Last spring, a friend of a friend asked me if I had watched the first season of the Netflix historical drama series, “House of Guinness.”
“Did you live near any of those places or settings?” he asked.
“Oh! Yes!” I said, raising my voice over the restaurant noise, not mentioning that some of the scenes had been filmed in the United Kingdom, not my native Ireland. I added, “As a kid, we used to ramble the grounds of that lakeside, thirteenth-century castle, eventually acquired by the Guinness family. It was in the next village from ours.”
He seemed impressed. What I didn’t tell this man was that I had only watched a few “House of Guinness” episodes, and that I prefer fiction over historical dramas.
I also didn’t reveal that, once, in the 1980s, as a final-year undergraduate student in Dublin, I had lived within eye view of—and downwind from—the Guinness brewery.
That college year, I wasn’t supposed to be living there, in that neighborhood that sat on the opposite side of the city from my small campus in a seaside, upmarket suburb.
There’s a backstory here, one I couldn’t share with someone in a clattery restaurant. That instigating backstory includes scenes that, in middle age, I would magic-wand delete from my life’s storyline, including one particular city afternoon before the start of the autumn term.
In my autumn memory scene, I’m a hippie-looking country kid stepping off a cross-country train, hoisting my rucksack on my back to traverse the Dublin streets toward an apartment house where I was to meet my three college friends. In our cheap, week-by-week rental, we four girls would rotate bed and floor space, scan the real estate advertisements, and divvy up the landlord calls until we found that year’s perfect flat share.
I found that apartment house. The hall and stairway reeked of mildew. Up there, behind a numbered door, I could hear how the summer catch-up had already started.
Inside that studio flat, I set down my rucksack to join the catch-up and fun. One girl interrupted to say that they had something to tell me. The others looked and nodded along as she announced that, contrary to our spring-term plans, I was off their roommate list.
“But … but …why?”
I was untidy. I often asked to borrow their clothes and spending money. When one girl’s mum sent her goodie parcels, I ate too much from those home-baked treats.
The list continued and concluded with, “Look, you’re just not like us.”
In another deletable memory scene, I’m back out on that city street, my body angled away from all the other pedestrians, because I just couldn’t let strangers see me sob.
You’re. Not. Like. Us. As I walked, those words, this fact that I had known but buried, replayed inside my head.
I realized I wasn’t just weeping over friend rejection. I was also mourning the death—just over a month prior—of my live-in grandma.
In our village and parish, everybody knew my grandmother. But at almost 20 years old, how had I not known that, Catholic and graveside rituals aside, that empty fireside armchair would become her most poignant and painful memorial? Why hadn’t I prepared myself for the sight of her black prayer bag still sitting there, in that big kitchen cupboard, unopened? Who knew that one grief or loss will hitch a ride with another, until we cannot tell the old (bereavement) from the new (friend ousting)? And which grief was making me weep so hard now, in a public street?
That evening, through a family connection, I found and visited a second apartment house. This smaller house sat on a wide connector road in southwest Dublin, right behind the Guinness brewery. By the time I rang that downstairs doorbell, I had stopped crying. Also, in that era when we couldn’t and didn’t let our parents know anything about our college lives, I had concocted a reason why I needed a temporary place to stay.
My host—I’ll call her Maria for the purposes of this piece—was also a rural-urban transplant who worked in the city and, luckily, had an extra single bed.
The college year began. I still hadn’t found a college-adjacent flat share. So Maria asked if I wanted to just stay on and share the space and rent.
Weekday mornings, I clamored down two flights of stairs to power walk (45 minutes) to the 46A, a cross-city, double-decker bus that would drop me off 10 minutes from college. From that bus stop, I ran-walked to that small campus with its landscaped lawns and copper beech trees.
Evenings, I reversed my bus-walk journey, where the whiff of brewing beer and that line of factory workers (the makers of Guinness and Player Wills Cigarettes) at the city bus stop signaled that I was finally or almost home.
On Thursday paydays, these bus-stop folks clutched their respective employee benefit goodies—a six-pack of Guinness stout (men) and a carton of Player’s cigarettes (women).
Closer to my new home stood a corner shop, the rendezvous for a group of neighborhood women, some still in their kitchen aprons. As I passed one day, one of those women interrupted the friend chatter to look straight at me and ask, “Ah. How you doing there, Love? You doing OK? Yeah?”
“Doing grand, thanks,” I answered, trying to conceal my rural accent.
And my lie. I wasn’t “doing grand.” Not yet.
But I was starting to not miss that student lounge (where the friends acted like nothing had happened) and those chattery evening suppers in the college cafeteria.
On Friday afternoons, Maria went straight from her job to the train station to travel west to her boyfriend or her family.
Most of the downstairs tenants left, too. So as my footsteps creak-creaked up two flights of stairs, for the first time in my life, I was completely alone.
Growing up in a three-generation household, it was hard to understand the very concept of solitude. Also, from an early age, I knew that the smiley, chattery child was better than the silent, surly version, and the best way to diffuse intergenerational tensions was to tell a tale or make them laugh.
Silly me. I had assumed that this rural raconteuring, this playing to an audience, would be my ticket into the college friend groups. And, like many working-class students, I had believed that college was the way out and up. But that year, I learned that it’s not always the way “in.”
Now, my Saturday and Sunday mornings were a late, silent breakfast and a long stint at that tiny kitchen table with my library books and writing journal.
Saturday afternoons, I walked to Dublin’s famous inner-city street markets. There, the women street vendors, known for their loud, quick-witted banter, could and did out-curse my corner-shop women. In those streets and at those markets, I learned things rarely taught in college lecture halls, including how to watch and haggle for enough food for next week’s home-cooked suppers.
Am I wrong to include this story in my midlife “please delete” list? Can any personal evolution happen without being nudged or transplanted into a place or space where the change can happen?
Looking back through those youthful memory snapshots, I just know this: As I peeled and chopped and simmered my Saturday food bargains, I was feeling the sacredness of just being there, alone and staring out at those Guinness chimneys against the night sky.