Almost a decade ago, I enrolled in a college photography class. Not a bucket list kind of thing by most standards, but it was something I had been meaning to do for thirty years. I had never been able to find the time for it, always too busy being busy and bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher. At the same time, I had also been waiting for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.
A dear friend signed up with me, and we were like teenagers competing for an “A” from the photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it and appreciate it when we did. It was “writing with light.”
I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the 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. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . So it was that on a Thanksgiving afternoon, I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I have no idea how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying me the way he used to do before he became dangerous, denying the COVID-19-pandemic that has left so many families grieving the loss of loved ones this Thanksgiving, contradicting doctors, and protesting the protocols that prevent him from performing and making people sick. For just a moment this morning, I’m remembering Morrison when he was merely grumpy and not as dangerous as Donald Trump. For just a moment, I’m remembering the beautiful Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of the holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving has something to do with that moment of transcendence among the trees in Arizona as I gazed up at those shimmering leaves. But that would not be true. Even after living an American life for over thirty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. Some of my American friends are still surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland, that Christmas is the holiday that warms us. Thus, I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
It was something else. Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I saw the light, I suppose, and the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
Thank you – a powerful phrase that often goes unsaid right when we need to hear it the most, especially during a pandemic.
There’s a lovely minute or two in the Irish film, “Waking Ned Devine,” that never fails to remind me of this. The hapless Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right when Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Always quick on his feet – and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and delivers this:
As we look back on the life of . . .
Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
This year, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik tells his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude.” In these times, when we are replacing all the known ways with new routines and rituals, showiong appreciation is more important than ever.
The coronavirus pandemic has meant months now of living at home with a beautiful view and a computer at my disposal. It is, as they say, what it is. I’m not complaining. I’m more confused than anything else by a lack of motivation to do anything that’s good for me. Unlike overwhelmed and exhausted front-line workers in places where the virus is rampant, facing each day a terror I cannot begin to imagine, I know I’m lucky. Really lucky. I have my health and a job and therefore the privilege to ponder more mundane and meaningless things like why I’m still in my pajamas at four in the afternoon unless I have to make an appearance on yet another digital meeting.
By now, I should have finalized a collection of essays for a book that will most likely never be finished, mastered conversational Spanish, and toned my upper arms. I am duty bound to report that most days I barely walk the length of myself, choosing instead to spend even more time online. Each morning, I peruse my Twitter feed hoping for the demise of Trump, I update my Facebook status with a lovely memory of something real that happened in the real world with real and much-missed people, and then I “go” to work via email and Zoom – the latter never intended to host both my professional and social life – more often than not wearing the same thing I wore the day before and without makeup which I am now rationing for those times I venture outside to places where I keep a safe distance from people who aren’t wearing masks.
I’m not alone in this online life. In fact, a new survey reveals that on the other side of the Atlantic, people are spending on average, a quarter of their waking day online instead, presumably, of doing the things they always swore they would do if only they had the time.
There are two contagions at work here – the coronavirus itself and its attendant emotions, the latter getting in the way of making things and making them work. I tell myself that if I were back in the house I own in Phoenix instead of a rental in beautiful Mexico – and Mexico is beautiful – it would be different. I would be different. I would be cleaning out the crammed closets and cupboards I left behind, forever ridding the place of the stuff I have told myself my daughter will want one day, even though I know she won’t. She really won’t.
An unsettling ennui has set in, and all the experts have something to say about it in articles in The New York Times – to which I finally paid a subscription – and none of it convincing me that I can do anything about it. With no recognizable shape to days that evaporate quickly and no clear end in sight, I can’t do the kind of backwards planning that has always served me well both professionally and personally. I miss deadlines, even those that required all-nighters to meet – especially those. I love deadlines. I know I could and should create some, but it’s just not the same as someone else doing it for me.
I didn’t know until this morning that the late Nora Eprhon loved deadlines too. In her own words, when she started out as a reporter for The New York Post:
I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking Scotch and playing dollar poker . . . I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines.
I loved Nora Ephron. I love thinking of her smoking and drinking and in the throes of a rewrite to meet a deadline. Words like “moxie” and “chops” come to mind. I love thinking about what she would have to say about us in the time of corona. I imagine she would keep it light, making light of the fact that due to coronavirus-induced closures of beauty salons in recent months, there are probably as many grey-haired women in America as there were in the 1950s when only seven percent of them dyed their hair.
