Irish Surprises
by Judith
Scheffler
If
anyone had told me that one late Spring day last year I’d
be sitting in a touring van, part of a group called NineWomen, headed
for Dublin to be interviewed by the Irish Times, I’d have quoted
Sir John Pentland Mahaffey: “In Ireland the inevitable never happens
and the unexpected constantly occurs.” Not quite nine this time,
but eight of us, all highly successful women, now retired, were stretching
our bounds again.
Since our first meeting more than two years earlier, we’d taken
a course on “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” hiked
on two barrier islands, submitted to an eastern Chakra healing methodology,
written a book called Beyond the Corner Office--- Essays by NineWomen,
and were now giving talks and seminars. The Irish interest in our group
developed because one of our members, Dana, was spending a year living
in Killarney with her family.
Michael O’Conner, our freelance tour guide from Killarney, drove
the van, and as we quickly found out, kept us constantly amused with
story and song. Mike spoke into his microphone.
“Well, I hope I last longer than Drew.”
Astonished, we laughed and shouted back in unison, “You read our book!”
In January of 2002, Yvonne, a fiery six-foot redhead and our founder,
invited eight business women and one man to our first meeting. Drew was
sitting right there when Fran politely commented that she had expected
our group to be all women. The rest of us agreed. Drew laughed. Our first
decision was made. It was an important one. Though we are all married
and happily admit we like having a man around, we need to work in an
all-women environment to better understand our pasts and to encourage
women our ages to take advantage of the later years.
In the early morning, while our rooms were being prepared at Harcourt
Hotel, we walked through St. Stevens Green, a 22-acre park dating back
to the 17th century, and wandered through the Trinity College campus,
visiting the display of the elegant medieval manuscript of the gospels
called Book of Kells. The coffee we sipped in the James Joyce room
at Bewley’s Oriental Café tasted wonderful, but didn’t
help my jet lag, so I walked alone back down to the hotel to wait for
the Irish Times interviewer.
We expected the reporter to spend fifteen minutes with us. Instead
she spent two hours, clearly interested in asking questions to satisfy
her own curiosity. When the article was published, her most significant
point was that the approach to handling early retirement described
in our book would work as well for Irish women as it had for us.
I’ve always thought I’d hate spending a week with a tour
guide. Not this time! Mike drove us to the 1,000-acre National Stud Farm
and Japanese Gardens near Kildare. We looked in the paddocks at famous
Irish stallions that periodically wait for Tom the Teaser to do his thing
and then join and “cover” a visiting mare. The process takes
about ten minutes.
If the horse is the well-known like Indian Ridge, the owner of the
mare pays 80,000 Euros when the cover is successful. No foal, no fee.
Indian Ridge once made 320,000 Euros in one day. At a lake in the Japanese
Gardens we watched a male swan swimming protectively around a huge
nest where his mate sat on an egg. From there we traveled south to
visit Killarney and its environs.
My favorite day: a trip to the Dingle Peninsula while the sun was out,
an event even the Irish cherish. During the trip from Killarney to
the peninsula, we kept gleaning facets of Irish life as Mike sang ballads.
As we drove through Castlemaine, he trilled the Wild Colonial Boy about
the young man who’d left his hometown to become the Robin Hood
of Australia. When we passed the sign for Tralee, he crooned the haunting
melody about a young woman who fell in love with a man from Tralee
above her station, and pined her way to early death when he left town.
On his return the young man heard about the event and sat by her grave
to write the poem on which The Rose of Tralee ballad is based, recording
her faithfulness for posterity.
Giving a toast that night in Killarney, I thanked Dana and her family
for setting up the trip, and told them I’d always wanted to visit
the place where the movie Ryan’s Daughter was filmed. I’d
had no idea I’d be doing it on this trip, and was truly pleased
when Mike told us to look over to a beach surrounded by high cliffs
on Dingle Peninsula, the site of an extraordinary scene from the film.
I wondered if there was a usable path to the place or if they’d
taken Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles in by boat.
What made this tour work for me despite my worried expectations? I
was with women who had become both friends and partners in the great
adventure called, “the next stage in our lives.”