Miami
I got the awful news some time in the winter of 2003 while I was living in northern California. Ronan wasn’t coming to San Jose after all. He was sailing into Miami instead.
After moping around for a few days, it finally hit me that since I was living in a closet and working full-time to put back the cash to travel again, I had some liquid assets. And flights to Miami would be discounted because of the spring season.
My despair turned to excitement. Instead of a wander in the concrete jungle of San Ho, I now had a full-fledged Spring Break to look forward to.
On March 11 he wrote to me:
HI BABE!!!!!
IM IN BERMUDA. THE CRYSTAL BLUE WATERS HERE REMIND ME
OF HVAR AND YOU. CANT WAIT TO SEE YOU... THE DAY WE
ARRIVE WE WILL HAVE TO RIG UP THE SHIP FOR TOURS ETC SO
I WONT BE FREE FOR A FEW HOURS. WHEN YOU SEE US COME IN
CALL DOWN AND HAVE A BIG AMERICAN WELCOME WAITING.
YOURS ALWAYS
NEO
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
My plane landed in Miami on March 19, 2003, the day the US declared war on Iraq again. I wrote to my family in an e-mail:
CNN was on the television at the airport, so I was there when our “president” declared... not war exactly. Something about Iraqi freedom that involved killing a lot of them and a lot of American and British troops and taking over a bunch of oil wells and enraging the international community and increasing threats of terrorism and asking for $75 billion that will be used to destroy buildings and neighborhoods and families, oh and then also cutting taxes for the rich. Hm, so who’s going to pick up the tab, I wonder? Oh, that’s right. Poor people and public schools and sick old people and public health care providers and 20-year-old boys paying in their blood. Good call. God bless America.Ronan said they were coming to the States because Irish soldiers had stopped some vandals from sabotaging American military equipment at Shannon Airport. The saboteurs were trying to protest the Iraq war. Public pressure in Europe against the war was immense from the start.
In exchange for protecting their equipment, America invited a shipload of Irish sailors to march in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah, GA, and then rig up the ship for schmoozy cocktail parties in Miami, probably to show how strong international support for the Iraq War was.
I walked across a long bridge to the port and wandered past several cruise line offices until I found a friendly policewoman who pointed me in the right direction.
As I walked around the building closest to Terminal 12, the 87-meter warship, the L.E. Roisin, a grey floating fortress, slowly came into view. The last part of her I saw was the green, white, and orange Irish flag waving proudly off her stern, and my heart swelled.
I walked over to the gate 100 meters or so from the ship to talk to the police officer guarding it. He told me the area was restricted and I could not go in. I asked if he could take a message to someone on the ship, and he said he couldn’t talk to anyone on the ship either.
So I had nothing to do but wait. I found a parking garage roof with a good view and took a picture of the ship from it. I questioned the guard again an hour later, but he said he still couldn’t help.
I kept getting harassed by police since I was loitering for hours next to a restricted military port during wartime. It was only after my third interrogation that I saw the sign posted above my bench:
PROTECT THE HOMELAND.
Immediately report to local authorities
if you see anyone doing any of the following:
1. Loitering for extended periods of time
2. Asking about port schedules, locations, or other information that seems like none of their business
3. Taking photographs or making sketches of military objects
4. Engaging in suspicious activities….
I was glad I had a valid US passport with me.
The third time I went to the gate, some men on deck saw me in the distance and started pointing and talking among themselves. They seemed worried. I asked the policeman one more time to please take a quick message to them that Pam was waiting for Ronan. Finally he relented and walked over to the boat.
And then a figure walked down the gangplank of the ship and came toward me across the concrete of the jetty, and my heart skipped about fifteen beats. Wearing a dark blue T-shirt and sunglasses, he was taller and slimmer than I remembered, and his stride was cool.
When he got within hearing distance, he asked, “Hey, how ya keepin’?”
I was too overwhelmed to know how to answer. He walked up and kissed me, and his lips tasted salty.
I heard a noise from behind him, and he laughed, embarrassed, and said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, just me mates back there.” The other sailors were whistling and hollering from the ship, and I blushed and smiled.
“So how ya keepin’?” he asked again.
“Good,” I stammered, “I’m good. It’s good to see you.”
“Listen,” he said, “we still gotta rig up the ship for a while, may be a couple hours, but I’ll come down as soon as I can, all right?”
