Hey, Diddle, Diddle

Dec 12, 2024

closeup photo of cow — Photo by Amanda Kerr on Unsplash

On my first trip to Ireland in the early 1970s, I stayed in Galway City at a splendid guest house run by two middle-aged sisters. One was single, the other a widow with five teenage and young- adult children. A warm, lively household with lots of comings and goings, and minor dramas.

One day one of the teenage daughters broke up with her boyfriend and she fell into a pit of depression. Her Auntie May thought a change of scenery would be just the thing to lift her spirits. We started off, Auntie May at the steering wheel, me riding shot gun, and the niece in the back seat. It was a holiday–Whit Sunday–or Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s disciples. The traffic heavy, everyone was in town for Mass, then a meal at a pub.

We headed out of Galway and onto a back road, the sea on one side of us and rocky cliffs on the other. Oh, isn’t this the most beautiful country? I thought. The sun slanted down on the bay on my left, the water glistening a deep green.

That morning, I was happy not to have to do the driving, and by the end of the day, I was even happier. Since that time, I’ve made it a rule not to drive in Ireland. I don’t drive a little black car. I don’t drive a little white car. I don’t drive any car. Too dangerous. There don’t seem to be any speed limits in Ireland and no one there appears to have suffered through Driver’s Ed the way we did in the States. Remember the drill?

You were sitting in your simulator, or incinerator as we called it, hands on the wheel, 10 and 2. Children were playing ball in their yard on the right-hand side of your screen. Anticipate the problem, my instructor called out, and my foot hovered over the brake pedal. Sure enough, that ball went right into the street with a child chasing after it. Brake, brake, brake.

In Ireland cars whiz by each other in a terrible hurry. Trucks with big SCANIA plaques on their grills charge their way down the freeway where I’ve seen cars stop dead in the middle of the center lane, then back up, cross the meridian, and make a U-turn. In the cities, street signs are embedded into buildings hundreds of years old, their lettering dim.

In Connemara, road signs are clustered together on one pole in a confusing mass of wooden arrows. This way to Letterfrack. That way to Clifden. This way to Cleggan. Do you really want to get lost? Take that road to Roundstone and you will end up driving straight into the sea.

In Ireland, the steering wheel is on the right-hand side of the car and you drive on the left-hand side of the road. The opposite of American driving patterns. I’ve watched one accident after another at the Dublin airport, Americans barely able to depart from the rental car lots. Blam. A head-on collision with the fecking Yank driving in the wrong lane.

I take the train, or better yet, the bus.

I love to land in the Dublin airport where a bus is waiting to take me non-stop to Galway. I curl up in the tall seat, lie back and fall asleep. I open my eyes and we’re in Galway where I have a full Irish breakfast complete with blood pudding, then step on another bus heading to Clifden. All very civilized.

I let the bus drivers navigate the narrow, winding roads through the mountains, past the bogs, and around the loughs. I let the bus drivers brake and honk at the sheep wandering across the road. I close my eyes and dream back to that first 1970s trip to Ireland when donkey carts were a common sight on the streets of Galway as well as the back roads of Connemara.

Ah, yes, I lie back in my CityLink bus seat and think of that first trip to Ireland.

“Would you like to go to the Cliffs of Moher?” the guest house proprietor had called up the stairway one morning. She had matched me with a family who had driven down from Northern Ireland for a holiday. We walked out on the grass right up to the drop-off down to the sea, the waves rolling in. No gates, no fences. And so it went. I toured all around the area as a stowaway with other guests. And when there were few guests, I hitched (perfectly safely) across the country. Who needed a car?

On the Whit Sunday drive, I noticed a herd of Holsteins grazing on top of the cliff. Downright pastoral. But then I looked closer. Again, no fences. The Holsteins just wandered around on top of the jagged rock. Huh. Now isn’t that something? No speed limits, no fences in this country. A pretty open place.

A friend had told me that the Irish sheep don’t need fences. “Often you’ll see the descendants of five or six generations of sheep on a mountainside. It’s in their genes. They know to stay put.”

