coffee in the funeral home

In a quiet pub in the ancient town of Kilkenny, Ireland, a few years ago now. We are playing pool in the back room.

"I want that picture with the horse," says the French girl, who is drunk. I persuade her to leave the picture on the wall. She and the Australian girl smuggle a couple of pint glasses into her bag instead. This is actually good because when we come back to the hostel late at night after our pub crawl and want to continue drinking, we can't find any other glasses.

The Australian boy, who is young and adorable, hangs out the window into the mild Irish night. "I want to call my girlfriend," he says longingly, not caring that three girls are teasing him for always saying this. And he does. We giggle in the background while he is trying to tell her how much he misses her. She seems mostly annoyed at the other end, far away in Sydney.

The next day we walk through Kilkenny castle. I dream of a long-lost world and stroke the rough stone walls. The sun is shining over the impossibly green lawn in front of the castle. We sit on the grass and have a picnic. I ask the Australians about a word they used that I didn't understand. I'm determined to learn all the English in the world. They giggle, the word turns out to be one you shouldn't really use in civilized company and not of much use to me anyway since it's Aussie slang. I'll remember it forever now.

Driving home in the French girl's tiny Renault we get lost again. It's impossible not to get lost on Irish roads. The lane is winding through fields and hills and cow herds. We swerve to avoid running over a cat.

In late afternoon, still on the road, everything seems quiet and hazy. Weariness settles over me like fog. I fight a sudden feeling of melancholia and request a stop for coffee. We pull up in Carlow, almost a ghost town. We manage to find a place that is open and it turns out to be a pub combined with a funeral home. We discuss this interesting fact at length over coffee.

"I'm glad we got lost," someone says. "Otherwise we wouldn't have seen that cat."

We all agree that the cat was an important element of our trip to Kilkenny.