I nodded, tongue-tied.
An hour later he found me on my park bench, and we walked across the bridge to Miami together. On the way he told me one of the lads had met a girl in Savannah who’d taken a liking to him and wanted to marry him. When he saw me waiting on the pier, he was terrified she’d gotten pregnant and I was her!
He told me they only barely made it to America. The weather tracking system on their ship had gone down for a day, and they ran into a hurricane that almost drove them back to the Azores. But they pushed on to Bermuda. By the time they got there, they only had 150 liters of fuel left—enough for about 15 seconds of cruising speed.
They were almost diverted again when the war broke out. The ship was on alert to be redeployed back home or to the Persian Gulf. Luckily, after hours of briefings, they made the decision to continue with Operation Parade and Cocktails.
He hugged me and said, “I didn’t come 6,000 miles across the ocean to see ya just to get turned back at the end.”
Once we’d settled down over some daiquiris, I asked him how he pronounced the name of his ship, and he said it was ro-SHEEN. When it docked in Savannah, it was easily visible from the main street of town, and the Irish sailors walked around in their uniforms like celebrities and got free drinks and pretty girls wherever they went.
“One girl took a fancy to me,” he said. “She followed me around everywhere. She was nice enough, pretty enough, but I told her I was interested in someone else.”
I almost asked, “Who?” but then he looked up at me, and I looked down and smiled.
He said, “It was really something else, but I was never in my life so tired of hearing American southerners blabbering on about their Irish heritage. ‘Oh, you’re Irish? Me too!’ Like fuck you are. Were you born in Ireland? Did you grow up in Ireland? Have you ever been to Ireland? All right, then, fuck off. And some of those girls asked the stupidest questions. This one girl said, ‘So how does it work in Ireland, with the thatched roofs? Does the rain ever get in?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t fuckin’ tell ya, I still live in a cave.’”
I laughed.
“Anyway, we went around town getting drinks bought for us all the time, and by the time the parade rolled around we were all drunk as fuckin’ monkeys, full as an egg, and then we were trying to march in this fuckin’ parade. We were marching in these nice wavy lines.” He laughed. “And they gave us a fuckin’ medal for it, can you believe it? For marching in their parade, they gave us all medals. That’s American generosity for ya.
“Then one of the young lads got interviewed for the local TV station. They asked him on camera what he was planning to do there in Savannah, and he says with this innocent red-cheeked smile, ‘Ah, well, we’re hitting’ the pubs, meetin’ folks, ya know, lookin’ for crack.’”
“No!” I laughed.
“Yeah! And it was broadcast live in the pub, and all the Americans went nuts, cheering and yelling. They thought we Irish were pretty fuckin’ cool. Someone bought us another round, and half the kids didn’t even know what was going on.”
A crack in Ireland is just a good time, a good laugh, but naturally the Americans didn’t hear it that way.
Between South Beach and the mainland are several man-made islands in cute shapes with names like Palm Island and Star Island. Celebrities like Gloria Estefan, Bruce Springsteen, and Rosie O’Donnell like to live on them.
We bought tickets for a little cruise around the islands that afternoon, and while we were ogling those expensive backyards, I asked him if he liked any singers or movie stars in particular. He said, “Yeah, we were on a ship one time for months and months. It was getting really desperate. And then somehow we got a Shakira music video on their television. I just looked at her and I thought, Damn, that’s one gorgeous woman.”
He also had a thing for Angelina Jolie, like almost everyone else in the free world. It’s been a personal struggle not to categorically hate both of them since.
I came back with my mad crush on Colin Farrell, but then again I probably liked him because his unapologetic Irishness reminded me of Ronan.
He asked me, “By the way, what the hell is a ‘born again virgin’? I heard that somewhere in Georgia.”
“It’s someone who’s had sex, maybe lots of times, but then suddenly decides that she won’t have sex again until she’s in love.”
“Wow. That is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. Born again virgin. Would you ever be one of those?”
“No, not now…” I looked at him. “Maybe I’ll be born again tomorrow.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Congratulations, you made an Irish Ranger blush.”
South BeachWe took a cab to South Beach that night and found an Italian restaurant on an open-air pedestrian strip. Our waiter was a lovely Welsh guy, Celtic like the Irish, and we chatted with him a while. Ronan and I both drank ripe red chianti, and he ordered a gorgeous lasagne and I had spicy penne all’arabbiata. We dined leisurely in the humid Southern night, the kind I remembered from Oklahoma.
