In the picture above, a self-professed “triple gold equivalent” pop street band is performance bombed by a man in a Leopold Bloom costume on Crown Alley off of Temple Bar in Dublin on Bloomsday. While the street band was quite good, they clearly had nothing on Leopold Bloom. Mr. Bloom, who might have been a bit on the tippling way, spent a solid twenty minutes dancing for the crowd and playing air guitar on his stately cane. The band, for the most   part, seemed amused by his antics, though the lead singer, of course, did not.

The first time I saw a musical street performer was in Dublin. This is odd, because I had certainly visited cities before that one. I had even lived in (or in close proximity to) a couple–first Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which I went to highschool near, and then Burlington, Vermont, where I attended college. I never lived IN the city of Philadelphia, though, and Burlington is Vermont’s equivalent of a city–that is, rather small.

It’s rather interesting to think about what the different types of performers in a city might say about that city. I found Paris had mimes in an abundance in public areas, and the musicians could only really be found in the connecting points between metro stations (though there is one old man who has been lip syncing opera in the same square, day after day, since I was at least the age of twelve). I’ve always gotten a sense that the culture in the more tourist oriented destinations in Paris is largely designed to be exxaggerated in order to more clearly communicated to a diverse audience. the other hand, Dublin seems mostly to be filled with living statues and musicians. Given the city’s tumultuous history with both memorialization and music, this also makes sense. In any case, it’s interesting to see people literally performing the values of the places they live and work in.

The rock in the picture above is a quernstone. Fascinating, yeah? Look at all the holes in it. Quernstone’s don’t look the way they do naturally. They’re rather manmade objects–large stones carved into flat shapes to provide a surface to mill grain on. They’ve got a pretty intense history, and variations on the idea they represent can be found all over the world. The British outlawed their use in Scotland in a bid to leave tenant farmers in that country more dependent on their landlords since their landlords were much more likely to be able to afford the more expensive and technologically complex mill. This law has only been repealed in the last decade or so, though I expect there aren’t many Scottish citizens who ran out to carve their own Querns when it was.

The particular Quernstone seen above is located in the Irish Museum of Archeology in Dublin. It’s quite interesting to me from a personal perspective because, before seeing this stone, I had no idea whatsoever what a Quernstone was. I had, however, seen one unearthed to much consternation in the farm my family once owned in West Virginia.

it was a really glorious hunk of rock, Granite worn through with hundreds of small, equally distributed divets. My grandfather had no idea what it was. He sent it to a friend of his who taught archeology at the university of West Virginia and the friend sent it back. He was baffled, too. Perhaps the rock back home isn’t a quernstone, though it doesn’t look it. It does remind me that the home I’m missing now is a home other people missed before. I don’t even know the Native American tribes that would have inhabited my former home, milling grain on that quernstone my grandfather later unearthed. Have their descendants stopped grieving for the home they’ve lost? Are there neW homes they’re grieving for instead? It can be hard to remember that the joy you’re forgetting losing was made from the joy another lost. Place is funny that way.