Bow Bugs

All my kids played violin when they were very small. Their teachers told them they must practice every day because if they left their bow in the nice dark case for too long, bow bugs would get in and eat the bow.
Bow bugs. Yeah Right. That ranks right up there with the tooth fairy. Except for one of my kids decided after freshman year that he'd had enough of the viola and put it away. About a year later, someone needed to borrow a bow and I knew there was a perfectly good bow with the viola. So I took it out and discovered, to my shock, that the majority of the bow hairs were severed as neatly as if someone had cut them with a razor blade. I asked all the kids who cut the viola bow hair and why. They were all dumbfounded. My kids do dumb things like kick tortilla chips under their beds and then wonder why they get mice, or forget their wet laundry in the washer, but this didn't really seem like anything any of them would do for any reason.

It turns out that there really are bow bugs. They're called anthrenus museorum. I already knew you should ideally store unused stringed instruments and bows in the open, but with a big family it just seemed safer in the case. You learn something every day.

A Tribute To Grainne

When I was a lot younger I shared a flat with three other girls in a fashionable but dilapidated historical Dublin neighborhood. This was years and years before the Celtic tiger had even begun to roar. Ireland was a quiet provincial backwater in those days; jobs were nearly nonexistent and what there were were poorly paid. Our flat on Anglesea Road, was on the same street where Brendan Behan had lived. But the magnificent old Georgian house had been crudely partitioned into flats. Any fixtures of value had been removed and replaced with cheap and flimsy. The heat was regulated to only be on in the evenings, and it cost 50p of a pre Euro Irish punt to heat the water for a bath. There were two bedrooms, the smaller of which I shared with Grainne. The other girls, both from Co. Tipperary, were named Liz and Eilish and it seems they knew each other from their school days. Grainne was from Mullingar, and had come to the big smoke to be rich and famous. Liz and Eilish were sensible gals. Liz had a civil service job at the DMV, and Eilish was a young university lecturer in economics or something totally sensible. Grainne was only 18 or 19 years old, a big sturdy freckled Irish country girl with a mop of shockingly red hair, whom John, Liz's fella, referred to as the Mullingar heifer. The Irish gals were a little dubious of having a Yank share their quarters. Grainne was my biggest advocate. After all, she reasoned, I came from a lot closer to Hollywood than she did (and somehow that was a positive thing.) And it couldn't be disputed that I did have a steady source of income and seemed unlikely to bring a parade of drunken chaps into the flat, so I was chosen to be the fourth roommate.

Grainne had landed a job upon arriving in Dublin in the typing pool at Radio Telefish Erin. She was sure that within a week or two someone at the radio station would recognize her talent, and put her on the air, and her career would be launched. When that didn't happen immediately, she decided that the thing to do was to attach herself to a man with power and influence. Of course such men didn't hang out in the typing pool; no... far from that. You had to find out what pubs they went to and make yourself available after hours, according to Grainne. Grainne was magnanimous too: she was utterly confident she could snag me a man too. I once went on one of her hunting trips with her just for the "crack." Since I was obviously clueless, Grainne plotted that she'd do all the snagging; and once she'd had her pick I could take the one that was left. I sat alone in a dark corner of the pub soaking up Guinness while Grainne flitted about the place tirelessly looking for an opening. When I had had all the Guinness an eight and a half stoner could hold I could see that Grainne hadn't snagged anything in a whole evening of flirting. As far as I could tell there wasn't anything worth snagging in the whole joint anyway.
So we went home and had a cup of tea, and Grainne expressed quite strongly the view that she had been badly misled-- obviously we had not been at the "right" pub. I was dubious that such a place existed, but I kept my opinion to myself.

Grainne had a penchant for thinking large, but not thoroughly. She decided once that she would cook a gourmet feast at the flat, I guess, for this man, whoever he was, before she had even found him. So she went out and bought a couple of cornish game hens. I'm pretty sure Grainne had no idea what to do with a cornish game hen. But that was far from the least of her worries. She busied herself with the pub scene, sure her savior would walk in the door, be smitten with her, and accompany her to the flat for a light ripaste. Liz & Elish had gone down the country for the weekend, and I had gone to spend a pleasant weekend up in Malahide with my friend Jane. On Sunday afternoon I happened to meet up with Liz and Eilish at the bus stop in the center of the city and we all went together towards our digs. A pong greeted us when we entered the flat. Grainne's game hens had been hastily stashed on a shelf on Friday, and without refrigeration (not that we didn't have a fridge, mind you!) by Sunday afternoon they were busily poisoning the air. I'm the one who ended up sweeping the reeking mess into the dustbin and removing it from the dwelling. Apparently that sort of implicated me by default until about midnight when Grainne showed up wondering what had happened to her supplies.

Alas for Grainne, her employment with RTE lasted but a short time. It is possible that she couldn't type to begin with, or was so distracted by her quest for her man, that her performance dipped to below abysmal and she got sacked. It is also entirely possible that she annoyed someone pretty badly. But cost effectiveness of a worker was a foreign idea to the Irish in those days. If a company had money (which RTE most surely did,) they rarely sacked anyone. My guess is Grainne got tired of the whole thing and simply stopped going. That guy who wrote the screenplay of "Office Space" probably got the idea from Grainne.

And so..... Grainne went on the dole. They didn't ask too many questions in those days in Ireland when you went on the dole, as their recordkeeping was hopelessly byzantine. As a condition of collecting the dole, Grainne was supposed to be looking for a job. Alas... the jobs she could have got--a youngster with no discernible skills--were pedestrian, and Mr. Wonderful wouldn't be there. She took to sleeping late, and what's worse, not paying the rent. Our greasy landlord, Mr. Woods, with his yucky polyester shirts, was not flexible about rent payment. So Liz and Eilish and I chipped in for a few weeks for Grainne's share but eventually Grainne was politely invited to go elsewhere, and was quickly replaced by a very sensible young woman from Cork.

None of us kept a tight line to Grainne, but Ireland is a small place. Grainne the drama queen persisted for quite some time in her fantasy about Prince Charming in the form of a rich not-too-old-or-nasty-looking gentleman who would buy her a pint, and from there all would fall into place and he would sweep her off to a high life. Some time after I left Ireland, it all became too much for Grainne, and one evening she washed a whole bottle of sleeping pills down with a slug of whiskey and never woke up.

Liz and Elish went on to prosper in good health, and I reunited with them many years later. As we reminisced about the old times, we couldn't help but remember Grainne with a bittersweet tear. Maybe if she'd just gone to America.... or gotten some sense....