In 1998, I moved from Baltimore, Maryland, where I’d lived my whole life to that point, to Waterford, Ireland.
Today I’m at home part of the year in Paris… and part of the year in Panama.
To make sense of that, I’ll start at the beginning…
I wanted to be a writer. Graduated with an English lit degree. Needed a job.
I was engaged to be married so didn’t want to leave town. Publishing gigs in Baltimore were hard to come by. A friend told me about a copy editor job. I sent a CV and landed an interview.
That’s how, one bright spring morning, I came to be standing on a cracked sidewalk staring at a brass door plaque.
Yes, this was 824 East Baltimore Street. Maybe my father was right to be concerned. I’d grown up in this city. I knew this block of East Baltimore Street. What kind of publishing company would be based here?
I mustered my courage and went inside for my meeting with Bill Bonner. The interview consisted of one question.
“What do you think of the Oxford comma?” Mr. Bonner wanted to know. “Yea or nay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Always. Apples, oranges, and pears isn’t the same as apples, oranges and pears.”
“Agreed,” Bill said. “When can you start?”
It took longer than it should have for me to cop on to the answer to my question about what sort of operation I was hooking up with. Turned out, Agora was a direct mail house.
“Filling up dumpsters across America,” as Bill put it. I’d had no idea.
To my relief, junk mail wasn’t the point. Here in the heart of the Baltimore ghetto, I was welcomed by an intriguing collection of oddballs.
The chief financial officer dressed year-round in white T-shirts and tiny white shorts to show off the forever tan he worked hard to maintain.
The chief financial editor’s office was stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers from around the world that he never threw out. In this pre-Internet world, he relied on them for research. How he ever found what he was looking for was a mystery.
No matter how early I arrived to work, Bill, Fred, and Robert were already hard at it. I so wanted to be part of their world but was just smart enough to recognize that I was nowhere near smart enough. My job was to edit copy I mostly didn’t understand. “Oil & War”? “Paris Confidential”? What business did this 21-year-old girl who’d traveled outside the United States but once and only to Bermuda for Spring Break have editing books with titles like those?
But Bill gave me the chance to take on those projects and others as unlikely. In the process, he opened my mind to a world that was so much bigger than the one I’d known.
I became editor and a couple of years later publisher of Agora’s International Living magazine. Not everyone Agora-wide was on board with the idea. Some had trouble taking this young sometimes ponytailed girl seriously.
My early-in seat at the Agora table set me on a career path I’d never imagined. And it connected me with my tribe. I found I liked these free-thinking contrarian misfits.
It also showed me I had a lot of catching up to do. These folks I was now spending my days with had been everywhere and seen everything.
One year in I took an extended vacation. My college roommate and I bought discounted tickets on Icelandair and a couple of Eurail passes then spent three weeks lugging backpacks across Europe.
My appetite was whetted. I didn’t only want to be a writer. I wanted to see the world.
I was fortunate. My wanderlust was supported. I was invited to join for business trips to London, Paris, Bonn, Hong Kong, and beyond. In my first five years at Agora, I visited 12 countries.
I participated in the purchase of a finca on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua that my Agora partners and I set about developing though none of us had any idea what we were doing. In these nascent days of my going-overseas experiences, that was my over-arching reality. I always felt like I was proceeding blindly.
Some days I still do.
Soon enough I was invited to become a partner in the International Living business…
And then came an even bigger chance.
How would I like to move to Ireland, Bill wondered one day.
Agora had been on a mission of global expansion for a decade. Now Bill wanted to establish a base in the Auld Sod whence the Bonners hailed.
Bill had more pragmatic motives, as well. This was the age of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland was working hard to attract foreign investment. Its Industrial Development Agency (IDA) offered a corporate tax rate of only 10% and grants for each Irish national employed.
Since starting at Agora I’d married, had a daughter, and divorced. Now I was embroiled in a dead-end office romance. Did I want to reboot my life in Europe? You betcha.
I’d been to Ireland before but only on holiday. Better take a closer look.
I packaged a two-weeklong tour of the Emerald Isle and invited readers of my International Living magazine to come along… as well as my parents and my 8-year-old daughter, Kaitlin. It was a chance for a family vacation that doubled as a scouting expedition.
Agora was headquartered in a vintage 19th-century building in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. We scheduled a dinner in the boardroom, placed Irish flags down the center of the conference table, dined on catered shepherd’s pie, toasted with Irish whiskey… and conceived a plan.
Stripped bare, here was the idea…
I’d leave my hometown, my family, my friends, my daughter’s school, her friends, and the stable position with loads of upside I’d worked years to secure.
Step 2 Kaitlin and I would take off to build a whole new life in a whole new place where we knew no one and had no infrastructure of support.
