January and February 2000 were when we discovered the Irish.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0It was, of course, Ireland’s Four Provinces, and after-work drinks turned into closing the place at 2 AM\u2026and coming back the next night at 6 and staying until 2 again.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n
I didn’t have the cigar shop at this point. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0No 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). \u00a0I 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. \u00a0(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.)<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0There 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”\u2026and, of course, the sad tale of Roddy McCorley cited earlier.<\/p>\n
That, I think, is when things really clicked. \u00a0We’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. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0That’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.<\/p>\n
Even if it’s non-smoking now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. \u00a0It was, of course, Ireland’s Four Provinces, and after-work drinks turned into closing … <\/p>\n