Wellesley College / AP Photo
It was a rare leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her handbag, her small breasts about which she famously wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray that returns with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she slapped us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her aging body, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not copy, as her son explains in the documentary about her life:
I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” he says. “That the things you want to keep are not copy. That the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything is copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the means to control the story was to make it not exist.
Somewhere in the middle of my life, I realized I have always understood the need to control and contain. As much as I have revealed of myself in these virtual spaces, I know for sure what is not copy. My breast cancer was and is copy. Some of the work of widowhood is copy too, but not all of it. I know what to keep and what to discard, how to control it and myself – most of the time. I know how to be private. I know how to keep what is precious, private. I know how to – as Meryl Streep says of Ephron – ‘achieve a private act.‘ I know how to avoid certain kinds of endings; I’m very good at the long game. I know what Nora Ephron’s son knows – that closure is over-rated. I can’t begin to consider it without recalling the first time I realized how much it mattered to other people, following a school principal’s evaluation of a lesson I’d taught in which she indicated, with some disappointment, that I had provided “no closure” for a too-big class of middle schoolers. I chose not to argue with her, because I knew that, unlike her, I would be back in my classroom the next day and the next to continue – not to close – with my students. It is the continuing that matters along with what I wore and how my hair behaved.
Continuance – it has a nice ring to it.
Resurrected in her son’s documentary, Ephron is among us once again. Vibrant, funny, and in control. It is easy to imagine her striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after her death. In my mind, she is authoritative – and maybe even perceived as a bit mean – providing direction to actors that adore her, at the same time searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. By many accounts, she was a cynic with a sharp tongue. According to her son, she had:
a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.
A sentimental old fool, I can’t help wishing for the romance she so effortlessly delivered on screen and that real life would have handed her the happy ending she served up so many times in those fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” But the happy ending would not have been real, and my guess is that Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.
Her contribution to the movies is a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a wide-eyed immigrant who got here right around the time Sally met Harry. Granted, it is probably not as memorable as the fake orgasm scene in Katz Deli, but there’s a moment in When Harry met Sally that never fails to snap me back to the girl who still shows up now and again to remind me how little time there is to become who I am supposed to be. Life happens in the twinkling of an eye. It is for the living and for living, she tells me, and always when I need to hear it.
In the scene, a tearful Sally has just found out that her ex is getting married. Harry doesn’t get it that for Sally this means spinsterhood – at forty. At the time, mind you, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut I was convinced would work with my natural curls. It didn’t. Undeterred, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a magazine featuring all Meg Ryan’s cute haircuts. I really did. And, 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, to politely ask them for a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found Topher at an aptly named Altered Ego beauty salon, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times, perhaps.
And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday
Just yesterday I felt the same way. Forty was a lifetime away from eighteen, the deadline at the time for “letting oneself go” and, let’s be honest, Eileen Fisher. Fifty was sensible and dowdy. Sixty heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. Seventy was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. What does that even mean? With sixty looming on my near horizon, I’m wondering what’s next. Whatever it is, I hope it includes visits to my parents in Ireland and lemon meringue and a decent President in the United States. With my thirties and forties and most of my fifties behind me, I am accepting a couple of truths about myself. Some are visible – I do not have sensible hair, and I have a tendency to ramble when I’m nervous, and I’m nervous most of the time because I still worry about what people think of me. Others are hidden and more painful and definitely not copy. I’m gonna be 60 someday . . . and some days it feels like I’m lost in IKEA, one of my least favorite places on the planet, too big, with strange Scandinavian words on signs around ‘rooms’ that require instructions and assembly. There’s no end in sight.
Still, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process in general and the way it just sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. One minute, I am reading the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years than on something as graceless as aging.
About six months before he died, my late husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix. Other than the fact that it was the last concert he saw on this earth and the last time I would cheer for an encore with him, I hold on to the moment I caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in a bright red hat, pointy red shoes, and dangling wooden balls, and in the background, Stevie Nicks still spinning in black. Mesmerizing. Just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie, at almost seventy. Rock on gold dust woman.
So many beginnings and endings, with who knows how many more to go . . .
In various places in my house in Phoenix, I have saved my daughter’s drawings, handprints, book reports, birthday cards, report cards, certificates, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Stuffed in vases and file folders and between the pages of hard-cover books are random letters from Zoe the Tooth Fairy – and her posse of pixie pals who lived in the mesquite tree in our back yard for years – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of the uber-organized professional organizers on Learning Channel documentaries, the ones who tell flustered hoarders to place everything they own on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it is time – theoretically – to tame the paper tiger.