Boy, did I not know what I did not know.
Today I realize that was as it needed to be. A dose of naïve enthusiasm goes a long way when embarking on this kind of adventure. Trying to see too far ahead can keep you stuck at home.
My first challenge was to decide where the new Agora EU office would be based. The Irish IDA gave us three options. I could move to Sligo, Galway, or Waterford, three cities with economies in need of jump-starts.
The first morning of the Discovery Tour I’d organized, I sat at the head of the table in the meeting room of the Jury’s Hotel in Dublin with my 25 tour-goers, including my parents and my daughter. We regrouped on the itinerary: Dublin to Wexford to Waterford, then Cork, Galway, Sligo, Belfast, and back to Dublin.
After I set everyone free to collect their luggage so we could all meet back up in the hotel lobby in 20 minutes, I mentioned to the gentleman sitting to my right that I’d had trouble accessing my e-mail in the hotel business center earlier that morning.
“I don’t want to take off without checking in with the office in Baltimore,” I said, “but I can’t get into my account.”
“You should ask that fellow down at the end of the table to help you,” my new friend offered. “His name is Lief Simon. I think he knows about computers.”
Lief Simon, I learned over the coming days, was a longtime International Living reader. Like me, he was in Ireland not as a tourist but a scout. Lief, divorced from his wife of five years just two months earlier, was looking to make another big life change. He wanted to move from Chicago, where he’d been living and working while married, to Ireland.
He also wanted to make the leap from being an employee to building something of his own. Lief had two ideas: He thought he might either buy a pub and try life as an Irish publican… or invest in a sprawling Irish estate with the intention of converting it to a center for corporate retreats.
In Sligo, one typically grey and misty Irish summer day, we toured several properties for sale, including a 150-year-old farmhouse with outbuildings on a half-dozen acres falling to ruin but oozing romance and potential. Exploring the hay barn, I came upon Lief Simon, off in a corner on his own, wearing a Stetson and writing in a journal.
We chatted alone just a moment before the rest of the group found their way to us. But the moment made an impression. Like a meet-cute.
In the hotel bar that night after dinner I sat with my mom, dad, and daughter, revisiting the day’s discoveries.
“Some of the others and I are going to meet in the room across the way to talk about the houses we viewed today,” Lief said, leaning in to our small circle so I could hear him, “if you’d like to join us.
“Maybe you could give me your opinions. Do you think that farmhouse with the hay barn could work for my corporate retreat idea?”
Back in Dublin the final night of the tour, Lief again sought me out after dinner. He and some of the others were taking taxis across town to a dance club. Would I like to come along?
We danced until closing time, shared a taxi back to the hotel then a quick hug at the elevators, and wished each other well.
I returned to Baltimore to continue formulating my plan. Now that I’d seen more of the country, I was ready to make some decisions. Sligo, on Ireland’s wild and windy northwestern coast, has a Wuthering Heights appeal but didn’t seem like a place to build a business or raise a daughter. I’d focus on Galway and Waterford.
Then one afternoon, sitting at my desk in my office, my phone rang.
“One of the guys from your trip to Ireland last month called to ask for your number.”
It was Patti, the young woman who’d organized the tour with me.
“Which guy?” I asked.
“His name is Lief Simon. He called this morning to say he wanted to speak with you. I told him I’d have to check first.”
“Lief Simon?”
“The one we went dancing with on the final night in Dublin,” Patti prompted.
“Ah… OK… yes, go ahead and give him my number.”
Two hours later, when I returned from a meeting, I had a voice mail message:
“Hi. This is Lief Simon. We met in Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I’d like to take you to dinner. Give me a call…”
Followed by four phone numbers—apartment, work, cell, and weekend house. I called the work number.
“I was hoping we could get together,” Lief replied after I’d said who I was.
“Get together? You’re in Chicago. I’m in Baltimore.”
“I’ll come to Baltimore next weekend if you’ll have dinner with me.”
Lief came to Baltimore, and we had dinner. Two weeks later, I flew to Chicago, and we had dinner. Two weeks after that, Lief was back in Baltimore.
He and I both needed to make return trips to Ireland, Lief to continue his property search, me to decide between Waterford and Galway.
“Why don’t we go back together,” Lief suggested.
And we did.
Our final night in Dublin this return trip we stayed at a small bed and breakfast outside the city called the Charleston House. The morning we were to fly back to the States, Lief made another suggestion.
“Maybe we should move to Ireland together,” he offered shyly. “I mean, what if we got married?”
And that became the next piece of the plan.
Kathleen Peddicord
P.S. I’ll pick up the story here next week… including how I finally chose between Galway and Waterford. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston played a role…