In the middle of nowhere…

Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin
My father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,
His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,
The rexine seat of red leatherette,
And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.

This is the beginning of the Irish poet’s Paul Durcan poem “Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949“. Pat heard it this morning, or a reference to it, on the radio. She told me about it and how it reminded her of me about to bring builder’s supplies, cement, tiles, to this really really really run down stone cottage we had bought (after Pádraig had spotted it in ‘Buy and Sell’ pre-internet time, remember pre-internet time?), lost on a bit of soaking wet land in the middle of lovely Leitrim. It was after work, in the winter, it was raining and dark, and Pádraig decided that he wanted to come with me. When we had passed all the towns and villages, Mullingar, Edgeworthtown, Drumlish, and Lake Keeldra (affectionately known as Cloone Swimming Pool), when there were no more villages left, just a very bad, very narrow, very dark, and very wet country road, when the bottom of the completely overloaded car hit the road hard each time I had missed to spot a pothole (and there seemed to be millions of them), I remember that I heard this voice of young Pádraig beside me, asking:

“Papa, is this the middle of nowhere?”

It was.

Today, his nurse told us that his colleague had told him that Pádraig during the morning being-washed-routine had lifted his right arm over to the left arm, had scratched himself, and had moved the right arm back to its original position beside his body in the bed. Had we seen this before? – No, we had not. But here is to another first!

How good it is to hear about good, exciting progress like that. Not to hear about, for a change, another step back, being put on panic station, making you feel like as if you were, right in the middle of the city of Hamburg, moving through the middle of nowhere, with just a yellow moon peering through the window.