It Finds You

When you visit Dublin, you do not go looking for a bar.

It finds you.

 

When I arrived in Dublin, I did not arrive at a bus station. Rather, I was dropped off in the middle of O’Connell Street, one of the main arteries of the city. I figured out where my lodgings were and I headed there to drop off my bags. I made my way towards the nexus of the Bachelors Walk and the Ormond Quay on the bank of the River Liffey. 

I am not ashamed to admit that I arrived in Dublin without a real plan of what to see or do. Frankly, that is how I had lived during this entire trip. I had an idea but no really set plans other than where I would stay, how long I would be there, and how to get between places. I would figure out what to do when I got to where I was going and let serendipity take me by the hand the rest of the way.

Passing numerous bars with different enticements, such as Joyce quotes or prose from the four Irish Nobel Laureates for literature, they inexplicably did not feel right. They were too touristy, too crowded, and just a stereotype of a quaint Irish pub. I arrived at my hostel and dropped off my bags. 

I walked around a little more and perchance, I decided to cross the Ha’Penny Bridge that divided the Liffey. On the other side was a busy but not frenetic pub, so I figured this place was just as good as any. I looked up at the sign; the Ha’Penny Bridge Inn. I stopped in and bellied up to the bar. Although it was busy my barman Vincent poured me some Irish Whiskey attetively, as if I were the only person there. I gazed around the room and could see that I was in good company. 

I looked behind the bar as I was slowly nursing my rocked Whiskey. On the posts that supported the shelfs of liquor were patches. Looking closer, I could see names like Spokane, Dallas, Atlanta, but most notably New York City. These were patches of American police and firefighters. I knew my pub had found me. 

I would continue coming back to the Ha’Penny Inn for the duration of my stay in Dublin. This included one very solemn night; the night of September 11th. I had been in a few different places when this date came up on the calendar. I was in my Freshman year of college when I heard the news of the day being filtered through 30 different voices as I walked back to my dorm just in time to see the second plane hit. I was in New York at Ground Zero while there were still excavating a little over a year later. I was in Los Angeles on the fifth year anniversary. I was back in New Orleans on the 10th. And here I was sitting in a bar in Ireland.

Maybe because it was my tour guide that read a heartfelt message to us on our way back from an outing, maybe because it was two large Whiskeys deep, or maybe I was just cataloging all the troubled and terrible happenings I had witnessed on my voyage thus far. But the Ha’Penny Bridge Inn understood my sentiments. I felt the twinge of inspiration as I sat underneath a collage picture of the Twin Towers that the bar featured on one of their walls. I re-read a post I had written on social media:

‘When people say 9/11 feels like a lifetime ago, for me, it has been. I was 18 when it happened. Now that I’m 36, I think about the lives of the victims they would never get to live: weddings that would never happen, children they would never meet, parents that would never say goodbye, spouses they would never hold again. So, when I say Never Forget, I mean to remember these lost souls, remember the evil that stole them from us, and to remember why and how this happened so it does not happen again.’

Perhaps Ireland has a special affinity for its foreign Irish children of which I am one. The Ha’Penny Inn felt like home for those few drinks; safe and warm on such a dark day. Looking over my shoulder, I raised a glass to the photos of the Twin Towers and then to Vincent.