Funny gift irish

Ta cuma baisti air," Kate responds. It looks like rain.

Michael, her instructor, disagrees. "Ta an aimsir og dul i bhfebhas."The weather is improving.

Kate can see that the weather is improving but wanted to show off her expanded vocabulary. Now she insists that the weather is getting worse, "to, se ag dul in olcas," and for good measure adds that the wind is rising. "Ta angaoth ag ein."

just then a gust of wind whistles down the chimney. From the sofa near the window, where he is giving a lucky manuscript a second reading, Kate's husband Paul laughs.

"Be careful," he warns Michael in Irish, "she is a witch."

Kate turns to him and starts to speak, but Michael raps his knuckles on the table, twice.

"Ta obair le deanamh!" There is work to be done.

Kate is not Irish. She is a Katherine in a family of Katherines, whose grandmother and mother and various cousins have taken all other variations of the name: Katherine, Kath, Kay, Cat, Kitty. She is a Kate only by process of elimination and is living in Ireland because her husband is Irish, the real thing, born, raised, educated in Ireland. Kate met Paul when she was a student and he was visiting poet for three years at her upstate New York university. When she announced her plans to marry a man old enough to be her father, no one, except her father, thought she might have done better.

Paul is slender, even slight, with a diminutive frame, pink skin, white hair, but is a man of enormous presence, with eyes you remember-intense, blue-and a rich, resonant voice he never has to raise; it projects when it needs to and has the natural properties of a magnet. It was his voice that first attracted Kate at a party five years ago, even before she turned to see who it was who was speaking. And then she found him a joy to talk to, and to talk to again. In conversation he is attentive and never interrupts, but is also witty, funny, often brilliant. Several of Kate's friends, despite the general disdain for faculty-student relationships that had recently swung into fashion, taking Paul by surprise, were jealous when he chose her; they considered her lucky. She was not even in poetry, but prose; she was not even his student. Which is how they were able to keep it quiet.

She too considered herself lucky. Amharach!

Living in the west of Ireland now, she's learning Irish because, barring space travel, it seems one of the few unexplored territories left, the information highway having paved the entire globe, telephone, fax, and e-mail having destroyed all sense of distances, bridged all land masses.

As Paul has said, "No island is an island."

Ireland is not strange enough, not elsewhere enough. Even out here in the west she can buy chili paste and green salsa. She can read the same books she could read at home and even see the same movies, if she really wanted to, if she wanted to go as far as Dublin or Galway and stay overnight. The same sitcoms screech from televisions everywhere. But the Irish language seems truly exotic. She sees those hopelessly tangled syllables as an impenetrable jungle she will have to hack her way into, something that will be conquered only with great effort.

Is cursa eachtraiochta e, she calls her lessons.

An adventure course.

Michael, Kate's tutor, has been a close friend of Paul's for years. A big burly man, tall for an Irishman, tall for any man, with a large head and a lot of curly black hair, he falls halfway between Paul and Kate in age, ten years younger than Paul and ten years older than Kate. A writer and translator, he makes a living teaching Irish in the local schools, the boys' school in the morning and the girls' in the afternoon. When he submits poetry translations to the literary magazine Paul edits, Paul always publishes them, not because he and Michael are friends, but because the translations are so faithful to the rhythmic and assonantal complexities of the Gaelic originals. This is not easy to achieve. Many translations from Irish into English give the impression of too many people being crammed into too small a room. Yet Michael makes it seem easy, easy and graceful, and Paul is always grateful for his submissions. Nevertheless, when Paul asked if he would consider tutoring Kate, Michael seemed overjoyed to be able do something for him in return.

And then, Paul supposed to Kate, the extra twenty quid a week wouldn't hurt, either.

The two-hour sessions take place at Michael's house on Friday afternoons, when he comes home early to be with his son while his wife stays later at her job in a local gift shop. Paul is usually there too, having driven Kate, who doesn't have a full Irish driver's license-it sounds so delicious to her, a full Irish license, like a full Irish breakfast-because she hasn't yet passed what she thinks of as the Mount Everest of driving tests, and so is not insured.

She not only has not passed the test, she has failed it twice, not managing to execute the "reverse around a corner" requirement neatly enough, running a rear tire over the curb the first time, and cracking a tail-light in a hedge the second, and it takes months to get on the books again for another test. She is not alone in this. So many people regularly fail the road test that several greeting card companies manufacture a selection of cards both congratulating those who have managed to pass the test and commiserating with those who fail. How such stringent rules and regulations could result in so much slaughter on the roads is a mystery to Kate. The death rate could hardly be higher if they put every five-year-old behind the wheel. It seems to her they might as well do away with the driving test altogether, especially since any tourist getting off the plane, even those used to driving on the wrong side of the road, can hop into a rental car and drive away from the airport. Of course, they pay through the nose for the privilege, at insurance rates Kate and Paul cannot possibly afford on a year-round basis. As he prefers that she be fully insured before taking his beloved Volvo on the road, he doesn't mind driving her in the meantime.

Certainly not to these lessons, where he waits for her, lounging on the sofa in the window, doing his own work. When the weather keeps his five-year-old godson indoors, Paul enjoys keeping him amused, priding himself on how long he can keep Brian from interrupting his father. he also enjoys eavesdropping on the lessons, which have moved from chitchat about the weather into a discussion of Peg Sayers's account of her life on the Great Blasket island, the book Kate has been making her way through for weeks. he himself turned his back on the Irish language after having it crammed down his throat for more than a dozen years at school. Crammed down his throat, stuffed up his nose. It wasn't like learning Italian or French or Spanish. He'd had no choice in the matter; he was a prisoner subjected to daily forced feedings of an unpalatable mush. Submit or perish: that was the choice, and he felt damaged by the experience. When he first saw Kate struggling with the Sayers book, he threw up his arms. "Peig!" he cried, as if he'd been struck. "Ah, God, bloody Peigl"

But he finds that he enjoys overhearing these lessons. A word here, a word there, triggers fountains of speech. How easily it comes flooding back after all these years! There may be something to be said, after all, for having things beaten into you at an early age. he believes that Kate, as comparatively young as she is, is too old to learn Irish, that she might as well try to learn to execute a difficult Paginini caprice on the violin, now that the musculature of her fingers and hand are set for life.

"I'm away," he says, in Irish, laying aside the manuscript he's been reading. Today, for the second Friday in a row, he has to leave early for an appointment that can't be rearranged. he lifts a hand to Michael and, still speaking in Irish, as is required even of young Brian during the two hours of Kate's lesson, he tells her he will see her at home. But she calls after him in English, a violation of the rules.

"Don't forget to take my bike out of the car!" Last week Paul forgot and drove away with her bicycle still in the back of the Volvo. It's too far to walk, especially in clogs, and she had to wait for Michael's wife to get home so he could drive her. She could see that his wife was not pleased, not in the least.