Full of good intentions one day before making my mid-life move to Mexico – and for about an hour – I organized. I made some folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs. I threw away the greeting cards that were made not by her but some copywriter at Hallmark, and I filled a box with books and teddy bears to donate to the local bookstore. While flipping through the pages of one of her school composition book, I came upon one of her drawings entitled The Mountain of Life.
I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. I can almost see a wry smile creep across Nora Ephron’s face as she tells that 50 year old to straighten up for Act Two, to cause some trouble, just as she urged a bunch of Wellesley graduates in her 1996 Commencement Speech – to continue.
No closure.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your life . . .
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 a book that has graced my coffee table for decades.
When was it when a Dylan song first mattered to me? I can’t be sure, yet I can’t 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 I to measure the success of a Dylan song. (Not pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, mind you, who writes that it 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. 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?
https://youtu.be/FgbsvGUW27Y
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 his 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, one of my American cousins 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. This was Positively 4th Street (What??) and I loved it.
As a going away present, my cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of photographs by Daniel Kramer. Black and white, these indelible images taken over a period of two years, reveal the young man Kramer characterizes 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.
Yes, the ability to stir the soul, to see things right in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. Also a welder, the self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items such as spanners, chains, and 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 Bob Dylan doesn’t have the answers either. We won’t see him on tour for a while. On the road almost continuously since 1988, he has canceled the summer leg of the “Never Ending Tour,” his representatives saying it will resume once they are confident that it is safe for both fans and concert staff to do so. The coronavirus may have altered his touring plans, but Dylan has been busy. Over the course of a month, he has dropped three original new songs, the most recent with an announcement that he is releasing a new album on June 19, Rough and Rowdy Ways. This flurry of activity began on March 27 when a new song, a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music, “Murder Most Foul,” arrived unexpectedly at 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.”
And, back to black and white . . .
Of course we found it interesting, the timing of its release in the middle of a pandemic that continues to upend national and cultural life with the Covid-19 death toll this Memorial Day weekend hovering close to 100,000. We may not yet know the full social, cultural or political legacy of the coronavirus, but we know that part of it will be the incalculable loss spread out before us on the front page of the New York Times today. In black and white, the names of a thousand people who were known and who leave behind the people who miss them terribly, and who in the middle of their grief, had to pluck just the right detail from a whole life to include in an obituary that might just help the rest of us ‘know’ their loved one as more than just a number. In black and white before us a list of deaths that could fill ninety-nine more pages today.
I find myself recalling a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988, when I saw Dylan play at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during his performance “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.
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . . nothing
Lyrics: David Byrne
I am supposed to be in Phoenix, but like many of you, I am not going anywhere. This Mother’s Day weekend coincides with what has been projected as the peak of coronavirus contagion here in Mexico, and we are being urged to stay at home. There have been social distancing measures in place since mid-March, but they have intensified this week, in an attempt to keep crowds from gathering to celebrate Día de las Madre in the traditional ways. This year, health officials are urging the people of Mexico to reimagine those time-honored tributes that define Día de las Madre and to cherish mothers and grandmothers from a distance. To that end, most restaurants, flower markets, and plazas will be closed on Sunday. To prevent people from visiting their mother’s graves, even cemeteries will be closed. Hopes are for a quiet Sunday, more likely now with a ban on in-person serenades of “Las Mañanitas” in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Zacateas, and here, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the heartland of the mariachi.
Where we can no longer reach out with our hands, we must now reach out with our hearts.
I understand all of this, having availed myself of technology-enabled engagement to remain connected while physically distant. The only journeys I have planned for the foreseeable future are virtual, daily Brady-Bunch style Zoom meetings with my colleagues at 9:30AM, WhatsApp calls with my parents, still isolated at home in Northern Ireland, and the celebration of my only child’s college graduation on Monday. The right thing to do, her university has announced that due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and its attendant public health recommendations, Arizona State University will move its 2020 Spring commencement to a virtual, online ceremony temporarily turning upside down my plans to be there to cheer wildly with her tribe as my darling girl strides across the stage to receive her diploma and to reflect quietly on this accomplishment in our Phoenix home, the place where she learned to walk and talk and read – the place where she first knew love. In addition to the online ceremony, graduates like Sophie can also participate in an in-person ceremony in December. She has opted for the latter, preferring to postpone rather than participate in what might feel like just another Zoom meeting. I know she is doing this for me. After so many months of social distancing, I will be ready for an in-person and personal party on the patio to celebrate all she has accomplished. There will be handshakes and hugs and high-fives, won’t there? Or maybe there won’t. I remind myself we are only four months into a global pandemic, and my fifty days in a house in Mexico may be but a drop in the bucket.
