How I met Seamus Heaney

A wise man once said, "Never miss a good opportunity to shut up." This is sound advice that most people find a way to ignore or forget at exactly the wrong moment.

For example, in my experience during unscheduled encounters with uniformed members of law enforcement, six words never seem to have the compelling logic and irresistible power they had the moment before I uttered them: "Officer, you've made a big mistake."

Never works, never will. Yet I can't help myself.

Sometimes it's not the spoken words but the space between them that causes calamity. What I think is a thoughtful, measured response to my wife's wardrobe question - (Pause) "No, honey, (pause) that doesn't make you look fat. (Pause) Not at all" - is perceived as insincere and inflammatory.

Damned if you do, damned if you (pause) don't.

But there was one failed opportunity I had to shut up that I really regret. I blame it on the altitude. This happened at about 35,000 feet somewhere over the North Atlantic with a bunch of buddies who, on a lark that became an annual tradition, were flying to Ireland for a long weekend of song, laughter, and multiple pints of Guinness.

There were a dozen of us scattered around the cabin in the coach section of an Aer Lingus 747. It was in February 1986, and the Irish national airline offered an offseason round-trip transatlantic flight from New York to Shannon for $250.

I was sitting in that crowded middle section of coach, and there was a white-haired Irish guy sitting in the aisle seat to my right. He looked like a college professor in his tweed jacket. We got to talking and he told me he was heading home from a trip to Boston. Nice guy.

We shared stories, but he seemed more interested in me and my buddies' coming weekend adventure than I was in his middle-aged Irish life. I never asked him what he did for a living.

"So what do you do in Philadelphia?" he asked me. And I answered, "I'm a writer."

What you have to understand is that I never say that. To me, "I'm a writer" sounds pretentious. I usually answer, "I'm a newspaperman," or "I write a column for The Philadelphia Inquirer." But, to this friendly white-haired Irish gentleman, I identified myself as a writer.

He was most impressed. "You write a daily column?" he said. "I can't imagine." I sat there smug and beaming. I felt like Bob Uecker in that funny beer commercial saying, "I must be in the front rowwww."

At some point, one of the flight attendants walked over and whispered something in his ear. He nodded, and turned to me. "I've been invited by someone to come up to the lounge in first class," he said, but he wasn't nearly as excited as I would have been. He shook my hand and said: "Nice talking with you. Enjoy your weekend. Good luck with your writing."

I figured he'd be back before the end of the flight. But that was the last I saw of him. When I stood up to stretch my legs, Bob Herndon, one of my more literate tour buddies, came up to me and asked, "Do you know who that was?" I said no. He mentioned a name I didn't recognize.

"He's like the greatest living poet in Ireland," Bob said.

The next morning, my seatmate's photo was on the front page of the Irish Independent, showing him receiving an honor from Harvard University. I had been talking and sitting next to Seamus Heaney, who a few years later would win the Nobel Prize for literature and who is considered the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats.

After he died Aug. 30, at age 74, his funeral was broadcast live in Ireland, and all I could think of was me grinning at Seamus Heaney and telling him proudly, "I'm a writer."

D'oh!