I hate our scanner! I’ve been trying to scan a postcard from a pub we went to after Banana’s funeral. I’ve meant to post this for a while now, because Lumpy and I had such a surreal and wonderful experience there. We were driving around towards the downtown area because we thought, “surely we can find a non chain food restaurant/bar/pub in this area…” Lo and behold, we came upon this little treaure. We saw a neon sign in the window for a non-American beer and thought that we might just be in for a treat. We were. We went in and sat down and it was like we had left Florida suddenly. Actual Irish were at the bar and sitting around the pub. Whuh? In Tampa?
Here’s the pub, by the way: http://www.fourgreenfields.com/ We had so much fun. We were surrounded by shouting, laughing, flirting, and all you can hope to find in a pub. We’ll see how it compares to Dublin ‘09, but until then, we have a few Chicago pubs we can compare Four Green Fields to, and frankly, it totally measured up. After a while, a musician started playing, and we knew we’d hit the ball out of the park. There were a couple of young trendy folks ordering mixed drinks (at a pub?!?! whuh?!?!), but they were out on the rear patio…or at least, mostly out of our view. We loved our server, she was friendly, yet left us alone (which is exactly what we like in a server), and we basically didn’t have to talk to anyone but each other.
Sometimes I’m not sure why this experience struck us so hard, but I think it comes down to Banana leading us there. We were quite dreading the bar/restaurant experience in Tampa, since neither one of us is trendy, exciting or hip, but we passed this bar and something clicked. We even did a loop to try to find it again. We were comfortable, relaxed, and happy, which is more than we could say about the whole day. I cried most of that day, dreading saying goodbye to our girl. She led me to what I needed that night. F*#ck yeah.
**Oh, and to the family that had the deaf daughter; hell yeah. She was more expressive than most speaking children I know, and frankly, I know a lot of girls in her age group right now, thanks to She Runs. She played hard, and it was fun to watch her. Your family will never in a thousand years read this, but holy crap I loved watching you all.
Thanks Four Green Fields. You didn’t know what you were doing for us that night. It had been a hellish, hellish, painful day. We found a small piece of what we know in a place we never wanted to be in the first place.
