made to last

artisan

Pronunciation:/ˌɑːtɪˈzan, ˈɑːtɪzan/

NOUN

a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand:street markets where local artisans display handwoven textiles, painted ceramics, and leather goods

“We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” ~ Seamus Heaney

I was on the phone with a friend the other day when I heard a high pitched whistle from the street. My friend heard it too, and I took a little detour from our conversation to explain that we were hearing the distinct sound of the knife-sharpener passing through my Mexican neighborhood. I like it. More than a call to potential customers, the knife-sharpener’s tune is a reminder of the presence of old ways amidst modern life.

I’ve been reluctant to take my dull knives out to the knife-sharpener, because I should know how to hone them myself. I know the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel from my childhood home, my dad making the long metallic strokes on each side of the knife that ensured an edge sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast. Honing knives is simple, he once told me, requiring me only to exert equal pressure on each side of the blade and then ever so carefully to test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. Over the years, I have tried – driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I cannot get it right.


It is my father’s birthday today, and I’m remembering an evening from this summer, back home in rural South Derry. One evening, I spotted him in his garage, perusing his collection of hand-tools for something my brother might be able to use. It’s a gentle start to the “cleaning out of the garage” that he and my mother talk about in ways we’re all afraid to take seriously.

Other than his beloved garden, this space is where my dad is happiest, surrounded by things he can rework and repair; things he can restore.

A maker of things, a fixer, he belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. My father has the “Midas touch” of The Thatcher and even the grasp of the Diviner. I watched once, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.”

Da is also a pragmatist, quick to remind me that his artisanal handiwork began out of economic necessity, his craft shaped and sharpened by the place that produced him. Even in hard times, he sang or whistled as he worked. With an ear for music, he is one of those people who can sit down and pick out a tune on whatever instrument is within reach. He always sang in harmony to songs on the radio or hymns at church—unaware he was teaching me to learn not the melody first, but a harmony. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, daddy made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the violin that would one day open doors for me in places like East Berlin before the wall came down. My father never bought an instrument for himself.

For my fourth Christmas, knowing I wanted a cradle for my doll, Gloria, he made one himself and painted it green. I imagine the scene, my father working under the “bare bulb, a scatter of nails, shelved timber, and glinting chisels” of Heaney’s “An Ulster Twilight.” Almost six decades later, it’s still in the roof-space above his garage along with other things that need to be “sorted.”

These days, I appreciate the way my father crafted a thing to last. In my mind’s eye, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.” I know he wishes he lived just down the road from his children and his grandchildren, to make things and make things right again.

It wasn’t until I was older, a parent myself, that I understood his obsession with fixing things. I also understood that maybe, as parents, each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children won’t have to experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. Sometimes, we fool ourselves into believing we’ve outsmarted the pain don’t we? With our reframing of things and the telling stories that soften the blow. Sometimes we are no match for the thing that cannot be fixed. My father knows this.


Two days after receiving the news from Arizona that my husband had died in our Phoenix home, I began packing clothes to make the long journey back. Like an automaton, I packed our suitcases with things we didn’t need, things to carry from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and then to a house full of sadness and inappropriate desert sunshine.

While packing, I remember noticing mud caked on the soles of my boots, a reminder of our walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of the Broagh Road. From half-way up the stairs, I handed them to my father and, as if life was still normal, I asked him to take them outside to shake off the dirt. Even as I did, I knew instinctively—and I was ashamed—that when those boots came back to me, they would be polished to a high shine.

Sitting on the stairs, my favorite boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorised from Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays filled my head:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

. . .

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
What did I know?

From the stairs, I watched him through the crack in the door. Stoic, strong as an ox, his head in his hands, a Bible open in his lap. Undone. He paused to cry out to God for help. He couldn’t fix this The man who had always fixed everything was no match for this – his only daughter widowed, his granddaughter fatherless.  All he could do was polish my boots, the way he had once polished the leather brogues I wore to school.

What did I know?

I know this.

I love my father and have almost told him as much. Almost, because, as Seamus Heaney explained so well to Dennis O’Driscoll, “That kind of language would have been much suspect. We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” It was, and it is.

It is a gift to know this, and for that I am indebted to the teacher who introduced me to the poetry in which I discovered my father—a man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, a man who also understands that poetry belongs to all of us and can speak on our behalf when the right words evade us. Once, following Seamus Heaney’s death, I was asked to give a speech on the poet and include some of his poems. Stuck for which ones to choose, I asked my brother who suggested I just gather the audience on a Zoom call and have our da read “Digging.” “That will floor ’em.” Yes, it would.

Poetry is close to prayer. Carol Ann Duffy once said it is “the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.” It is also the perfect art form for gratitude and love unspoken.

I don’t know if I ever thanked him for cleaning my boots or sharpening knives or making things better, so I’ll do that now.

Happy birthday daddy. xo

A Call
by Seamus Heaney

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him. (From The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney)

Dream On …

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Happy Birthday Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at Phoenix's Footprint Center on March 19, 2024.

