The Blarney Stone (Irish: Cloch na Blarnan) is a block of Carboniferous limestone built into the battlements of Blarney Castle, Blarney, about 8 kilometres (5 mi) from Cork, Ireland. According to legend, kissing the stone endows the kisser with the gift of the gab (great eloquence or skill at flattery). The stone was set into a tower of the castle in 1446. The castle is a popular tourist site in Ireland, attracting visitors from all over the world to kiss the stone and tour the castle and its gardens.
The word blarney has come to mean “clever, flattering, or coaxing talk”. Irish politician John O’Connor Power defined it this way: “Blarney is something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit. Those who mix with Irish folk have many examples of it in their everyday experience.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blarney_Stone
Which got me thinking. My man, from the very moment I met him, approached me in a clever, flattering, or coaxing talk. I fell in love on more profound communication aspects, discovering compatibilities and complementarities that revealed my soulmate to me. No tricks or hustles deep, or up, there.
Yet, whenever he interacts with another person – in particular a woman – there comes again, like a red fish out of his pocket, this talent of the tongue. A sovereign speech of nothings. Witty words with no other aim than to charm the ears and hypnotize the mind of his interlocutor.
But he never went to Ireland, to kiss the Blarney Stone. Wondering, what if kissing ‘my’ Blarney Stone has given him the gift of the gab? But wait, he mastered it even before we met. How many ‘stones’ did he kiss before mine?
‘Only one, in high school,’ came the answer to my out-loud question.
‘Okay, and before that other one?’ Wondered I further back in time.
‘Dunno, but I know that a few more were easily enthralled to become my girlfriends.’
I can tell that, back then in the early 1980s, high school girls used to be quite reserved about sex. [...] It took more than a ring and the aforementioned gift before I allowed him to kiss ‘my Blarney Stone.’
Ah, yes, back to the legend. My personal take on the gift of the gab is that one is born with it. Like with any other talent. Daring to go up there to only bend down backwards – so you land in the appropriate position to kiss the legendary stone – is only a side effect of this endowment.
A regular ass kisser lives, and re-lives, the utopia deemed to be safe and stable. A Blarney Stone kisser dares the gods, and goddesses, of the past – because only fools and rebels would make the present new again.
Ironically, one welcomes the minor metaphor while the other gently touches up to the superior senses – undiscovered to the public eye.
He managed to overwhelm me more than once, a few times to such intensity that I returned the favor. But wait, this is about him, not me.
