Landlady invited me to dinner with her social club called the Burren Club, a splinter group from a more formal civic club.  I drove and we stopped in to pick up Mary and her husband Jim. The dinner was at a hotel where a house had stood for 200 years and then got burned down. The small hotel built on the spot had the same type of thatched room put on at a cost of 90,000 euros. We had a 3-course meal with many stories shared. One story was of Mary, a woman of the village who had died 3 years ago but everyone knew Mary. She lived alone and attended every funeral of anyone in any surrounding village whether she knew them or not. At one funeral, Mary was viewing the body with one of my fellow dinner companions with the brother of the deceased standing next to them. Mary said, “Look at him, he never had anything to do with his brother and now he’s standing there crying ‘rocodile tears.” Mary wore an arm full of watches. One had a butterfly on the tip of the hour and minute hands. People knew Mary liked watches so they would find the most extraordinary watches and give them to her. She wore them all at the same time. Mary was raised in foster care. Her mother was a servant at a manor house, her father was the owner of the manor house. When Mary died, she left her paid for house to her next door neighbor, who had been so very good to her for all her years.

All of my dinner companions had negative stories about tipping in the United States. One after one they layered their tales of woe and how demanding wait staff had been for tips. I explained how much a wait staffer was paid in the United States and they were shocked. They had no idea, no wonder they wanted the tips. After bashing the United States over and over, I asked for positive stories they could share (half of them had lived long periods of time in the United States) and they all apologized and said that every country had their foibles. But no one offered a positive story, we just moved on along with the tales.

Most of the meal was spent on planning the next dinner party at the end of the month. Several ideas were tossed out, everyone agreed, and then a third idea was offered and everybody agreed, but in the very next breath, it was obvious that no decision had been reached. I was confused and admitted my confusion. Then everyone began talking at once when finally Julia took over to explain and got only through the introduction of explaining when she turned to Sheila and said, “now Sheila will finish and tell us what we have decided.” Sheila had no more of a clue than I did and looked quite baffled to be called upon to finish the explanation. Suffice it to say, there was never a definite, we are doing this on this day until we got back in the car. Jim announced that if I would be back on June 29th I could join them at the banquet at the castle where they were having their next dinner.

Kate and I stopped in at Jim and Mary’s for tea with Sheila and Tony after dinner. Jim had worked in the oil business and had been in Texas for 10 years, Egypt for 5 years and India for 10 years. Mary was from Ireland and they had their house built near the castle of Dunguaire where one could see the Galway Bay. There were many more stories around the kitchen table with the debate centering on the fact that computers were the downfall of civilized society, where no one made time to dine and to talk. Kate and I left after midnight with me driving through the burren on narrow back roads with no names or numbers. It was pitch black at the house but we pause for Kate to point out the line of lights in the horizon that is her view of Galway Bay.