NL.18 -- Molly Malone's, Amsterdam

Getting on a jet plane shortly.

On the occasion of a return to Amsterdam —all too brief, alas, but oh so welcome— it feels right to revive the Netherlands sub-series in Dispatches.

Why not do so just off the winding Zeedijk, nearer to Centraal station than you’d like, along the Oudezijds Kolk canal, behind —no, beneath!, no, overseen by, no, in the embrace of— the dome of Saint Nicholas, sits Molly Malone’s.

It’s not as tourist-lauded as Mulligans, another Irish establishment, over on the Amstel River. But for me there’s no contest. It’s the human beings and the feel, the “vibe” they create, for locals and for Amsterdam’s ceaseless stream of strangers. Even against the odds on weekends. Rossa, Claire, Jack, Sinead, Steph, Dominic, Anthony, (and Cathy and Niall, who went back to Dublin), in no order, and pious St. Nicholas knows I'm forgetting a good name or two— it’s the humans and the atmosphere they cultivate.

Weather permitting (and it’s a wide spectrum for such “permitting” in the Netherlands) I’ll sit outside for a spell. In the late afternoon, at one of the wooden tables. There are odd people, boats and bicycles going by. Someone comes out occasionally to speak and have a smoke and make a joke, to have a word. There’s Jack arriving on his bike, bearing responsibility, six things that need doing.

There might be an angled sliver of sun. There’ll be more affectionate teasing once my cover is blown.

If it’s later, I set up shop indoors.

You enter the gentle gloom of Molly’s, canalside. It's as if you’ve climbed suddenly below deck in the world’s most beautiful ship. The thick wooden beams, the low ceiling. It troubles you back and worries you forward. It’s old and fake-old. It’s Amsterdam.

I’m transfixed by the old cash register. By the once-studious array of books and bottles and lighted glassware. The registers are common, bog-standard in Irish pubs. But this one's different, I swear, propping up its bent little calendar, set to the birthday of the very youngest patrons of drinking age.

It becomes important, meditatively-speaking, to capture the old register from different angles, and in different lights. It stirs the flash of memory, the pressing puzzles, the distress and discombobulations, but also the crazy hope before the racket and all that’s submerged and all that’s streaming past. All that’s so unknowable, so strange. The world that isn’t there and the one that, apparently, is.

Middle-agedness. A kind of hammock, swaying gently, as familiar as it is flummoxing. “I feel [increasingly] like I’m floating,” quoth my friend Kris just the other day.

The Guinness tastes best in that particular corner. The one with the photos of notable Irishwomen and men, the one where I read a series of books, elaborated things in notebooks, and drew and painted —and drew and painted some more— the corner seat affording space to think, and to watch without watching. The corner seat with its angled view upon pretty much everything.

Maybe, eventually, I’ll join the sides of conversations, maybe not. I’ll hear stories already in play. But beautiful people can and will be found. In due course. In truth I savour the elixir of being alone, of finding that curious substance called time.

Joyce is on the wall —he’s tight there with me, in the simple pleasure of this corner.

What he characterised as life’s little “epiphanies” crop up, they surface, in such a space.

The staff in Molly's are gentle and patient. They’re responsible for this figuring ground. And they’ve seen a million of me.

A short video featuring photographs, drawings and paintings, and a patch of music “Molly Malone’s, Amsterdam” (07:23) follows . . .

* photographs, drawings, watercolours, and video by Kenneth Mills, with the exception of the (embedded) ink sketch of me, which is by Heidi V. Scott and appears with her permission.

** the magical snippet of music playing beneath the images in the video is something I happened to overhear a few months ago in a bar called Buffa’s on the Esplanade in New Orleans. It features the sounds of a gentle trio whose names I did not catch. Their rendering of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight” (off John Wesley Harding [1967], a riff upon what Pete Drake (pedal steel guitar), Charlie McCoy (bass guitar) and Kenneth A. Buttrey (drums) accomplished with Dylan (voice, guitar, piano, harmonica) in a few hours in their Nashville space in late November 1967 feels right, right at Buffa’s, and right alongside Molly Malone’s in Amsterdam.