But what if this is the first generation of dairy cows? I thought. What’s keeping these cattle from just stepping off the cliff? I quickly dismissed the thought. Don’t be silly, I told myself. But still, you just wouldn’t see this in the States. At home, you’d have a fence staked around the whole grazing spot.

white and black cow standing on green grass field during daytime — Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

I looked up at one heifer. She stared down at me. Just stay there, I told her silently. We made eye contact, holding my gaze. Anticipate the problem, I told myself.

Then she descended, the cow flying through the air, heading right for our car.

Brake, brake, brake! I pumped an imaginary pedal on the floor.

Auntie May slammed on the brakes.

The heifer barreled toward the windshield.

I was amazingly calm, even analytical, going through an abridged life review. This is it, I told myself. Killed by a heifer in Ireland. One thing in my short life I couldn’t have planned for, couldn’t have really foreseen. Lesson learned. What a poetical ending. It beats dropping dead from tuberculosis like the Romantic poets or suicide like the Sylvia-Plath-types.

Here Lies Mary Lynch Swander, an accomplished young writer, killed by a heifer near Galway, Ireland. Oh, heck, this was going to be inconvenient. Would they have to ship my body home? No, just stick me in the ground here—far away from dairy herds. Okay, here comes the heifer. She’s going to crush me. Just close your eyes and watch out for the flying glass when she comes through the windshield.

The heifer hit and cracked the glass. My vision went black. The whole inside of the car dimmed. I opened my eyes, and magically, the heifer slid off the windshield. She made a huge dent in the “bonnet” of the car. The heifer craned her neck around to once again catch my eye, slipping onto the side of the road. She shook herself off, tail in the air, and hobbled into the ditch, leaving little tufts of fur in the windshield wiper blades.

“Oh, the poor dumb beast,” Auntie May called. “Is she all right? Is she all right?”

There was a huge fine in the country at the time for damaging livestock.

“I think so,” I said, unable to move my neck which felt like it had been wrenched off my shoulders.

Our car was still running. The engine was in the undamaged rear end. Auntie May pulled it over to the side of the road, reached in the back seat for her large, brown pocketbook, and passed candies out all around. Then, to relieve the shock and tension, she began to tell jokes.

“Did you hear of the two Kerrymen who were driving to Dublin?”

“Oh, we’re almost to the city now,” one said to the other.

“How do you know?” the other man said.

“I measure the miles by the number of pedestrians we’ve knocked down.”

Home, the car sputtered and groaned into the guest house drive. Auntie May turned off the engine and the whole guest house family—sister and four children–gathered around the vehicle. They inspected the deep crater in the middle of the bonnet.

“Oh,” they finally said, almost in unison. “You must’ve hit a cow.”

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The Cat and the Fiddle

Hey, diddle, diddle, the cow

jumped down, the whole kit and

caboodle, and you, the moon.

Driving North from town, Galway City,

Whit Sunday, Auntie May at the wheel,

you didn’t know what to feel,

the windshield black and cracked,

the little tuft of fur caught

in the wiper. Poor dumb beast,

Auntie May slammed on the brakes.

The bovine slid from bonnet to ditch,

switched her tail into the air

to signal the end of danger.

Your whole life seat-belted and strapped,

you never set out without the tire check,

map, extra blanket, jack and flares.

You never pulled all-nighters,

but thumb grasped to pinkie, be prepared,

read ahead to a fault, Descartes

breaking apart before the sun

came out on Plato’s cave.

And here, you knew a moment before

she flew, the Tom rosining his bow,

the dish and spoon calling ahead

for reservations. But if there’s

anything to say, it’s this:

sometimes the cat may break

a string, or the dog sink into

a deep depression, but not to relax

and shout for Guinness all around.

At most, pull over and share candy

from May’s pocketbook, brown and worn,

tell jokes of the Kerryman measuring

the miles to Dublin by the number of

pedestrians knocked down. For up a bit,

is another bucolic scene, on either side

of a winding road cut between two cliffs,

a herd of Holsteins grazes on the green

grass, bobbing their heads toward the sea.

Originally published in Heaven-and-Earth House,

Alfred Knopf

Hey, Diddle, Diddle

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