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.Everyone wore summer finery and laughed and thronged the bar table.Music thumped from somewhere, rock ‘n’ roll, but better than any of these kids’ bands, recorded, undoubtedly.We stopped at the lawn’s edge and looked, silently.It struck me how very beautiful even the most ordinary suburban yard is on a summer night, the lapping surges of green and the fresh smells of new-mown grass and blooming flowers, the tender gold light deepening toward dark blue, the sweet, heady feeling of dark falling down over you.Anything could happen on a southern summer night.Magic could come; mystery could live.I felt tears stinging my eyes.“I wonder if I should have brought something,” I said, mainly to break the silence.“You brought the entertainment,” Aengus said.“Who could ask for more?”“Who indeed?” I said, and we walked into the party.A good party can literally drown you; it is what I love and hate most about them, depending on my mood.This one swallowed us instantly and whole.We sank into a living mass of convivial humanity and did not really come up until after full dark.I know that someone or other kept my glass and plate full and everyone spoke warmly and interestedly about Aengus and me and our lives, and I know that I ate and drank and laughed and answered and felt warmly connected to these people who would be our nearest, if not dearest, for a long time.I got separated from Aengus early on but did not worry about it; I had seen him work a crowd before.But as the dark outside the circle of light grew dense, I began to wonder about him.Wasn’t he supposed to do some entertaining?I was just about to excuse myself from the bristly mustached man I had met before and go in search of Aengus, when a drum boomed once and echoed into the night.Silence fell.“Listen up, y’all!” Carol Partridge called out.We all turned toward her voice.She stood at the head of her driveway with an overhead spot trained on her.Beside her sat a three-legged stool and a big portable metal fire pit.The pit was full of crossed twigs and limbs piled atop charcoal.“It’s time to entertain you-all, and you’ll be happy to know that I didn’t bribe any of our kids’ bands or hire a mambo instructor.”There was laughter and clapping.“I did better than that,” she continued.“Tonight I’m proud to present to you our new neighbor Dr.Aengus O’Neill.I can never tell anyone what I had to do to get him to agree, but he’s going to tell you some of his very special, spine-chilling, heartrending Celtic myths and legends, for which he is justly famous on three continents.I guarantee you will never forget them.”There was more applause and cheering.Carol took a lighter from the pocket of her dress and knelt and touched it to the fire pit, and flames leaped into the darkness, showering sparks.As they settled, Aengus walked out of her garage and came and sat down on the stool.He was wearing white pants and a dark blue tee shirt, and the firelight danced on his sharp-planed face and lit his blue eyes nearly to phosphorescence.He leaned a wheel-thing against the stool and smiled and said, “Oscar Wilde said that we Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures.But we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”His brogue, rising out of the night and the fire, was almost as alien as Greek; there was a small murmur from the crowd.“And so,” he went on, “I am going to talk.”And he did.Into the firelight he spun the stories of his beloved Celts; some I had heard, but many were new to me.“Out the Kilronan/Kilmurvey Road, beside the holy well at the Church of the Four Beautiful Persons, called also the Ceathair Aluinn…,” he began.He slid directly into the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The cattle raid of Cooley).Next he told of the wanderings of Oisin, the ancient Celtic pagan hero who met with Saint Patrick to defend the old pagan order against this new Christendom.And on and on.Kings, warriors, hermits, ghosts, druids, holy mountains, the waves of the Irish sea, madmen, saints… there was nothing for an hour in the summer-sweet air of Carol Partridge’s backyard but the tapestry of Aengus’s Celts, nearer and realer to us by then than the partygoers standing beside us.He finished up with the tale of Hazelwood, a peninsula of Lough Gill between Annagh Bay and Half Moon Bay, where Yeats had imagined that the wandering Aengus, the ancient Celtic master of love and the god of youth, beauty, and poetry, had finally grown old.He stopped.There was no sound.Then, one by one, people began to clap, and then to whistle and cheer.The din went on for fully two minutes.Through it, Aengus smiled.“Now,” he said, “I’m going to end up with a celebration of the midsummer fire festivals that flourished wherever the Celt lit his torch [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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