Y'know, when you pass someone on the street and you realise something about that person has triggered an old memory that brings a warm feeling to you, brings you back in time, to your childhood, to an innocent time, perhaps, even to a specific moment, one you may not be able to immediately identify, but the comforting warmth resonates, your senses bristling at the fuzzy, familiar, feeling.
Doniel Sexton, from 'out the country' by his own admission, but living now on Nuns Island, passed me on Dominick Street this evening, a fine, persistent drizzle had hastened everyone else off the street, just the two of us, walking, head-down in the soft rain, opposed on the narrow footpath, made narrower by a bollard, that swept us closer together, between the wall and the road, two polite, beanie-heads, "excuse me, excuse me", we part-passed, his pipe smoke enveloped me in a sweet, damp, retro haze, transporting me in an instant, back to Loughrea, fifty-five years ago, to an old farmer, John Ryan, visiting my father and mother in our kitchen, his big frame fairly filling the small armchair by the Aga cooker, him, tamping his pipe with a gnarled, work-calloused thumb, and slowly, patiently, alternately lighting and puffing and tamping, and lighting and puffing again, patiently reddening the shredded plug tobacco, waving the lit match, and exhaling a long blue-hued plume of smoke, smiling wistfully, before launching again into a story of the 'old days' in the town.
Lost in this sudden un-bidden memory, I turned and looked back at his half-turned head, at his teeth-clenched pipe, he, similarly, simultaneously half-turned, gazing down at my barefoot sandals. I said, "What brand of pipe tobacco is that?" He said "Sandals, for the summer, it's coming too, next Wednesday, or Thursday, though I wouldn't be betting the house on it, still, at least you aren't wearing socks, I can't understand that, in this wet weather." I said, "Can I take your photo?" He quipped, as he posed, "Go on ahead, sure it's a free country, for the time-being anyhow, or until we start charging for it."
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