I noticed a nasty gash of a scar on his shin and asked where it came from. He said, “I was riding some fuck-off heavy motorcycle on a country road in Ireland when a fox ran out in front of me on the road. I swerved to miss the fuckin’ thing, not to save its life but because I knew if I hit it, I’d probably lose control. I turned too tight and the bike just fell over. My shin got scraped off on a little stone wall. I had to do physical therapy for months.”
“Ugh, that sucks. Was it expensive?”
“What? No. I was taken care of.”
“By whom?”
“The government. We have universal health care in Ireland. What do you think we pay taxes for?”
My eyes widened. “Really? We sure as hell don’t have that in America.”
“I know. I heard if you get hurt in an accident here, they ask if you have insurance! Not in Ireland.”
“Man.”
“Yeah. But I was here for September 11, and it was different then. People were really taking care of each other.”
“You were in America for September 11?”
“I was in Manhattan.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I was there for vacation. I was so fuckin’ sick of carnage. I just wanted a nice relaxing time in the city. And I look up and see this plane flying low, and then it hits a fuckin’ building.”
“Jesus!”
“I was like, ‘This wasn’t in the tourbook!’ Me and my buddy had emergency first-aid training, so we went down to the scene, and you wouldn’t fucking believe it. It was like the walking dead. We found this one guy wandering around in a daze with a metal rod sticking out of his shoulder. My friend asked him to count backwards from ten, and while he was distracted, I held him while my friend pulled the rod out, and then we took him to a medical team. They medics were pissed we’d done that on our own, but they knew it was for the best.
“The firemen were the fuckin’ heroes. My hat is off to them forever. They just kept runnin’ into those buildings… I’ve never seen anything like it.”
After a while I asked him, “What do you think about the war we’re fighting right now?”
His face clouded with distaste. “I’ve got no time for your President,” he said. “He doesn’t respect his troops.”
While we were waiting for dessert, Ronan told me a joke and a story that I’ve been repeating ever since. The joke went:
A fellow is driving down the road in Galway when he sees a cat in the road right in front of him. He swerves, but unfortunately the cat darts the same way, and he hits it. He feels the solid bump, there’s no mistaking it. Unfortunately he’s late for his sister’s wedding rehearsal, so he feels inclined to hurry on. But soon the terrible guilt overcomes him. The cat may be lying there in pain, and the least he can do is make sure it’s dead and finish the job if it’s not.
So he turns around and goes back to the scene, and sure enough lying in the road there is a little white cat, twitching pitifully. He knows he has the sad duty to put it out of its misery, and the only blunt object in his car is a shovel. So he takes it out and beats the cat with it three times until there's no doubt. The little beast is laid to rest.
He’s about to go back to his car when an old woman comes out of her house by the road screaming, “Me cat, me cat! You terrible man, what have ye done? Police! Police!” The man tries to explain, but she’s overcome with shock and grief, and the police come soon. “Police! That man killed me little cat with a shovel in front of me, maliciously, for no reason! Why would he kill me little cat?”
The man says reasonably, “Officer, I’m really sorry this had to happen. I hit the cat, and it was in pain, and the only humane thing to do was put it out of its misery.”
The officer said, “Sir, please come have a look at the front of your car.”
And there, plastered across his grill... was a flattened yellow cat.True story:
One of Ronan’s friends was coming home from a pub, blasted out of his skull, full as an egg, out of his tree. (The Irish never say just “drunk” nor yet only one variation of drunk.) He was driving home, weaving all over the road, barely able to remember where he lived, when he heard behind him the unmistakable drone of a police siren.
“Oh no,” he said, knowing full well the penalties for drunk driving in Ireland. Still drunk as a monkey, he sped up instead of pulling over. He led the cop on a long chase toward the house of a friend of his. When he got there, he hadn’t lost the cop, but he was a ways ahead of him. He pulled into the driveway, turned the lights and engine off, ran around to the back, opened the trunk, jumped in, threw the keys out, and shut himself in. Then he started banging furiously on the door and yelling, “Help me, help me, sweet Jesus, is anybody out there?” The cop pulled in behind, found the keys, and let him out.
Ronan’s friend says, “Oh thank heavens ye came, officer! Some crazy fella stole me car and locked me in the boot, and he was driving around like a madman! Where’s he gone to, anyway?”
