Down low in Wexford

Finished with Tóibín, moved on to Bowen. Just read a passage where the maid informed the young lady of the household that the mistress has been snooping in her room while she was out. "She said to me this morning, did I not find it difficult dusting with all that mess about. Your bears' party, she meant[.]" For a few glorious pages, I thought I'd stumbled across a delightful late-Victorian idiom for "shambles", but sadly the collection of carved bears in her bedroom is very literal.

Both the Tóibín novels were rather similar, being set in and around Wexford, particularly the seaside town of Cush (where Tóibín's family apparently had a holiday cottage). One can't help but be struck by the frequency of placenames terminating in -low--Tullow, Carlow, Arklow, Wicklow. (Also, with slightly different spelling, Curracloe.) Makes one wonder if we aren't looking at a common formant.

The area is known for its long history of Germanic settlement (both Viking and "Old English") so I thought at first this might be the same element one sees in such names as Gütersloh, Oslo, and Waterloo, a cognate of English lea. But that is true for only one of the cases, Wicklow (i.e. Wykinglo "Viking lea"). Arklow is also a Germanic name, but the second element is apparently lág "low [place]". The other toponyms seem to owe their forms to a local Leinster pronunciation of -ach. Carlow is an anglicisation of Ceatharlach (from ceathra "cattle"), Tullow of Tulach ("mound"). And Curracloe is off on its own (Currach Cló "marsh of the impression").

In contrast, the Viking towns have completely unrelated names in Irish. Wicklow is Cill Mhantáin "church of Mantán ['toothless']", which has spawned a charming story about one of St Patrick's followers losing a tooth in a brawl with pagans there and then returning to found a church. And Arklow An tInbhear Mór "The Big Estuary", historically anglicised as "Invermore". Similarly, the town of Wexford (Veisafjǫrðr "Mudflatsfirth") carries the more romantic name of Loch Garman, supposedly in memory of a young man drowned on the flats by an enchantress. Maybe he was looking for his teeth?

Collected and traded

Yesterday evening I made my way to A Taste of Heaven in Andersonville. (Yes, that Taste of Heaven.) I took a seat at the window bathed in sunlight and looked out on the people strolling by as I sipped tea, read my books, and devoured a lovely roasted pear salad with juicy tender chicken and rich dollops of cheese. It would've been perfectly delightful if not for one thing[*]: I was only killing time waiting for the summons to join Bumiputeri at Hamburger Mary's.

Initially I was puzzled why she invited me out for drinks with her work friends. What do I have to talk about with a bunch of social workers anyway? Puzzled, that is, until she told me how much she wanted me to meet her co-worker Rick. Even before she spoke the dreaded words "You two have a lot in common," I knew what was up.

She was playing collect and trade.

My first gay mentor warned me about this game way back in high school. "When you're gay, women collect and trade you like baseball cards. 'Oh, you've got a gay friend? I've got a gay friend. Let's get our gay friends together!" But I wasn't out until college, so I was able to dodge being the victim of this game for another four years. I can still hear my college pal Sandra's voice uttering almost exactly the same codephrases. "You have a lot in common." "You'll like him."

Can we all agree right off the bat that "You'll like him" is just an obnoxiously presumptuous thing to say in general, regardless of motives or reasoning? That would raise my hackles even coming from someone who thoroughly understands my taste. Seventeen years I've known Nuphy--one of the most easygoing men I've ever met--and I still can't predict which of my friends he'll hit it off with and which he won't.

The good thing about being un pédé d'un certain age is that you know the drill, you know the other guy does, too, and you can both minimise the awkwardness of the situation. If you choose to, that is.

Thing is, I'm a bad friend. I know that if I agree to certain things, I should have the decency to see them through with good grace. But I combine being too well-intentioned to turn someone down with being too petty to keep my big mouth shut. So there I was in the back bar with Bumiputeri and her friend Jazz, hearing her say once again, "You'll like him." And I was simply too fed up not to ask:

"Why will I like him?"
"Because you two have things in common."
"What do we have in common?"
"Well...he's been to Germany."
"Okay. What else?"
"He likes to drink beer, too."
"Okay, beer and Germany. Is that it?"
"He's Catholic."
"You know that I haven't done anything Catholic for twenty years, don't you?"
"No, I didn't. Maybe he'll make you start going to church again."

So what do you think we talked about when he finally did show up? We actually did discuss Germany. It turns out the reason he's been there is that the programme he administers employs a lot of Germans who are doing their civil service. So that was five minutes of conversation. But mostly we talked about neighbourhoods, street crime, and Off Off Campus.

Yep, he went to UofC, too. The SINGLE STRONGEST INDICATOR of our compatibleness and she never thought to mention it. (Not that I get along with everyone who graduated from there by any means, but it does generally guarantee we'll have at least enough interesting conversation to fill an hour.) Naturally we never brought up being gay at all. Why should we? Would two straight people have talked about being straight?

In the end, it all would've been just fine, a decent way of passing an hour. He was no fool either; like any gay man, he'd been here before and knew how to extract himself tactfully. But Bumiputeri had to hover at my elbow as if making small talk with strangers in bars wasn't something I had a good decade and a half of practice with. She once tried to leave but quickly returned because she felt "bad" about leaving us--which is ironic because it was much easier to chat without her watching while doing nothing to get a conversation going.

So next time a female friend tells me about some guy I've just got to meet because "you'll like him", I won't try to humour her. I'll politely volunteer to take her out to dinner myself instead, then gently explain to her the error of her ways.

Objoebehrsandiego: Has a friend ever tried to bring you together with someone you had little in common with? How did you handle the situation?

Any straights out there want to confess to having played collect and trade before? (Reminder: Anonymous posting is enabled.)


[*] Well, two things, actually; the music was incredibly bad. One Van Halen song, okay, ironic retro kitsch. But two? That should be actionable.