Life Interrupted The Unfinished Monologue

Life Interrupted I didn't think there'd be another monologue, and I'm still not sure if there is. I had settled down into domesticity and a quiet life out in Sag Harbor and didn't want to continue making family soap opera. Or at least I thought I didn't. When I turned sixty there was no big celebration, just a family gathering. I said I didn't want anything. NPR did announce it on Morning Edition, I was happy to hear. Garrison Keillor did not, on his birthday show. We're not exactly on the best of terms. I reviewed a book of his called Leaving Home in the New York Times, and I opened with my girlfriend at the time saying that if I played that show Prairie Home Companion again she'd throw the radio out the window. There was no party, just a birthday dinner at home, and I remember Forrest, my eight-year-old, saying, "Hey, Dad, remember how much fun it was having a birthday before you found out that you were going to die?" Then there was a surprise. About two weeks after that, Kathie, my wife, gave me a present of a trip to Ireland for the whole family. Kathie's always coming up with these crazy trips. I remember she took us to the Ice Hotel up in Quebec City where you pay three hundred dollars a night to sleep on a block of ice. So Ireland was cushy. It was a rainy version of the Ice Hotel, I suppose. A little more whimsical, and rainy, and not frozen. I'd been six times before and wanted to go back. It made me laugh in a way that the United States doesn't. We had rainy times but good times. In spite of the rain it was a jolly place. I can remember Kathie and me riding bikes in the rain for hours and then coming upon this Irishman leaning against his bicycle with a golf hat on or whatever they wear, and he said, "How are you doing?" I said, "It's just awful weather, it's just awful," and he said, "No, it's not. It hasn't gotten cold yet." So I like them; they're optimistic and philosophical. They're not industrialized, really-there was no industrial revolution-so they drive pretty haphazardly. They don't have a great relationship to machinery, to say the least. There's a lot of banging around and the roads are very narrow, and they just get in their cars and go, you know they just put the pedal to the metal and they're going everywhere, in all directions. We were invited to the Scanlon estate. John Scanlon was a publicist, a very big one, in all senses of the word. He was a publicist for Bill Clinton, actually, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and he had this huge house in Ireland that he was inviting a group of us over to for this birthday bash. He was a big gourmand, and he perished in front of the TV after a big meal just two weeks before we were supposed to go, just died. His wife said, "Come on over anyway, John would have loved it." So over we went, in spite of his death, about twelve of us, five children-my niece, my stepdaughter, and my two sons, and Tara Newman's son-and the rest adults, and the house was big enough to accommodate that without any confusion. I have to say that this place, exquisite stone manor that it was, reminded me a little bit of The Shining. It was disconcerting, actually. It was set right in the middle of these woods and fields, and the kids went running in the elds with no fear of deer ticks for the rst time in a long time. The woods looked like Harry Potter woods; they were very old, it was about twelve acres of land, and all very spooky. It was in the town of Mort, which was even more of a spooky name, in the county of Offaly. O-f-f-a-l-y. We arrived on the longest day of the year, June 21, 2001, and all went to celebrate with a treasure hunt. In the morning, the following day, the next-longest day of the year, Barbara Leary was down in the kitchen-Barbara Leary was the ex-wife of Timothy Leary and she was one of the guests thGray, Spalding is the author of 'Life Interrupted The Unfinished Monologue', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400048618 and ISBN 1400048613.