Notes from Chapel Hill

Teaching in Galway—May 28th, 2023

Every day, as I walk my 7yo son to school, I memorize what he’s wearing. “Camp Vibes” t-shirt, light blue with red basketball shorts. White t-shirt, stained, with black basketball shorts. Radiohead hoodie (seriously, it’s awesome) with blue basketball shorts. Every day I walk him to school and every day I do this.

Other parents say they do the same for the same reason.

 So we can identify their bodies.

I’m thinking of this as I teach in a classroom with an entire wall made of glass that looks out on to the campus of the University of Galway.

Last year, I mentioned it to my students. “We could never have this in America. There’s nowhere to hide from shooters.”

Three days later, 19 students and two teachers were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

At first, I didn’t want to return to America. My son was safer in Ireland. This is an indisputable fact. The cops (or the Garda) don’t even carry guns. That’s one of the most startling things my students notice.

“How do they protect themselves?”

“Almost no one else has a gun,” I tell them. And their okay with that.

They vote. They buy businesses. They drive cars.  

It’s pretty free there, as far as I can tell.

But America is my home and I’m not cut out—personally and financially—to be an expat. And there’s also the sense that leaving America would be giving up on America. Letting the bastards win, to paraphrase the saying.

It’s also why study abroad programs are crucial to college students and travel—international travel specifically—is so eye opening to Americans. The way we live isn’t the only way to live.

If you come to Ireland, you’ll find a nation that overthrew its colonial overlord a hundred years earlier and then spent the following 80 years in on again off again armed conflict to maintain their independence. Yet the cops don’t carry guns. Their children are free to go to school without lockdown drills.

And everyone looks at Americans like we’re absolutely insane.

Ireland Bound—May 20th, 2023

I don’t remember what exactly made me curious about Ireland, leading it—25 years after my visit-- to become a sort of second home for me. Perhaps it was my grandmother who’d gone in the 1980s, exploring with a tour group of other seniors the lush countryside and more than a few pubs, bringing home stories of meeting our relatives. Maybe it was a desire to find some sort of history I could tie myself too, an identity separate—and more interesting—than just another white kid from the San Fernando Valley.

What I do remember is arriving in Dublin at age 18 and being completely at ease, finding myself in conversations with strangers, people who even laughed at my jokes, though I was awkward, shy, and scared back in America. I remember finding the train ride to Galway meditative, with the rolling hills and rocks walls passing by. I remember finding myself in Sally Long’s pub in Galway—still a favorite—sitting beside a pair of nuns.

Another night I found myself in a café on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. I was slightly scared of the B&B I’d rented—an old woman with an adult son giving off serious Norman Bates energy—so I stayed in town late and drank coffee and talked to a girl from Wexford, a brunette who let me flirt with her in a completely amateur way. I think she made fun of me (which is what I though flirtation was for a very long time). But she kept talking and let me sit with her as she closed up.

I was never lonely. That’s what I remember.

Recently a colleague of mine, when hearing about the study abroad course I’m running, said “the Irish are cool.” It’s a broad generalization, of course. There are plenty of assholes in Ireland, just like anywhere else, but there a hospitality that is difficult to define. “Cool” is about close as you can manage.

Living with a Covid Cat—May 18, 2023

Allow me to tell you the many ways in which my cat is an asshole.

He knocks my wife’s phone off her nightstand at six in the morning so she’ll feed him.

He chews on power cords until I play with him.

He bites, suddenly and viciously.

And now as I pack up for Ireland, I keep finding him in the suitcase, a cat I never wanted but loves me with an intensity I didn’t realize animals of his ilk had.

He jumps in my lap as I write.

He greets me at the door, like a dog.

He curls up like the small spoon as I sleep.

This wasn’t what I wanted but it’s what I’ve got.

I’ve always been a dog person. They go on walks. They love you unconditionally ( my wife and child have a long list of conditions). And they never bite just because you touched them on the wrong part of their back.

But as my six-year-old likes to say, this cat adopted us. (He also said “cats are part of my soul,” which is both adorable and pretty fucking weird to hear out of a child who sings songs about his butt).

The cat had been living in the woods behind our house, mid-Covid, only six months old. Well fed. He’d gone from house to house begging for kibble, and largely getting it.

I told my wife not to feed it.

She fed it. And then put a bed outside for it.  And then named it Ruth (after the recently deceased supreme court justice).

And then she called one afternoon and asked how much money we had in our checking account.

“Why?”

She’d taken it to the vet. It was getting fixed and needed a repaired tooth.

“By the way,” she said. “Ruth is more of a Babe Ruth.”

Now I have a cat. Ginsberg. Who is not part of my soul but is in my suitcase.  

Andrew Gutierrez—May 12, 2023

A while back, I began looking into the life of Andrew Gutierrez: his grave is a few minutes walk from my UNC office. I was surprised to find a fellow Gutierrez in Chapel Hill: I haven’t met any others in the four years I’ve been here. Looking through an ancestry website, which held census and naturalization records, yearbooks pictures, a draft card, and death certificate, I was able to work up a brief bio:

Andrew Gutierrez was born on New Year’s Eve 1903 in Santiago, Cuba to Jose and Emma Gutierrez. He was given the first name Andres, a name he carried to the United States aboard the SS Munargo, which dropped him in New York on June 27, 1922. He went on to attend the University of North Carolina and became a Civil Engineer. On Christmas Eve of 1924, he married Margaret Nesbitt, 17, whose family had been in Chapel Hill for a generation. You can still see the Nesbitt name on certain business in the area. At some point, they moved to Urbana, Illinois, where there first child Andrew was born in 1925. Three more children followed: Joseph, Rosita, and Margaret. Some time in the late 20s, the family moved back to Chapel Hill, where Andrew worked as an engineer at the Durham County Water Department. Later, he moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he worked for the D.C. government. He died in Virginia in 1980 of Acute Pulmonary Ademaand Parkinsons. 

Of course, very little of this tells me anything about his life, what he loved, what he thought of the life he led, how it must have pained him not to be able to return to Cuba in his later years. Still, every day when I see his headstone, I try to imagine those things, to fill in the other parts of life, the ones that don’t end up on paper.