Hi. I'm John, from Ireland. [pause] Well. <emphasis>Ennis</emphasis>, Ireland. [chuckle]
[pause]
I'm new to San Antonio. I'm looking for a place to stay a little longer. [pause] I thought it would be easier if you knew who I was.
[pause]
Well. Let's see.
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My parents were Tom and Anne. They married in Ennis on the twenty-first of June, nineteen fifty-eight. [pause] He was twenty-two. She was twenty.
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A couple of years on, she was carrying me. That was late in nineteen sixty. [pause] I arrived on the ninth of January.
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Patrick had come first, in August of nineteen fifty-nine. He was the older brother, and he stayed in Clare. [pause] The house was the four of us. My father, my mother, Patrick, and me.
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We lived on the edge of Ennis. Past the house, the ground goes pale. That's the <emphasis>Burren</emphasis>. [pause] We walked it a lot as kids, Patrick and me.
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<fast>We liked being outside. A wall was enough. We'd stay out till someone called us, and we knew every lane we were let onto.</fast>
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Summers, I lived in a short set of clothes and no shoes. The cottages, the church over the roofs. [pause] I was happy out there.
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There was the river as well, and the town beyond it. [pause] I liked a wide quiet place even then. I never really grew out of that.
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My father spent his days at Shannon. He fitted aircraft, and he came home with the ramp still on him. [pause] Evenings in that house smelled like his work.
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I grew up there, and I left the secondary school in Ennis at eighteen. That was nineteen seventy-nine. [pause] I didn't go on. The town was enough, for then.
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In nineteen eighty-four I took three years at Sarsfield Barracks, in Limerick, with the Twelfth Infantry. I finished a three-star private. [pause] There was no war in it, and I was never posted overseas.
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There was one stop, though. <emphasis>Egypt</emphasis>. It wasn't a posting. [pause] I already liked old ground, and Egypt got into me there. I said I'd go back one day and look properly.
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The working days, before the army and after it, were beside my father. Tools, fittings, the ordinary hardness of a hangar. [pause] I never took the full licence. He was the fitter. I did what I knew, and I left the rest.
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The other half of those years was the brigade. I joined the retained roll at Ennis in nineteen eighty, and I kept it. [pause] The alerter went, and you turned out. [pause] I don't keep a bad call for the table.
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Years later I went back, and I wore the same shirt the whole day. [pause] I walked the lane with Patrick.
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Then it was my father with us. And my mother. [pause] Same day. Same clothes.
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And then my mother, in the garden. She was older by then. Once I was at school she had taken hours in a garden shop. [pause] When I think of that day, I end it with her.
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I had a small house of my own on that side of town. I lived in it alone. I never married. [pause] On the tenth of September, twenty eleven, I was still out walking that ground.
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I had taken up flying on my own time, light aircraft out of Shannon. I'd grown up under the flight path, and I wanted the air for myself. [pause] One year I flew freight. I loved it. I didn't look for another year, and nothing happened up there that belongs in this telling.
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I stayed on the Ennis roll a long time. Standing at those doors, I'm older. [pause] I don't wear a fire badge anywhere else.
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Egypt never left me. I still sit down with it. I still mean to go back and look.
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<soft>By the time I left Ireland, both of my parents were gone. I don't keep a year for either, and I don't tell an illness.</soft> [pause] My father had wanted me to come away and see other places. That wish is what moved me.
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So I did. A friend from the battalion, Darragh Keane, was already in San Antonio. I came in twenty twenty-five, stayed with him a few months, and fell in love with the city. [pause] I sold the house in Ennis. There was a good buyer. I arrived with a bag, and I don't know when I'll see Ireland again.
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That's the road that got me to this chair.
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A friend told me there was a room. Someone who wanted a hand with the technology, and with a bit of research, and that we might get on. [pause] I can learn a thing beside a person and still be of use. The house would stay hers.
[pause]
If a longer stay sounds right, I'd like the room.
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<soft>I'll leave it with you.</soft>