No charges were filed.
The Welsh man recommended pekaboo for dessert, a warm dense chocolate pudding cake with ice cream and fudge sauce, and it was the crowning pleasure of a perfect evening. Enjoying a warm night under the stars on a narrow pedestrian lane, the food and service leisurely and tasty, we felt for a few hours like we were in Europe again. As for bearing the weight of the world’s joy, we were doing our part.
We walked along the strip until we found a pleasant place to sit and drink some world-class mojitos. Our bartender was a willowy brunette with a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for strength on her back.
Ronan was supposed to report back to his ship for the night, but he stayed with me instead. He said he could get up early the next morning and sneak back on board.
Before we went to sleep I asked him if he’d ever really felt in danger for his life, and he said one of his closest shaves was on a mission, in Timor I think, when they were moving in on an enemy base. He was in front, and some Ethiopian UN soldiers were supposed to cover his back. They came under fire, and the flashlight on Ronan’s shoulder got hit, and its glass broke into shards and sliced Ronan’s shoulder badly. The Ethiopians, instead of maintaining their position and providing protection, gave him up for dead and retreated.
“They just left my ass hangin’ in the wind,” he said disgustedly. “You’re never, ever supposed to do that.”
He couldn’t walk back into his own base out of the dark from the direction of the enemy camp or his own men would shoot him for sure. He’d be in shooting range long before he’d be in hearing range. He had no choice but to pick up his pack, carry it on a badly injured shoulder, stopping occasionally to pull his skin back together, and hike three days in the wilderness, staying out of sight of everyone, friends and enemies alike, until he could come back to his base from the rear.
When he finally reached the base, he had to take a flying leap into a trench yelling, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s Neo, I’m friendly!” A hail of ‘friendly’ fire was unleashed in his direction, but it missed. Then they saw who it was.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said with a smile to one of his friends who had shot at him, “I’m glad you’re a piss-poor shot.”
Since the bullet hit the flashlight and not his shoulder, he wasn’t up for a Broken Cross medal, similar to the American Purple Heart, but he couldn’t care less. “I don’t need a fuckin’ medal to tell me I’ve been shot.”
He said another time in Afghanistan, he parachuted into some fog and couldn’t find his men. He sat back against a rock and lit a cigarette, only to have it practically shot out of his mouth. I wanted to smack him for that one.
I asked him if he ever thought about giving up smoking. His answer didn’t inspire much confidence. He just laughed and said, “I figure in my line of work, I’ll be lucky if it’s smoking that kills me.”
I changed the subject, and he told me about his favorite poem. “The first time I heard it, I memorized it on the spot. An Irish Airman Foresees his Death by W. B. Yeats.” He recited it for me:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Every time he was on duty as a sniper, usually covering his men on a mission, he closed his eyes and recited this poem before he picked up his weapon. There was something romantic but also grotesque about it. It seemed he didn’t particularly identify with a cause or a country, and he probably rationalized it to himself one way or another, but perhaps he fought simply to fight. The words “a lonely impulse of delight” echoed in my head. The last four lines, and some other things he said, spoke of a fatalism I abhorred, yet a peaceful acceptance of life, and a following of his own impulses, that I envied.
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Either way, whatever our savage impulses happen to be, I admired him for trying to turn his toward something that could help people and save lives. But I was never comfortable with the fact that he also took lives. I wasn’t sure how to think about a good person who did something I abhorred, or if he could be forgiven for the lives he had taken because of the lives he had saved, or if, in fact, the lives he had taken had, on balance, saved lives. If so, would that justify the means? Or was it just part of the cycles of violence that keep sweeping over everywhere?
If there would be cycles of violence anyway, could it be a good thing to have someone become a first-hand part of the mess who would genuinely try to help people? Ronan, well-educated and from a wealthy country, had chosen to be a witness to the most vomitous aspects of what it means to be a part of Western Civilization. If we don’t have witnesses like that who have the means and the courage to speak up now and then, how can anything ever change?
Of course, Spring Break wasn’t the time to talk about these things too much, or analyze our choices, or press the point that life was precious. I let it pass for another day. Over beers in Dublin some day, we’d hash all this out.