The President of ASU is saying the right things, encouraging graduates like Sophie to deal with the disappointment and this departure from tradition by tapping into “the same resourcefulness” that has guided their journey to earn a degree at ASU. He tells them they have “demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.” This is also what makes Sophie.
Home is were I want to be.
Overly sentimental today, I am remembering her high school graduation ceremony, the small Senior class filing into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). An appropriately hip processional at an artsy school, it was one of her dad’s favorite songs, five fabulous minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. (He liked a tune that would inspire ‘happy feet,’ a fact that prompted me, one St. Patrick’s Day, to take him to see The Chieftains perform a particularly joyous show in Scottsdale). I had never been so utterly happy to hear the Talking Heads, or so utterly lost. By the time Sophie reached her seat on the stage, I had brushed away memories of David Byrne dancing in his big white suit, and instead was back where she started, asleep and swaddled, six pounds of potential, snug in the space between the crook of her daddy’s arm and the tips of his fingers, safe and secure. Certain sure.
Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. For twelve idyllic months, with her father off at work, it was the best year of my life. Our baby girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, there were mornings when I danced just like the sign says – like nobody’s watching – around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her face or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. How I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink.
I spent interminable hours just looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature, every furrow, every flicker across her face, for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Maybe my hovering bothered her the way it would later in her life. I’m not sure. This was before she had found words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today, a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, those slender fingers in constant motion. I remember we called it hand ballet. Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would too soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.
Mostly, Sophie bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or perhaps just to let us know she was there. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who were convinced they knew better, I refused to let her “cry it out.” I picked her up the instant I heard her begin to cry at night. From afar, my mother encouraged me, reminding me the way Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. It has indeed been in such desperate times that I have found myself wishing that we mothers could somehow bank all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children in a rainy day fund to help us help them weather whatever storms await them.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their cargo pants and Birkenstocks with big mugs of coffee brought from home – this was pre-Starbucks – they were usually still chatting in the parking lot as I left for work. I like to think I left them with a vague impression of adulthood, in my boring Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. I pretended (mostly to myself) that I had evolved into “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all – impossible, I know now, to achieve at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job and my navy suit, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl. Coolly, she placated me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. Although she had to say it more than once, she showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes in response to my wild-eyed fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but the unspoken truth was that I wanted the unflappable Bonnie to lavish on Sophie her undivided attention. I wanted her to spend hours staring, like the Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing the moment Sophie did anything for the very first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew a bubble and the ceremony that followed when I would immediately notify her dad, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as monumental as when she uttered her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – just in time for daddy’s birthday – or let go of my hand to stand erect, like a little warrior, to our doting ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was madly jealous that it was this magnanimous pre-school teacher – not me – with the right kind of magic up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. The daily choice to walk away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then sit in my car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the sound of my child’s crying distinct from the simultaneous crying of all the other mother’s children. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Every day, I waited in the parking lot until those wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remaining, off I went to work – for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he left for college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would eventually find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a physical bookstore where I could also get the print edition of The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday. Every night for a long time, I read to Sophie the story of Appelt’s Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were our secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
This refrain would become the salve that soothed those morning goodbyes for both of us, when I left her with Bonnie and other teachers who never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I was sending them the very best child I have. Dissatisfied, I switched schools so much that by the time she finished high school, Sophie had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who might change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
The President of ASU has never met Sophie, but if I could sit down with him, I would share with him examples of her Sun Devil spirit. I would tell him about the time before her fourteenth birthday when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I would invite him to stand in a hospital hallway outside the ICU, where she, impersonating “strong and stoic,” is leaning on her beloved daddy and he on her as they wait for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither of them feels safe nor secure. Squaring up with a false bravado, she is at once confronting the wild fear that I might die yet balking at the notion of wearing the “kid with the sick mom” mantel. She did not want her teachers to know all she did to help during my recovery, in case they felt sorry for her and awarded good grades out of sympathy.
