Our taxi driver was a riot.
“Happy 4th of July!” he said brightly.
“Yeah, thanks,” I replied. “About that, it’s a national holiday for us but not here in Killarney. Why are there American flags everywhere and what’s the deal with those cheesy statues of Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty?”
“Aye, that would be called licking arse!”
Carolann and I howled with laughter.
“We love American dollars,” he explained, “but we also like the fact that you kicked the feckin’ Brits out of your country. We did too, but it took us 800 years.”
The guy should have been doing standup, not driving a taxi. I told him that but he brushed it aside. He was just having fun and glad that we were, too.
Home from Ireland and Scotland, I can’t get the places we went and the people we met out of my mind. The images of the countryside and ancient cities are everything you imagine but even more glorious.
The people are delightful.
I know, I know – we’re tourists. They work at being nice to us, they kiss arse. But in watching the Irish and Scots interact with each other I love the fact that these hardworking, fiercely loyal family people are steadfast; they have many hundreds of years of common history and culture. They treat each other, and us, with the loving respect of kinship. They know who they are.
I envy them.
In fact, that’s why the merchants of Amador City, California, years ago began selling copies of their iconic Pig Turd Alley sign, hoping that tourists would stop stealing the actual sign. That must have worked. Carolann and I bought one.