Ronan came off his ship the next morning, Friday, with a look of disgust on his face and said, “How can you fly with the eagles when you’re dealing with turkeys?” He was annoyed with his captain, who didn’t respect his men half as much as he respected his own prestige.
He asked what I was reading, and I showed him my copy of The Return of the King. He smiled and said, “Oh yeah, those guys were my best friends when I was a kid. Who’s your favorite?” I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t surprised that his was Gimli.
He told me the Rugby Six Nations Championship was in full swing, and it was down to Ireland and England for the Grand Slam, and he hoped they could teach those limeys a lesson this time.
Scott later told me Ronan had drilled into him that “If you wanna be a great soldier you have to go to a Munster rugby game in Thomand Park Limerick and know the four provinces in Ireland: Munster, Leinster, Conaught and Ulster.” It was obviously a major passion of his.
I asked him to tell me more about his own rugby career, and he said he had played for Munster Province, the biggest of the four. His games were televised nationally. When he scored his first tri, with his father in the audience and the cameras rolling, he said, “You know what I did? I cried. Right there on TV in front of me father.” He shook his head. “I cried.”
He said after some time and cumulative injuries, a doctor told him that if he got hit hard one more time he’d never walk again. Ronan said, “Given the options, I decided to call it quits.”
We were walking around the shopping district of South Beach again, and he was looking for some high-heeled shoes for his sister. She’d sent him to the States with a photo and a mission. We walked into a designer women’s shoe store and saw some nice heels, but with price tags in the hundreds. We started to leave.
The proprietor sashayed over to us and asked, “Are you folks looking for something in particular?”
Ronan said dead-pan, “No thanks, I don’t think any of these would fit me.”
The man said suggestively, without a hint of irony, “Oh, you’d be surprised.”
Ronan’s eyes widened and we hurried out with a polite, “Thanks, but we have to go!”
That night he told me he’d been nervous coming here, but now he felt like a king. He said, “You’re like me muse. I left a little part of meself back there in Split.”
I said wistfully, “If we lived 6,000 miles closer...”
He said quietly, “If you lived 6,000 miles closer, you’d be wearing an engagement band.”
I went silent. The idea alarmed me intensely, not because it didn’t appeal but because it did. And I wasn’t ready for it to. I started imagining a couple of kids, a house and a yard somewhere in the south of Ireland, some books, summer travels, wintering in Italy or Malta, baking, soccer games, peace… and I wasn’t ready for it yet. Ronan had had his crazy times, and I wanted to have mine.
I didn’t know how to tell him that, though, so I let it pass and said nothing. But from then on this sweet vision of the future was always in my head.
I was talking about my own politics a little while later, railing on about the environment or human rights or something, and he cut me off with a laugh and said, “If you’re anti-war and a tree-hugger, how’d you take up with a soldier anyway?”
I thought a minute. We both had the same impulses toward wringing all the excitement and pleasure out of life we could and fighting for other people’s rights to do the same. Just different ways of going about it. I said, “I think we’re of the same heart. We both want to make a difference.”
Later his face clouded and he said, “My conscience is not clear about the job I do.”
“What would you do otherwise?”
“Probably crunch numbers for some corporation to make them more efficient.”
I wondered why in the life of a gorgeous free world he found himself faced with such shitty options, and to what extent those options were an illusion. I’ve tried to think of another place in the world for Ronan, and it is hard to see him without his hair on fire and both guns blazing, hard to see him doing anything but walking on the edge and playing for keeps. And hard to imagine how better he could do it than soldiering with the UN. Maybe that is my lack of imagination.
He went to university reunions sometimes, where his peers who had taken the desk jobs were strutting around looking down their noses at his 35,000 Euro a year job working with his hands and his feet and his mind in ways they never would. There was no way they could know what they were missing.
On Saturday I woke up wretchedly ill, and Ronan walked all around town looking for soup for me. He brought it back along with two stuffed animals.
While I was lying there sick, I asked him how he could tell right from wrong with everything going on like it was. He said there was no right or wrong out there. It was basically just a shit storm.
I knitted my brows, unconvinced, and he said, “You know what? You’re too deep. Too thoughtful.”
I said, “Yeah, and you are, too. It’s an affliction. But if not for it we’d be dead already.”
After a while he laughed and said, “It’d be so nice if you and I could just grow old together and die.” I paused, not knowing what to say, and he laughed again and said, “Maybe that sounds bad, but to me it sounds so nice.”
