It's not too difficult to get enjoyment out of even the rainiest day, if you remember the good times and wait for the sun to come out, writes MICHAEL HARDING
THE GREAT THING about the General is that he insists on enjoying himself, no matter what the weather. And we all gather around him like ducks and enjoy things because he’s enjoying them.
“I have fallen in love with clouds,” he declared one morning. Apparently there’s a Cloud Appreciation Society made up of cloud lovers. They watch clouds like train spotters watch trains, and they’re having their annual convention in Leitrim at the end of July.
The Medical Wallah was on the couch. “Clouds are bad,” he declared.
“Sadly, the only clouds you notice,” the General retorted, “are the ones coming out of your big fat doobies.” But the Wallah just flicked his long, grey hair out of his eyes like an offended girl and stared out the window.
We were all sitting around the wireless waiting for the BBC to give us a weather report. The General doesn’t trust Met Éireann since their reports became sponsored by an American insurance company.
I had two fire lighters under the briquettes, but they didn’t catch light and the stove filled with smoke and then billowed into the room, and the General laughed because the Medical Wallah thought the smoke was emanating from his morning spliff.
“Let’s go out in the boat,” the General declared.
“It’s too miserable for the boat,” the Wallah whined, but nevertheless, he moved when the General moved.
We had tea and cherry scones in Drumshanbo where a woman at the next table was getting annoyed on her phone. “I’m not telling you,” she snapped at someone in cyberspace. “I don’t tell my personal business to everyone.” She hung up and the General said: “Are you in some distress ma’am?”
“Would you believe it,” she said, “my ex-husband wanted to know what I was doing in Drumshanbo. I mean, I’m here for a romantic adventure, of course; but I wasn’t telling him that.”
“Perhaps,” the General suggested, “you’d care to accompany us on the lake for the day; we love messing around in boats.” The Medical Wallah thought this unwise as the woman had red hair, but the General insisted; and, after all, it is his boat.
Then we picked up Lutz, the German who has a model train set in his garage and who always gets annoyed when we call it a toy, and Gabriel from Argentina, whose grandmother comes from Killucan, and the Albanian boy who works in the fruit market in Dublin.
“This is the most disastrous summer ever,” the Wallah moaned as we boarded the boat.
“Adapt and survive,” the General said, assisting the red-haired woman on board. “In another few generations, Leitrim people will develop gills.” On the lake, he sat at the stern, steering us with the outboard motor until we were far from shore and then he turned it off.
“My ex-husband has not been well,” the red-haired woman said, “ever since I lost the child, 20 years ago. Of course he was always good with a gun, but years ago he shot a hare, by mistake.”
The company of men had made her dizzy with excitement and she couldn’t stop talking. “And the following winter,” she continued, “I had a miscarriage, and he stayed up all night weeping.
“He was drinking tea on the porch at dawn when he saw a hare come up the avenue and it looked him straight in the eye. It was like a knife going through his heart,” she said. “He was never the better of it, and after that he went strange. And even now he can’t let go of me.”
“You’re in safe company,” the General assured her, as the drizzle stopped and the mist lifted, exposing the slopes of Mount Allen and the shores of Inishmagrath Island.
“Everyone in my family has fat legs,” the red-haired woman confessed. “Apparently, on my dad’s side, everyone had rickets as well.”
The General opened the sandwiches and the tea flasks. “That’s fascinating,” he said.
She looked out at the lake again and said: “I’d love to get my nails done.”
“Of course you would,” the General said, smiling, and I began to see where this was going. But then Lutz caught a pike and the Wallah thought he saw a shape like Bob Marley in the clouds, and the boy from Albania took fruit from a plastic bag and we all began sucking oranges. And finally the sun came out. “You see,” said the General triumphantly, standing at the stern, “it is heavenly summer in Leitrim now.”