It’s always a bit jarring to hear that someone like Springsteen has been around for three quarters of a century? He’s one of those someones that we associate with being young and ‘glory days’ and the very idea of America. He’s a self-proclaimed “cool-rockin’ daddy in the U.S.A.”

Even today, when someone asks why I left Ireland for the United States of America, I know there’s something in my response that suggests Bruce Springsteen is part of the reason, part of the dream.

On June 1, 1985,  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. I had spent the previous summer working in the United States, with the Born in the USA tour in full swing. I was lucky to have been upstate New York at the same time as Springsteen, and saw him perform at Saratoga Springs and again in the Fall, when a trip to Niagara Falls with an American cousin included a Springsteen show in Buffalo.

I knew Ireland was in for a treat.

bruceticket

When the tickets went on sale, I also bought one for my little brother. It would be his first concert – a seminal moment in his musical education, and probably the first time he drank wine.

Even now, almost 40 years later, I smile at the memory of almost 100,000 of us making our pilgrimage through the sleepy and disapproving village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise—as yet unfulfilled—that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated with the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Some said it was the hottest day on record in Ireland.

Whenever I look at this picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken. We are forever young. It’s forever summer. We’re in a Bruce Springsteen song. 

I am young, and had I not been awake, I would have missed it

. . . the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

~ Seamus Heaney

Everybody was young that day, even the weather-beaten old farmers who let us use their fields as parking lots. And, everybody was also Irish. When the band burst on stage with a thunderous “Born in the USA,” Bruce turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.” The crowd erupted.

BruceSlane

In retrospect, although we basked in his Irish pride that day, the reality was that our weather was rarely that sunny, and thousands of us would soon be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s. Across the water, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister; farther afield, the Berlin wall was still standing; and, in Ireland, divorce was still illegal and condoms had barely become available without a prescription.

But on that glorious day, in spite of the economic and political truths of Ireland, and the ever-diminishing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we believed in America.

Almost 40 years later, and with only 42 days until the General Election, my vote already cast, I’ve begun believing in the idea of America again. The truth is that I’ve always counted on the likes of Springsteen to stand up and articulate it for people like me, immigrants seeking America. I’ve always known I could count on Springsteen more than a presidential contender hell-bent on almost convincing me that the idea of America is unraveling.

Bruce Springsteen will never be an elected official; he will never be a politician who would vilify immigrants or the working poor or women. But he will remain an inspiration. Just last year, Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota—and Vice Presidential nominee— signed a proclamation declaring March 5 Bruce Springsteen Day, which reads in part:

Springsteen’s music is a source of inspiration for many people in Minnesota, reminding us of the values we hold dear, including kindness, compassion, and fairness.

Then there’s the man at the top of the Republican ticket who fancies himself as America’s first King, and who has a well-documented problem with those values. He also has a problem with Springsteen who once said that  he didn’t think our democracy could stand another four years of Trump’s custodianship. At a rally, Tump recently said of Springsteen:

I’m not a huge fan. I have a bad trait. I only like people that like me.


When Springsteen announced he was going to tour again in 2022, I knew I’d fly back to the States to see him. I knew I’d probably be sitting somewhere in the nosebleed section, but I didn’t care. I had a ticket. As it turns out, our seats were great for the first night of his American tour in Phoenix. “Do you feel the spirit?” a happy and healthy looking 74 year old Springsteen asked when he took the stage right on time, and about 20,000 of us roared back that yes, yes we did. We felt it for the next few hours and you could see it on our faces when we emptied out onto Jefferson Street.

Bruce Springsteen is still touring, back in Asbury Park this past weekend after playing in places some Americans are considering as escape destinations pending the outcome of the general election.

When I mentioned to someone I’d seen Springsteen over a dozen times, she responded by telling me she didn’t mind his music but he was “way too into politics” for her. To be fair, Springsteen has not always been into politics. He played a fundraiser for George McGovern at a New Jersey drive-in in 1972, and author Marc Dolan writes that in 1984 interview, he indicated that he might only have voted once, perhaps in that 1972 election.

Politics, on the other hand, has been into Bruce Springsteen, since 1984 when Ronald Reagan dropped his hame at a campaign stop in New Jersey:

America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.

Yes. There was Ronald Reagan telling a New Jersey audience that he and Bruce shared the same American dream. No. They didn’t, and because they didn’t, Springsteen would have to get “into politics” – human politics.

At his first concert, following being name-dropped by Reagan, he made $10,000 donation to a food bank for unemployed steelworkers. He asked his audience to do the same. Ever since, on every Springsteen tour, there have been tables for local charities at every venue, usually food banks.

In 2004, he jumped right in, supporting John Kerry’s presidential bid. He would subsequently campaign for Obama, HIllary Clinton, and during the last election, he reworked his “My Hometown” song for a President Biden ad.

Two decades since getting into electoral politics, we’ve come full circle with Donald Trump dropping Springsteen’s name in New Jersey, calling the singer a “wacko,” before claiming at the Wildwood rally that The Boss and other “liberal singers” would vote for him if only they came to a Trump rally. Then Trump falsely added—because of that weird obsession with crowd size— that his crowds outnumbered Springsteen’s.


