“We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who without knowing our names or recognizing our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must say thank you.”
… a reminder this Memorial Day to say thank you to the strangers who made so much possible for so many of us.
I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a Black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, it resonated with me, then a young woman from another generation and from a tiny country on the other side of the world. The humanity in Angelou’s story reaches out into the universe where it will take up permanent residence in millions of hearts.
I remember reading aloud to teenagers from affluent white families, Angelou’s lyrical and clear-eyed account of a harrowing world in which she had been abused, raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, abandoned by her parents, left homeless, poor, and, for almost five years, unable to speak. But in this tumultuous life, she also fell in love with William Shakespeare and Dickens, with the written and spoken word. We are all the better for that, and I suppose the lesson for my students and for me was, as Anne Frank wrote in her diary,
I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.
Such beauty. At 86, the indomitable Maya Angelou was active on Twitter, sending out to almost half a million followers, soul-stirring messages in 140 characters or less. Miniature poems. The day before she died, she took to social media again:
Over the years, I have collected bits and pieces of wisdom and encouragement that I turn to when the going gets tough, as it invariably does. Growing up, I was often told, “show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” I was unconvinced of that, but with age comes experience and discernment and a willingness to listen again to advice I may not always have heeded:
As my daughter made her way into to adulthood, I hoped she would learn that the very first time a person lies to her or about her would be the first of all the other times; that the very first time someone wounds her with indifference or arrogance, manipulation or meanness, acts merely as precedent. The same might be said for integrity and loyalty which I suppose is why betrayal hurts so much, or as Arthur Miller once put it, why it is “the only truth that sticks.”
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Believe them – the first time, not the millionth time, so you know sooner rather than later, whether to walk this road with them or without them, dignity intact either way.
And for that perspective, Maya Angelou, I am forever in your debt.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades.
When was it that a Bob Dylan song first mattered to me? I cant remember. Nor can I remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue.
Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than the rest of us to measure the success of a Dylan song. Pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, was not among them, writing that Street Legal is “one of Dylan’s most important and cohesive albums . . . of astonishing complexity and confidence delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices.” Granted, he points out that it was badly produced, but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me and anyone else who has ever missed someone – or something – is “Where Are You Tonight?” It remains a staple in the soundtrack of my life. Everybody has one. We all have one.
But without you it just doesn’t seem right. Oh, where are you tonight?
“Hey, hey, HEY, hey.”
Where are you tonight?
Picturing the picture on the cover of the Street Legal album, it occurs to me that this was the first time I considered Bob Dylan in color. Until then my idea of him was monochromatic, an iteration of the Dylan we know from the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video – forever flippant, flipping over cue cards, dropping them in the alley. Deadpan.
Laid Off. Bad Cough. Paid Off. And, finally – naturally – What??
During one of my first summers in the United States, an American cousin took me to Buffalo to see The Grateful Dead open for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. In color. Previously, I had seen Dylan perform at Slane Castle in Ireland in the summer of 1984 – a mighty performance with Santana and Van Morrison. But this was different. This was as American as the idea could be. Deadheads. Tie-dye. Weed. The Wave. This was the Fourth of July. “It doesn’t rain on the Fourth of July!” Bob Weir told the crowd, and like poetry, the heavens opened.
As a going away present, my cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of black and white photographs by Daniel Kramer, indelible images taken over a period of two years, revealing a young man Kramer characterized as someone “who set his own marks and did not allow himself to be manipulated.”
For Kramer, Dylan was “someone worth photographing,” someone worth seeing from different perspectives. For me, Dylan is someone who forces you – without telling you – to shift a little in order to see better. Thus we find him perched on a branch in a tree or in an alleyway in London or Stuck Inside of Mobile. Or in the falling shadows.
Photography is just light, of course, and the good photographer will always find the right light. It is writing with light. As Amyn Nasser describes there is a kind of magic in this
. . . ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. [The photographer] respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Like a welder … seeing things in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. The self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items, spanners, chains, car parts, and axes. Some include reminders that he is also a musician – a treble clef or a guitar. Born and raised in iron ore country in Hibbling, Minnesota, Dylan writes in Chronicles, that he has always worked with iron in one way or another. Paul Green, the president of the Halcyon Gallery in London – which first showcased Dylan’s iron works explains, “He’s drawing from an industrial past, a working man’s past . . . It’s partly about looking back but it’s also about resurrecting these items and the physical act of putting these objects together.”
Why do gates hold such appeal to Dylan? He says it’s “because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”
What??
Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones?
Something is happening here, and Nobel Prize winner, Bob Dylan, doesn’t have the answers either.
His Never Ending Tour began in 1988 and continued for more than 3,000 shows until COVID-19 changed plans. During his time away from the road, , he stayed busy, releasing three original songs from a new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. “Murder Most Foul,” a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music, arrived unexpectedly one midnight with a Tweet from Dylan: Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.” Two years later, The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour began. It continues in Portgual next week.
Why does he keep touring?
I keep touring because: it is a perfect way to stay anonymous and still be a member of the social order,” he said. “You’re the master of your fate. But it’s not an easy path to take, not fun and games.
Wall Street Journal
Happy Birthday, Bob. I find myself remembering you on a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988. You were playing at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during “Mr Tambourine Man.” Of course it did. At the time, a recent immigrant to the United States, those were days of wonder for me, days before we worried about what waited around the corner – before we were observant, before we knew better.
