Mr O'Reilly

Mr. O'Reilly was old. I was 10, and for as long as I could remember he'd always been the same: black bushy hair and eyebrows and moustache, a well worn black suit and waistcoat, his pipe with which he constantly fiddled as he leaned on the garden gate outside his terraced house, watching the traffic on our busy road. He smelled of tobacco. From four houses away I could smell it, not unpleasant in itself, but for me a warning: Mr O'Reilly is out.

For he had a gruff manner, as though continually affronted by what he saw from his observation post at the end of his little overgrown garden. And he'd a loud and gravelly voice to complement his imposing dark figure and mannerisms. On my daily errand to buy the final edition of the Evening Herald, I had to pass him. Each time the blood would be pounding in my ears. Could I sneak by quickly without him talking to me?

'The state of that car it should be put off the feckin road!'

Oh no. Should I pretend I hadn't heard him, or just smile back, or what? Oh God!

'What?', he'd bark.

"You're right Mr O'Reilly", I'd stammer.

'Huh', he'd retort, severely unimpressed with my limp response.

I'd continue on up the road, turning right to cross at the traffic lights, taking Sally's bridge over the Grand Canal and on down to Kelly's newsagent, all the while fretting over my return journey and how to avoid Mr. O'Reilly.

But there was no avoiding Mr. O'Reilly.

'The Guards should do something about it but they're feckin useless.'

Oh no. He'd mentioned the Guards. What should I reply? Didn't Mam say one of his sons was arrested by the Guards? Is that the fella that was always coming home roaring drunk from the pub, or one of the other rough looking ones?

'What did ye say?' he'd shout.

'Eh, you're right Mr. O'Reilly', I'd offer.

'Huh'.

I tried various tactics. Instead of walking past him up to the traffic lights I'd cross the road outside my house; I'd often be standing at the edge of the road for an eternity, waiting for a gap in the traffic, feeling his eyes boring into my back. I'd take our little dog with me, so that I could take her off the leash at the traffic lights on the way back and race with her past Mr O'Reilly before he could say anything; he'd watch me the whole way, as I kept my eyes facing forward to avoid his gaze. He knew what I was doing.

I don't know when he stopped being there. I remember one evening much later, back for a visit after a couple of years abroad, I passed him at his gate without either of us speaking. He looked frail, probably didn't recognise me.

He's not there anymore. It's not the same place without him. 

Mr O'Reilly was here

Tender...

Jim Harrison's "Bridge" is one of the poems I learned off by heart a few years ago. His description of the sea reminds of the times I spent camping in Co. Wexford as a little boy with my family, stormy dark nights when the wind tore at the tent, the rain machine-gunned the canvas, and the sea thundered a baseline to the cacophony. 

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like 

the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.

What beauty in this the darkest music 

over which you can hear the lightest music of human 

behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

from Bridge by Jim Harrison 

Under a wide and starry night sky I too have felt a connection with the galaxies that sprawl to a horizon a billion light-years away. But the word "tender" intervenes like a note from a different key, intimate and melancholy in the midst of a grand symphony. I don't really understand precisely why the connection might be tender, but I do love the music created by that surprising little phrase.

Reading in bed late one night last week, I heard the same note when that word "tender" showed up in a very different piece.

Comme si cette grande colère m'avait purgé du mal, vidé d'espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.

from L'étranger by Albert Camus 

Merseault, the eponymous "l'étranger" (best translated as "outsider") of Camus' masterpiece, is expressing the opposite emotion, the stars opening his eyes to the "tender" indifference of the world, rather than its connection with him. But the effect is similar, a note of intimacy and melancholy is struck in this tumultuous last movement of the novel.

I wonder if this resonance only sounds for me or if Harrison deliberately planted it there?