Senior Sojourn: Ye Canna Go Wrong In Springtime Dublin
We visited Dublin several years ago, and were fortunate that springtime was just emerging from rainy April into a sunny May. Our bus tour through Ireland included visiting famed landmarks and sheep farms, dinner at a private home and an evening session at a genuine Dublin pub. Then we attended a performance at the famed Abbey Theatre.

The play was the classic “Playboy of the Western World”, but the actors spoke in 17th Century rural Celtic, and we couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. Not incidentally, that play coined the word playboy. In 1907, author Edmund John Millington Synge, called one of his raffish characters a playboy. The word was swiped 50 years later by a guy for his girlie magazine.

Springtime in Dublin and the surrounding countryside is a treat for the eyes, with the green grass of Ireland morphing into an almost luminous emerald. Everywhere were flowers bursting out in bright reds, whites and purples all around in parks, fields, roadways and gardens.

We particularly noted the kids playing in the streets and parks. The spring colors seem to have enhanced them with brighter pink cheeks and glowing blue eyes, and sprinkled among them were boys and girls with fiery red hair. It was like being in a living postcard from 50 or a hundred years ago.

As we strolled through old Dublin town on a Sunday noontime, everyone seemed to be out on the streets and in the shops and cafes as if costumed for a permanent Easter parade. Many were emerging from churches and, unlike the declining institution of marriage in America, proving that big, happy families were still the most wonderful sight in the world.

As our tour was completed and we made our way back to the somewhat drab reality of England, we all felt the words of the old Irish song, “Galway Bay”

“And if there's to be a life in the hereafter,
And somehow I'm sure there's going to be,
I will ask my God to let me make my heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.”