Food Feature: Time traveler

I lose watches when I travel.

That’s why I always fork out for a cheap Casio, which is what I bought after I lost the ugly watch my mom brought back from an outdoor market in Australia.

“I found just the watch for you,” she said last April. “It’s water resistant.”

“Resistant?” I whined. “Mom, that just means it’s not waterproof.”

I caught myself and made nice to Momma. It was awfully sweet of her to bring this thing from halfway around the world. So I thanked her and tried to set it.

It was impossible to figure out, and there were no instructions. The bulbous, black pile of ugliness lost minutes every hour. On my wrist, it looked like a tumor.

Worse still, its unpredictable alarm embarrassed the hell out of me in May when I went down to St. Petersburg for an editor’s workshop. So I stuffed the watch into my backpack in the hotel room and forgot about it. The workshop was great. I met this journalist from Ireland. The best thing about Niall Kiely — better even than his winning personality — was that he forced wine on the rest of us and put it on his expense account.

After the workshop, we hopped into his rental car and headed down to a state park just south of Sarasota.

“They’ve got gators, down there,” I told Niall. “You ever canoed among gators?”

“They’re green, aren’t they?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I’m from Ireland,” Niall noted. “Anything green is in Ireland.”

Despite the tall tales, Niall proved an excellent bowman. And the gators at Myakka State Park were splendidly aggressive, propelling themselves toward the boat like evil-eyed torpedoes.

We pulled out of the water, returned the canoe and headed to the Tampa airport. As he dropped me off, Niall invited me to visit him in Dublin.

It wasn’t until I got back to Atlanta that I noticed I’d ditched that ugly watch somewhere down in Florida. A gator, I figured, must have swallowed it.

Not long after the Florida trip, my cousins invited me to join them on a biking and driving tour of Ireland. I e-mailed Niall.

Early one Sunday, he picked me up at the airport and brought me to the charming townhome just south of downtown Dublin that he and his wife, Molly, had renovated. I mainlined cholesterol in the form of an “Irish breakfast” of ham and brown bread.

Then, Niall took me to his favorite pub, Nesbitt’s, for “a pint.” Now, if you’ve been to Ireland, you know that when the natives say something like, “Oh, we’ll have to stop at Nesbitt’s for a pint,” they don’t really mean just a glass of Guinness. They mean anything from two or three pints to staying all afternoon — until everyone in the pub seems like your brother, until the wiry old man leaning against the wall in the tweed jacket starts sharing his snuff with you, and your back’s slapped for being such a fine Yank that you understand the Irish, until all of a sudden it doesn’t matter that you can’t make out the slang through the accents because at this point you wouldn’t care what they said even in American English, until you’re almost set to cry at the warmth and the welcome and the fellowship of all these people but you hold back the tears because too much fluid running down that side of your face might ruin the shaky balance you’ve achieved as you teeter in the middle of the floor and you don’t want to embarrass all Americans by falling right over.

Luckily, this trip to the pub was the former variety. Niall and I downed a few, then he drove me back to the airport in time to rendezvous with my cousins.

The cousins and I pieced together the bikes, picked up the rental van and began tripping around Ireland. We headed to Kilkenny, where there was a castle and an arts festival. Then, to Waterford, where there was crystal. The biking was awesome. Even big trucks respect cyclists along Ireland’s hedged-in, narrow roads. They graciously wait for bikers to pass.

But one thought kept nagging me: Somehow, somewhere, during that first day, I’d lost the Casio I’d bought to replace that nasty watch from Australia. And watches do come in handy when you’re traveling. As best I could figure, I’d left the Casio at the Kielys, not the bar, so I left a message on Niall’s phone that I’d be back in a week to collect it.

The cousins and I headed west, where the scenery was even better and the people even more relaxed. We ended up in a remote place called Achill Island where ornery, independent-minded sheep graze the green edges of the continent; huge cliffs drop down to the ocean; ancient stone churches spot the landscape; and Grace O’Malley, the fabled 16th-century “pirate queen,” built a network of castles. Some people on Achill are more comfortable speaking Irish than English. And they see surprisingly few of the tourist buses you’ll find just a few hours south, at the famed Cliffs of Moher. It’s a place where a visitor can convince himself that time is forgotten and watches aren’t needed. But not having that Casio still bothered me.

We bulleted back to Dublin and the cousins flew out the next morning. I had nearly a week left abroad, so I headed back to Niall’s house and immediately began pestering Molly.

“We don’t have your watch,” she insisted for the first time in what became a running joke.

The next day, I stopped at a couple of pubs for a “pint” and returned to the Keilys’. “Where’s my watch?” I demanded. “We don’t have it!” she insisted.

Another day, I checked out the European artists’ collection at the National Gallery, people-watched on the pedestrian mall downtown, and bought gifts at a woolen shop along the River Liffey.

“Where is it?” “I don’t have it.” The joke was wearing thin.

I went off to London for a few days, and returned late on a Saturday for my final visit. To Niall’s delight, I groused at how frustratingly reserved the English act in their pubs compared to the Irish. “I’m going to get that watch back from you,” I told Molly.

“I don’t have it!” she claimed. This time, though, she pointed to something black on the coffee table. “You can have that one if you want it.”

I picked it up. It looked vaguely similar to that other watch — the one my mother had brought back from Australia.

“It’s a terrible watch,” Molly said. “Our son found it in the back seat of a rental car when we were on vacation last summer. It rings all the time, and he couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. It’s very irritating. He gave it to me, but it would wake us up in the middle of the night so I put it down here.”

Hmmm ... rental car ... vacation ... “Wait a second. That’s my watch!”

“No, it’s not. That’s a different watch. I already told you. We don’t have your watch. My son found that watch in a rental car in Florida.”

“That’s what I’m saying. That is my watch. It’s another watch I lost — in the back seat of Niall’s rental car before y’all joined up with him in Florida.”

She insisted that I take it. But I couldn’t. The world’s ugliest watch always had ventured eastward from Australia.

I rose early the next morning to catch my flight and stuffed that “water-resistant” piece of crap under Molly’s knitting. I headed back home without a timepiece.??