As an American of Irish ancestry, David Monagan fell in love with Ireland in 1973, when he was an idealistic, Flann O'Brien-reading student at Trinity College in a Dublin that really was a dirty old town.
But it was not until he was a middle-aged, married father of three, and Ireland was in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom, that something possessed him and his wife to abandon a comfortable life in Connecticut for an unpredictable adventure resettling in Ireland's second city, Cork.
His account of the year of living Irishly is set forth in ''Jaywalking With the Irish," a delicious play on the Hibernian penchant for rule breaking.
A honeymoon and frequent vacations in Ireland could not prepare him for actually setting down roots in the land of his forebears, because by the time the Monagans arrived at their Victorian house on the north side of Cork with three kids and 13 suitcases, Ireland, after 150 years of famine, revolution, and grinding poverty, had finally matched Yeats's observation and changed, changed utterly.
Crime was on the rise, traffic jams immobilized parts of the island, materialism was rampant, and so much of the new disposable income was spent on alcohol that the old stereotype of the Irish drinking too much was actually beginning to come true.
The Monagans tried to settle in what they imagined was Ireland while the country was awash in prosperity, which Monagan contends has swept away a lot that was special about the place. As an outsider, he had observed with an admiring if romantic detachment what the Irish had going for them when they were poor: unspoiled countryside, good humor, and great banter.
The stories here are good ones, acquired often but not exclusively in pubs, especially an unpretentious boozer called the Hi-B. Burkie, the pub's resident sculptor, recalls that in a Manhattan bar once, a Jewish fellow asked him what time it was, and when Burkie said it was half-five, the Jewish fellow said half-five is two-thirty.
''Christ," Burkie says, ''didn't he have a point?"
Corkonians, whose singsong accent and quirky sense of humor baffle even other Irishmen, left Monagan initially bewildered. People often didn't mean what they said, or didn't say what they meant.
''Why," he asked Seamus Wilkinson, the cousin of the Irish mentor under whose tutelage Monagan became enchanted with the country in the 1970s, ''do people in this country hold on to their secrets so fervently?"
''If you tell people too much," Seamus replies, ''they'll start talking about you."
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