don't really know how to describe it. Something quiet enough that I probably never would have heard it had I not been three days around nothing but rocks and waves and bare feet. An idea that I suppose I knew on general principle, though apparently I didn't believe in it enough to let it influence my actions. A voice not like the clatter of thoughts I'm always hearing, so sudden and surprising I stopped right there on the sidewalk:
"Yeah, you mess up. I love you anyway."
The matter-of-factness is what got to me, what still gets to me years later; I can and do forget about it all the time but when I do remember--it's like the only thing that has ever happened to me that counts.
And that's what makes this a Christmas story--it was the best gift I've ever gotten. I hope you like it.