Thinking back to his concert in Phoenix last year, it occurs to me that he wasn’t “into politics” that night. He wasn’t even into his trademark monologues between songs. He walked on stage, with “Good evening, Arizona. 1-2-3-4” and he didn’t really say much until after he’d sung fourteen songs, when he told the crowd about how he started out at 15 with The Castilles, his first band; how sixty years had slipped by in an instant; and, how he is the last living member of that first band.

I’ll see you in my dreams
When all our summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
We’ll meet and live and laugh again
I’ll see you in my dreams
Yeah, up around the river bend
For death is not the end
And I’ll see you in my dreams

Alone on stage, he sang that “death is not the end.” In the end, I suppose that dream, more impossible than the American one, has been so much easier to believe.

Happy Birthday.

hand ballet

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The day Lou Reed died shouldn’t have been particularly relevant, but I remember it. I remember the way the afternoon sun made shadows on my daughter’s fingers.  Graceful and elegant.

Just a twinkling ago, my baby girl first discovered her hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion.

Her father and I called it “hand ballet.

Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears. To fly, fly away . . .

Her dad’s favorite Lou Reed song.

I don’t know why Lou Reed was always relevant in my life. I first heard him on Radio One when I was just a little girl making daisy chains on the field in front of our house. The characters in “Walk on the Wild Side,” were on another planet. There was Holly, from Miami, FLA, and she hitch-hiked her way across the USA;   Little Joe who never gave it away, whatever it was; and, Jackie who thought she was James Dean for a day.  Just a child, I couldn’t possibly have known what the “hustle here and the hustle there” was all about. Had I known, I wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents. This was provincial Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.

Recalling this, I’m reminded of author, Neil Gaiman’s story of how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:

You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?

That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.

I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.

If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side , but I still took that walk. And, I have never once regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. To take me back.

The first time my daughter clapped her hands, it was for her dad on his birthday, on this day twenty six years ago. It was perfect.

Suspended in the one thought this morning are my daughter and the late Lou Reed, their elegant hands in motion. Laurie Anderson writes that her husband, Lou Reed, spent much of his last days on earth:

. . .  being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

LaurieAnderson_LouReedMy baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.

Selective recall …

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I tell people I have a good memory, and that’s less true than it used to be. I’m a bit forgetful. I’m also differently forgetful these days.

It used to be that I’d file stuff away in a mental cabinet and retrieve it later, usually right after the time I needed it … people’s names, titles of movies, passwords, the season finale of whatever series that won’t be back until next year.

There’s evidence to prove I’ve been to hundreds of concerts – a book full of ticket stubs and set-lists and anecdotes from friends who went with me. But I don’t actually remember being at lots of those concerts.
I suppose I don’t remember where I put my mental filing cabinet.


At the same time, there’s other stuff I remember effortlessly – my first phone number 64604, the shade of lipstick I bought at the Mac store in 2003, what you were wearing and what I was wearing when we went to see that movie, what I heard you said about me to someone you didn’t know would tell me. That goes in a whole other filing cabinet.


This realization reminded me of Nora Ephron’s collection of essays, “I Remember Nothing,” published in 2010 before she died. I remember I bought it at an airport bookstore, but I don’t remember where I was going. This morning, I discovered that I remembered to bring it with me to Mexico.

My favorite entry in this book isn’t an essay; it’s a list of what Nora Ephron will miss and what she won’t, after she’s gone. I suppose it should have been a sign to us in 2010 that she wouldn’t be with us for much longer.


Now, I have no intention of dying anytime soon, but if I were to make such a list today (it might change tomorrow) it would include the following:

What I’ll Miss


Sophie – Scott – Scott singing – Dogs – Texts from my brother – Phone calls with my parents – Strangford Lough – Dreams of living in Strangford, Portaferry, Ardglass or Groomsport – Slippers – The Christmas Tree – An Ulster Fry – French Toast – Butter & Marmalade on Toast – A whistling kettle – A turf fire – The pub – The idea of a turf fire in a pub – Vegetable soup & wheaten bread in the pub – A session in the pub – The first sight of the little church on the road to Ballintoy – Reading in bed – Clouds the color of buttermilk hanging over Lough Neagh – The Glens of Antrim – Botanic Gardens on a cold, dry morning in Belfast – the Arizona desert in December – The sun rising over Lake Chapala – Online friends that become best friends in real life – Pajamas – Shirts fluttering on a clothesline – Windchimes – Castlerock – Rediscovering something Seamus Heaney wrote – Tea in a china cup – Traybakes – The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving Day – Boots – Scarves – Sunglasses- Second chances – Davy Spillane on the Uilleann Pipes – A good hair day – Bluebells – Church bells pealing in old villages – Van Morrison’s “When the Healing Has Begun” – Airport arrivals – Finding the right word at the right time – The craic – The first cup of coffee.