Something about the way he said it made me think he didn’t believe he’d have the privilege. I let it pass again. I wanted to keep up my questing, for what it was worth, and when I felt calmer and saner, if I ever did, we could spend some days together and settle our minds and straighten it all out. I was hoping to visit him in Ireland at the end of my upcoming travels, and we could talk for hours and hours then.
On Sunday he had to work, so I enjoyed a lazy day wandering around and watching the Oscars. I found a gift for Ronan, a silver chain and a pendant with two water waves, the symbol for Aquarius, his sign and mine, and a token of his career on the ocean.
Monday we spent our last day together. He led me on a tour of his ship in the morning, and as we were walking up the gangplank he introduced me to a passing shipmate. The sailor smiled and said, “Are all the girls this pretty in California?” I smiled and thought, are all the lads this silver-tongued in Ireland?
He showed me the bridge and the captain’s chair and the helm, where he steers the ship. He was wearing a black button-down shirt, and he looked dead sexy checking out the printed weather maps like a pro.
He told me about the main gun on the ship which can, on its own, decide where the biggest threat to the ship is and aim itself there, and all the gunner has to do is push the pedal with his foot, and it always hits. It can pierce armor and sink almost anything with one hit.
I asked him if I could take out one of the cruise ships for crack, but he said it probably wouldn’t look good for the Irish. It was unarmed, and he let me push the pedal-trigger of the powerful NATO weapon.
We hung out in the ship’s mess hall and I had a Guinness and he had a Bud. He showed me the room where the tapped kegs are stored, and there were about 25 empties in there. Impressive. I had some Irish potato chips and cheese while some of the lads were watching The Wedding Singer for what turned out to be the 800th time.
He showed me the engine room and the room at the center of the ship which was most stable and used for sensitive navigation equipment. He said, “It’s a jammy bastard gets quarters close to this.”
We ate dinner at Hooters on my request, since I’d never been there, and it’s a proud part of our culture. At one point, a bartender was leaning on the bar with her breasts pressing up out of her shirt, and I nudged Ronan and nodded toward her. He glanced back and then quickly forward again. “Hoo, I think I’ve been blinded!” he said, and I giggled.
After dinner we watched the sun set over Biscayne Bay from South Beach Island. The water undulated softly like a silken mirror and reflected the diffuse pinks and blues of the sunset. We watched the sailboats and yachts bobbing up and down, and the thousand-windowed cruise ships slowly glide away, big as buildings. The evening was a living snapshot of perfection. That night was the first and only time I told a man, “I love you.”
In the morning, our last together, I gave him the water wave necklace. I kissed it and said, “Now you can carry my kiss with you.”
He said, “I’ll never take it off.”
He gave me his St. Patrick’s Day medal, his sailor cap, and a keychain with a picture of his ship, the L. E. Roisin, on one side and the ship’s insignia on the other. For more than a year now it’s been attached to my wallet reminding me of him every day.
I despise good-byes and tried to keep my emotions at bay, but a flood of feeling broke through when it was time for him to leave. He hugged me and kissed me, and as he left, we met eyes one last time. He looked at me through his eyelashes in his serious, sad way, and then he was gone again.
I’d never lost a close loved one before, but I felt like I was in mourning. Like my best friend had kicked me in the stomach. I walked around in a daze and wondered how life could keep going on.
I wandered down to where the Miami River flows into the bay, and from there I could see Ronan’s ship still docked in the distance.
I took a little sailing cruise around Biscayne Bay between Virginia Key and Key Biscayne and the condo-filled mainland. The captain let people steer the boat sometimes, and we talked while I steered it. He’d had an office job in Texas before, but he got seriously fed up with the politics and protocols and idiots involved. So he moved to Key Largo and now he sails ships for a living. He was only in Miami for a little while filling in for a friend. We agreed Miami wasn’t our scene. Too plastic fantastic. A nice place to spend a week, but that’s about enough. He said I should check out the Everglades and the Keys if I wanted to see some soul in Florida.
When we got within sight of Terminal 12 again, Ronan’s ship was gone.
At the end of my next travels I planned to visit him in Ireland, in his home, and meet his friends and family. He had recently started making payments on a four-bedroom house on a beach near Youghal, his small home town of around 6,000 people near Cork, and he said I was welcome any time. He said he’d take me on a ride on his Harley. I couldn’t wait.