Remember fourteen? A time for rebellion, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because she was your mother for God’s sake and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons; for experimenting with make-up; for discovering myriad ways to style your hair or sign your name – with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”. For my Sun Devil, this rite of passage was marred by my breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel as guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It was unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of the disease, isn’t it? Unfair.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
And then, like a Dickensian ghost, I would take the university president to another time, two years later, just before her sixteenth birthday. Sophie is with me in my mother’s kitchen, far away in rural Derry. She is concentrating on a sketch, and I am on the phone, trying to reach her dad in Phoenix. He does not answer, and the silence from the other side of America on the other side of the Atlantic troubles me so much that I text my best friend to please drive from Chandler to our house in Central Phoenix just to make sure all is well. Sophie is still drawing when my friend calls to tell me that both our cars are in the driveway, that our little dog, Edgar, is sitting on the couch, staring out the window at her. Sophie is still drawing when I hear my friend call out my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response. He is gone. We stop the clocks.
When we return to our home in Arizona, it is to a space we no longer recognize. The trees her dad planted especially for her no longer make any sense, casting elegant shadows on blades of grass that will never again flatten under his footsteps. The mailman continues to deliver letters bearing his name. We don’t know what to do with them? The hummingbirds flit about the honeysuckle waiting for him to feed them. Disoriented and uncertain, we get lost in our own home, no longer confident about what might happen at three o’clock or seven o’clock. Before, there was no doubt. Now we have to adapt. We persevere. We are becoming Sun Devils.
Today, my daughter is 22. Named after my mother, who has unhelpfully responded to so many of my predicaments with the same question, “What would the wise woman do?” Sophie Elizabeth has earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Family And Human Development, with an emphasis on child psychology, her goal ultimately to work in counseling, to help children who have lost parents or been frightened by the prospect of losing a sick parent to cancer. She has adapted to life without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a local Dairy Queen, since demolished, every Friday after school, the man who loved the Talking Heads and who would have loved being surprised by that high school graduation processional. He would have tapped his feet and by the end of it would have brushed away a tear, because by then he would have grown sentimental, contemplating the significance of the milestone and the prospect of so many more on the horizon. I like to think he knows somehow that she has navigated every one of them, with an independence and vulnerability that takes my breath away.
He would be so proud of her. He always was, from the first time she spoke right up to about a month before his death, when, unbeknownst to me, he had taken her to a workshop for teen drivers, designed to help her pass her Learner’s Permit test. She needed twenty-one correct answers in a row. Once accomplished, she looked out to where he was waiting and gave him a thumbs-up that prompted the wink and proud-as-punch smile she knew so well. It was still there on his face when I came home from work that day – “Look what we did today!” – and he beamed as our baby girl pressed her new Learner’s Permit into my hand. That was the last milestone our family shared – ordinary yet momentous.
I would also tell the university president that, on one of the six anniversaries of her father’s death, this Sun Devil told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm. I would emphasize that she is no longer undone by this fact. It is not a sadness that envelops her on these red-letter days. In fact, she sometimes faces the reality of these fatherless moments with a humor that others may find irreverent. The daily reminder that he is not here, that the saddest thing that could ever have happened has already happened reminds her that whatever happens today or on any day could not be worse. No fender-bender or unfair grade or postponed commencement ceremony could be any worse. This is how my Sun Devil rolls, going about her days, working, drawing, laughing, loving, singing, studying, seeking out and finding joy and hope, pausing during our texting the other day to don a pair of oven gloves to help catch and gently usher out the frightened woodpecker that had flown into the kitchen.
Unlike so many of us, who are in this very moment and the next and for who knows how long, struggling to find their way within an extraordinarily altered world, and seeing in front of us only what’s missing, my Sun Devil is focused on the present and the opportunities it presents – “keeping going.”
Raised by a mother who invoked Seamus Heaney to deliver all the most important life lessons – because there really is nothing better than a Heaney poem to explain us to ourselves – Sophie would expect nothing less than advice from our poet on the occasion of her graduation from university. I am here to deliver it. The year before she was born, and coincidentally on Mother’s Day, Seamus Heaney gave to the graduating class of 1996 at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, a commencement speech in which he shared what he described as the essential rhythm of not only survival but achievement: “getting started, keeping going, getting started again.” Our history – collectively and individually – depends on this rhythm, starting and starting over. Now more than ever perhaps we all need to be reminded of this. I know I do . This pandemic is a stepping stone, a place to pause and contemplate the distance covered and – this is important – to find another one. As Heaney told those graduates, it is the next move that is the test for all of us.
Here’s to your next move, Sophie. I am immeasurably proud to be your mother. Congratulations, graduate.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. But there is a pride and joy also, a pride and joy that is surging through this crowd today, through the emotions of your parents and your mothers particularly on Mothers Day, your families and your assembled friends. And through you yourselves especially. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