As easy it was to tell black from white It was all that easy to tell wrong from right And our choices were few and the thought never hit That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
On your birthday – and every day, Bob Dylan – may you stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?
Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died the day before our 24th anniversary, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online. Online was made for me, my best friends said. It would be fun, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about where I lived, what I did for a living, or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could filter out men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was in a little black dress, but who cared a whole lot – thanks be to God – about the Oxford comma and when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re,’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.
Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with moxie and a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. This, I understand. I don’t remember when I last ordered a dish exactly as described on the menu. I make up for it by being a really good tipper.
“On the side is a very big thing for me.”
While most of us remember Sally most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.
When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. For several years – a decade – I carried in my wallet, a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s haircuts. I had hit the mother lode For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.
I remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20. It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans – and 70 was out of the question – definitely not the “new 50.”
And now I’m 60 . . . . but maybe it’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself. I’ll call them “alternative facts,” some of which are trivial. In no particular order: I don’t have sensible hair, and until five years ago, I spent a fortune coloring it, highlighting bits of it, and trying to tame it. I’m mildly preoccupied with signage. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t. If I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering. Comic Sans on letters home from school forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, but I still buy gas only after the “E” light comes on. I fell asleep during a performance of Les Mis and, I don’t like Coldplay. Seven years ago, I didn’t like the Dave Matthews Band either, but that changed this past weekend. More on that later.
Although it subjects me to lots of criticism and heated debate with some of my Facebook friends every Christmas, I love Love Actually. I do. I always will. I don’t like opera. A music major, I have pretended to like it and have sat in ‘the gods’ at the Opera House feigning interest in Don Giovanni and Madame Butterfly, but if cell phones had been invented I would have been on Facebook instead. I don’t really like ballet either. Yes, I took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” one Christmas but only because all the other mothers were doing it, and it was an excuse to dress up.
Having said all that negative stuff about opera, I still love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. I know you know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:
To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.
I’m not convinced I have accepted that I’m now over 60. I’m not sure I like it. I might even be a bit resentful of the aging process that sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a bottle of shampoo. Now, I can barely read the CNN ticker at the bottom of a big screen TV. I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I found in a restaurant, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t great, which I would rather blame on over forty years of concert-going than something as graceless as aging. Nora Ephron didn’t like it either.
I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyannaish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere—friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized …
My memory is unreliable too – thank you, breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not necessarily where I’m supposed to be later today. I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much more confident about going places today. If I have driven somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara – I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Siri and Waze and friends who consistently “bring me in” by phone to my destination – where they are often already waiting.
Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and gentler – with myself and others. Those who know me best – especially me – will attest that I’m not there yet. My husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty, making me cautious and anxious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. In the end, it’s about survival and control and choosing your words – and your friends – carefully. I suppose.
But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? Even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way her son characterized her in his documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except be cuter, avoiding clichés or divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.
So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was Resume Writing 101. My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I also excel at the long game. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.
About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not?
I took a chance.
I. Took. A. Chance.
#ITookAChance
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all protocol. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, non-smoking, music-loving musician. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll) and hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color. There was a picture of a Harley Davidson and a mention of integrity.
Box checked.
He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. No religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention. I ignored the part about the Dave Matthews Band.
Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be under five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. If this seems overly cynical, you should know that in the course of this adventure, I had discovered more than a few men in the land of online dating who claimed to live in the Arizona desert, but who also enjoyed moonlit walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would even remember my name, and anticipated instead the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’
It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 – around 5 – at a well-lit bar. Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closet from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights – a moonlit walk was maybe in the cards. Behind the highlights, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it for our first date, this was promising.
Onward.
He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.
Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all, although to be fair, not a drummer (apologies to all my drummer friends) – I was also smitten.
That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip.
Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed “more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy.” Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time. Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.
As for the rest of the story? Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:
‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.
P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it. We have built our wall.
P.P.S. This past Saturday night, we went to a concert at the beautiful Teatro Diana in Guadalajara. He never understood why I didn’t like the Dave Matthews Band. I don’t either.
A month or two ago, I received an email from a stranger. A former journalist with The Financial Times who splits his time between Belfast and Baltimore, Steve McGookin, had landed on an old column I’d written for the Irish Times about my love affair with the Boston Red Sox and wondered if I might be interested in taking part in his States of Play, a project that uses baseball as a window into discussions – a series of nine Q&As – innings – with interesting folks about politics, society, and cultural connections.
Of course I said ‘yes.’ Without hesitation. After all, one of the best things about journalism as Steve points out on his website is just reaching out to random people and hoping they’ll talk to you.”
In retrospect, my only wish is that we could have had the entire conversation in the cheap seats at Fenway all the way into extra innings.
If you’re a baseball fan or if you’re just interested in the state of the nation from the perspective of an immigrant from Northern Ireland, you’ll maybe take a look, with this in mind:
At a ball game, you almost always see something you’ve never seen before. In today’s America, honestly, God only knows what we might see next.
Thanks again, Steve. Hope to see you back on the oul’ sod one day soon.
Here’s the link to my nine innings, conducted over email in the Spring of 2023 shortly before – and after – I returned to Northern Ireland to celebrate my 60th birthday which coincided with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.
