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As in Venice, where I was astonished not by the great works of art in the Accademia but instead by the cracks in the walls, so too on the Aran Islands I grew wide-eyed not so much at the austere beauty of the place but at the handful of words you see above, on an artless souvenir in a tourist shop.

Italy sometimes unmasks my being a philistine. Ireland fiercely stirs up my inner Celt.

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My first encounter with the power of the written word—down here at the local level of daily life, not up there in the pantheon of Literature—was in the early 1970s. I was a nuclear reactor operator on submarines. (Can you believe that? I still can’t. After you finish reading this entry, try this one to learn more.)

Submarine patrol passes slowly. And, well, boys will be boys. On my ship, during the dull midcruise stretch, there was a certain, um, indecorous ritual that just about everybody was subjected to, one at a time when caught unawares while visiting back aft in the engineering spaces. Well, not everybody; no doubt the senior-most officers were exempted.

And me.

I’m convinced that I escaped the unseemly rite of passage because they (the boys who will be boys) were afraid I would write about them.

You see, my creative outlet on patrol was to write a “ship’s paper.” It was called The Underwater Log. It had a cute masthead illustration:

It was typed, in that era well before desktop publishing, and then mimeographed. About two dozen copies of each issue would periodically emerge from the logroom. They were much anticipated—which reveals just how boring patrol must have been—and quickly snatched up.

Because I was a short-timer and had developed a notoriously bad attitude, and because I was a young man unrestrained by empathy or good judgment, I wrote some wicked stuff. Finnegan was the name, and satire was my game. At one point, the content crossed a line, and the captain ordered that all copies of the Underwater Log be confiscated.

Though I probably left him little choice, he shouldn’t have done that.

A few days later (still submerged) came the sanctioned opportunity for the crew to let off steam in the Talent Show. Being freshly out of the newsletter business, I turned to musical theater. I wrote a satire, patterned on West Side Story; auditioned eager actors and helped them remember the tunes and rehearse the new lyrics; and hid out backstage (near the ice cream maker by the galley) as the one-night-only Topside Story premiered before a wildly receptive audience.

The rival gangs were the Nukes and the Pukes. We three dozen or so from the nuclear engineering spaces back aft were badly outnumbered by the ninety-some Forward Pukes, but by dint of superior cynicism, and no doubt a superlative libretto, in the rumble we prevailed.

I wish the show could have been recorded (and an issue or two of the Underwater Log archived). Oh well, for now a solitary fragment must suffice.

For days—and much satirized in the Underwater Log—we had been doing busywork, painting for the sake of painting. Pipes, deck plates, cabinets . . . if it didn’t move, it got painted. We were fed up. So you can imagine the reception when, on that ill-starred night, in a sketch called “Captain Crapky” (to the tune of L. Bernstein and S. Sondheim’s “Gee, Officer Krupke”) the captain sings, in indignation and denial, to a concerned junior officer:

        You say the men are angry,

        But I say that they ain’t:

        Crew’s morale just needs

        A coat of paint.

My inner Celt was surely proud.