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Editor's Recap: 2001 An Irishman's Odyssey

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"He'll see you now." Mrs. Scully, the receptionist, indicated the door at the far side of the waiting room. She smiled at me when I walked past, but as I raised my hand to knock before entering the doctor's office, I distinctly heard her whisper into the intercom, "The bore is coming now."

Dr. Siegfried Mulder was seated at his desk when I walked in. Without looking up, he waved me to the leather couch. As if I didn't already know my way.

"How many visits have you had?" he asked, searching through his files.

"About twenty," I said.

He shook his head and sighed. "Twenty visits, and we have yet to discover why you are racked with these irrational feelings of guilt." He sighed again. "What point have we reached?"

"My tenth birthday," I told him.

Once more, Dr. Mulder heaved a sigh. He had been sighing a lot in recent months, and I was beginning to worry about his state of mind. If I wasn't mistaken, Dr. Mulder was showing definite signs of becoming depressed. I wondered what it could be that was bothering him so much.

"Okay," he said dully, picking up his notepad from the desk. "I suppose we had better begin." He flicked through page after page of notes. "Now, can you tell me what happened after your tenth birthday party?"

I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes.

"Well," I began, "the first thing I had to do was raise bail for Mickey MacGonagle, my very best friend in the whole wide world. You will recall that Mickey got into big bother with the cops when they arrived to break up the party. And, believe me, it wasn't easy to find that much money in a hurry. When a bloke puts half-a-dozen cops in hospital, they set the bail pretty high, I can tell you. Even when he's only ten years old."

I settled deeper into the soft, plush leather as the memories came flooding back.

As luck would have it, I continued, a Shakespearian tragedy was playing at the time, just a short distance down the road from the police station where my friend Mickey was being held. And outside the theatre, a line of culture vultures stood waiting for the doors to open.

Actually, the play was Twelfth Night, which, as any aficionado of Shakespeare will tell you, is one of the Bard's most popular comedies, (in fact, it's so good, they named it twice: 'Twelfth Night' or 'What You Will'). Unfortunately, by the time the local amateur dramatic society had done its worst, the play had been transformed from a comedy into a tragedy of the most appalling proportions.