January and February 2000 were when we discovered the Irish.
It all started when we went for after-work drinks with some of our Y2K contractors, one of whom was off the boat from Kildare and who recommended a place in Cleveland Park. It was, of course, Ireland’s Four Provinces, and after-work drinks turned into closing the place at 2 AM…and coming back the next night at 6 and staying until 2 again.
In between, on that Saturday morning, I remember driving to Tyson’s for a new pair of Docs, my second. These were proper brown 1460 8-eyelets, the sort I’d probably never have now because they’re not black or red or cap-toed or whatever, but at the time, they were appropriate to post-blizzard DC. The roads were clear but the white stuff was still a foot deep in all directions, and there were two-foot walls of ice down the sidewalks with cuts to dodge in and out.
I didn’t have the cigar shop at this point. I mean, I’m sure I’d been by at least once, but for the most part, skulking around for something to smoke generally meant either Georgetown Tobacco in Tyson’s or a place whose name I can’t remember over in McLean – one that stands out in my mind because they had unfinished pipes. No varnish, no paint, no nothing – just raw wood that had been carved and sanded (mostly) and which you had to stain yourself through use and handling (and in my case, as often as not, filling with Maker’s Mark and allowing to sit overnight before first smoking). I guess that’s the point in my life by which I had genuinely become A Smoker, albeit a pipe smoker – which meant carrying a pipe, a lighter, a pouch of tobacco, something to scrape the pipe out with and as often as not a couple or three pipe cleaners. (A lot, when you don’t have a bag or a jacket, and I was grateful when Dockers produced their pants with the concealed zip pockets on the side.)
And on the drive to make my tobacco run, I was playing the tape – because of course we bought the McTeggarts’ cassettes the first night. All three. To this day, there’s one chord of their “Whiskey in the Jar” that puts me right back there, surrounded by the snow. There would be other music, of course – we’d see Ronan Kavanaugh and buy both his albums, buy every Fenians disc imaginable, and that co-worker loaned a tape of old rebel songs that we damn near wore out until we knew all the words to (some version of) “The Man From Mullingar” and “The Men Behind The Wire”…and, of course, the sad tale of Roddy McCorley cited earlier.
That, I think, is when things really clicked. We’d been the EUS for a long time before that – through the first great shedding of contractors, the 9-day backlog of support tickets, the crash project to replace Token Ring with Ethernet, and of course the massive Y2K cleanup – and we already had some small rituals in our past, like the Thursday prime rib at Sign of the Whale or the fledgeling softball team playing out on the Mall. But it was when we got the 4Ps, when we started singing along, when we got that third space outside work to just have fun together – that’s what stands out in memory. That’s the thing I wish we could go back for – and when I did go back in 2010 and 2012, it wasn’t to run tickets, it was to belt out the old songs and stagger out at closing time.
Even if it’s non-smoking now.
I remember at one point that weekend leaning over to our favorite Irishman and saying, “These songs… they make me homesick for Ireland, yet I’ve never even been there! That’s how powerful they are!” He chuckled and smiled in his charming and happy way. In retrospect, I’m not sure that homesickness was really what it was. Instead, that whole experience made me feel a part of something bigger, something greater, a cohesive group of people that mostly all got each other and understood who we were and why we were there. I think we can both agree that was missing from other aspects of our lives, heh.
It’s funny, I was talking to the husband recently about smoking and about how common it is in Paris (we’re talking a lot about Paris these days) and how glad we both are that both of us kicked the habit. We moved from there into talk of other things to smoke (cigars, pipes), and I said, “Stagger Lee smoked a pipe for years.” Husband remembered that. We both declared how awesome it smelled and how much we enjoyed being around it.
We’re both happy that you’re healthier without it, but I will say this… Anytime that I walk past someone smoking a pipe with that particular 1Q aroma, I’m instantly transported back to the Ps, to those songs, and those times of group togetherness. And then I know how wrong I was in 2000, and now I understand homesickness a little better.