Hello again y'all...!
I've decided to start publishing my blog again, after a hiatus of two years. During which time, a lot has happened, both in my life and across the globe!
But typical blogger I am, I've shot my wad tonight recovering my blog's previous posts and revamping this site (not done yet!), so I've no energy left to write! So instead, by way of introduction, I'm going to post a column I published in Dublin's Village magazine last year when I had a short-lived writing gig there.
I finally did it. After threatening to leave if Bush did this or Congress did that or Democrats sat idle while Republicans pulled another shenanigan, I left the U.S. Bush's invasion of Iraq was the final impetus, though it took me 15 months to wind up loose ends. I spent a week decompressing in Paris, then a Ryan Air flight set me down for the first time in Dublin. Given a 15kg-baggage-limit and a recent spate of unemployment, I began my life as an American expatriate with little more than the clothes on my back, Irish citizenship through my grandparents and a pocketful of credit cards.
Dublin's gray skies and Georgian architecture were a bit of a shock after opulent Paris. My youth hostel sat surrounded by pubs, and sleepless with jetlag, I wandered wide-eyed at 2 a.m. among inebriated revelers doing their unsteady best not to wander into traffic. Shouts, drunken laughter and the clip-clop of horses bounced off the walls of my room until seagulls took up their unholy din at dawn's early light.
A veritable teetotaler by Irish standards, my disquiet was compounded those first days by the fact I couldn't locate a bookstore, stationery store or fresh bakery anywhere amid the ubiquitous pubs. Dublin's shy demeanor confounded me, super-sized Yank that I am. I walked right past businesses that failed to shout their wares from the rooftops with proper neon, missing altogether their weatherworn hand-lettered signs. Monday morning, metal shutters lifted to reveal clothing shops, employment agencies, a Chinese food emporium. I found half-a-dozen bookstores near Trinity, a stationery store tucked beneath a news-shop and a supermarket in, of all places, a department store basement.
What convinced me to stay, though, wasn't bookstores or, surprise, the weather, but the people. You Irish are renowned worldwide for friendliness (though it helps a visitor, I've discovered, to be white and from America). My introduction to your cordiality occurred riding into town from the airport. A tiny elderly man in a rumpled three-piece suit was trying stiffly to board the bus. Everywhere I've lived, passengers would have trampled him in a rush, but here, everyone hung back respectfully until a young man reached down under the old gent's elbows, picked him up and placed him gently on the bus. At my stop, he tottered toward the exit and the driver enjoined, "Give 'em a 'and, wontcha?" but before I could untangle myself from luggage straps, your man had launched himself over the last step to land, two feet on the sidewalk. Such is the generosity here, gray skies and square buildings simply don't get me down.
Still, before I came my biggest fears about living in a foreign county centered around being a female-to-male transsexual. Would I have to hide my identity out of fear of job discrimination? Would medical personnel treat me as a freak? What if I never made friends?
My initial experiences have been encouraging. Ireland's public health system is short-staffed, under-funded and low-tech, still everyday care is progressive and generally more accessible than in America. First doctor's visit, I walked one block from work, registered with no appointment, waited 20 minutes, then was shown in. Visibly surprised by my disclosure, the doctor remained professional, helpful and polite and the 45 Euro cost was cheap by U.S. standards. Since then, I've seen GPs, an endocrinologist and had a mandatory exam for a permanent job: in every case, the doctors have been open-minded, sensitive and surprisingly astute.
But it's my pharmacist who really amazes me. In America, land of impersonal and frazzled service, I have never been treated with such care and attention to detail. Paul didn't bat an eye when I mentioned Outhouse, in the process identifying myself as transsexual. Not a hint of condescension greeted my request for a drugs discount card. When he saw a newer-generation European drug was to replace my former prescription, he sat me down for a baseline blood-pressure reading. Then special-ordered needles for injecting testosterone and telephoned, once to let me know delivery had been delayed; a second time to say they'd arrived.
Such kindness and consideration illustrate, among other things, Dublin's forward-thinking attitudes toward the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgendered) community at a time when such sentiment is fast going underground in the United States. When Republicans attacked gays in last year's presidential election, not a single Democratic contender had the courage to declare himself in favor of gay marriage. I believe Ireland will legalize it before the United States, and I plan to be here to see it.
