memorial day reminder: maya angelou

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by Editor in Awesome Women, Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, Great Advice, Great teachers, Loss, Maya Angelou, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, saying goodbye

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Great souls, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, mother daughter relationship, the human condition, wisdom

“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:

people know themselves much better than you do. That’s why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.

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.

Dear Nelson Mandela

18 Monday Jul 2022

Posted by Editor in Apartheid, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Death and dying, From the Republic of Conscience, Funerals, Human Rights, Loss, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Politics, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Cure at Troy, Themes of Childhood, Writing

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#MandelaDay2017, Amnesty International, Barack Obama, Free Nelson Mandela, Mandela, Mandela Lecture, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Paul Simon, Seamus Heaney, South Africa, United States

Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names.

~ Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

Not you, Nelson Mandela. Over one hundred years ago, you came into this world with boldness and made your mark on it – Madiba will ring out forever. On this day in 2018, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, went to Johannesburg, to commemorate the anniversary of your birth, and did so with an eloquence and a rallying cry that many Americas had been missing – a reminder to cleave to your values of democracy and diversity, of equity, of kindness:

I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality, justice, freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal.

Madiba, I am drawn back to June of 2013, to when we heard news that you were gravely ill. As reports poured out of Pretoria, South Africa that you were on life support, we held our breath, not wanting to accept that you were frail at 94, ill, and nearing the end of your life. Then – and today – in my mind’s eye, you are still at the beginning of your life as Mandela, the free man, who stepped onto the world’s stage in 1990 after spending 27 years behind bars.

In the darkest days of Apartheid, no one – other than you – could have imagined the man in that tiny cell as the future President of your country, that you would one day stand among rock stars and royalty and popes and presidents to advocate for democracy and justice, to inspire a vision of peace that transcended race and creed, that you would matter to so many people and that he would make so many people matter. People like me. As Obama is reminding us today:

Through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and perhaps, most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world.

Mandela mattered to me because he embodied what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the dream of peace envisioned for Northern Ireland by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, his vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election. Mandela moved more than 17 million black South Africans – 17 million – to vote for the first time. What a sight to behold, even on a tiny television screen in a tiny country on the other side of the world. Before our eyes, proof that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme. Before our eyes, “madiba magic.”

Over 30 years ago, not long before I emigrated to the United States, a boyfriend surprised me with a ticket to Paul Simon’s Graceland concert in Dublin for my birthday. Boisterous and beautiful, the performance sparkles in my memory as one that transcended the ugliness of apartheid. Paul Simon had been and still is widely criticized for performing in South Africa, but how could we fault him for accepting an invitation from black South African musicians to collaborate on some of the most hopeful and uplifting music ever created? This was glorious music that represented the “days of miracle and wonder” that were possible in the heart of Mandela, music that represented the universal dream of Martin Luther King.

In accepting a Grammy award for the album, Simon said of his fellow musicians and friends:

They live under one of the most oppressive regimes on earth today, and still they are able to produce music of great power, nuance and joy, and they have my respect for that.

I remember Paul Simon was one of the first people Mandela invited to South Africa as a free man – not just because the bars had been removed, but because he had left bitterness and rancor behind. Not everyone could or would. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. When the Iron Lady took office, I recall her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that following her death, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.

As young university students in Belfast in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative; it was the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were so young and full of hope for a better future, and it was through that lens that Thatcher and others in her party appeared resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s time in that tiny cell. On the other side of the argument, there were those, including De Klerk, who felt that “Thatcher correctly believed that more could be achieved through constructive engagement with his government than international sanctions and isolation of the South African government.”

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It always does.

When Mandela walked out of jail, the world cracked open. Enormous challenges lay ahead with even more bloodshed, but apartheid would eventually come to an end. Together, De Klerk and Mandela would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, of a democratic nation. Perhaps this would be the example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness.

Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award inspired by fellow Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” was presented to Mandela in 2006. Perfect then that Heaney would be the first to congratulate Mandela thus:

To have written a line about “hope and history rhyming for Mr. Mandela in 1990 is one thing . . . to have the man who made them rhyme accept the Award inspired by my poem is something else again.

At the beginning of the summer of 2013, I imagine Seamus Heaney was vexed over the thought of a world without Mandela. I think we all were. I remember a Sunday morning conversation with my late husband about Mandela’s charisma and fortitude, his inestimable influence – the “Madiba magic” that changed the world. Drinking our coffee, aware of our smallness in the world, we were sad that Mandela’s time was coming to an end. I didn’t want to believe it – the world still needed him, and so I turned to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the way I still do in the in-between times.

And then, just six months later, Madiba was gone. Seamus Heaney was gone. My husband was gone too. Gone. Like three shooting stars in the night sky above me – startling and beautiful and gone forever. For a time, it felt like my world might end. But only for a time.

Addressing the United Nations back in 1990 Mandela reminded those listening:

We must work for the day when we, as South Africans, see one another and interact with one another as equal human beings and as part of one nation united, rather than torn asunder, by its diversity,

He knew that many of those who had fought against apartheid had been made refugees by it. He would surely be alarmed today by the growing levels of xenophobia and nationalism in Africa – and beyond. The 2022 Africa Youth Survey reveals intolerance for refugees and immigrants among young people surveyed in 15 African nations; two new political parties, ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance, made significant gains in municipal elections in 2021 by running on divisive, anti-immigrant platforms. This we know – freedom untended runs the risk of slipping away from us.

South Africa – the world – could use Mandela’s inspiration and his example, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded us just yesterday, “Our world today is marred by war; overwhelmed by emergencies; blighted by racism, discrimination, poverty, and inequalities; and threatened by climate disaster.” South Africa is among the world’s most unequal countries, the gap between rich and poor ever widening, the poor being told to wash their hands – with little access to water – as the pandemic overwhelmed the country; unemployment is at its highest in the country’s history and among the highest globally; over 65% of the population struggling to afford food. The inequality in South Africa has increased since apartheid ended in 1994, according to the World Bank. The country is unraveling without Mandela, the man whose greatest miracle perhaps was that he made people in every corner of the world believe that the way things should be can overcome the way things are, that the world can change.

Time to change the world. No time to play small. No time to settle for smallness in hearts and minds and governments.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

The Supreme Court . . . the Harper Valley PTA

24 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by Editor in Dolly Parton, Ireland, Jeannie C. Riley, Movies, Nell McCafferty, Northern Ireland, Sexism, The Troubles

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9 to 5, Brett Kavanaugh, discrimination, Harper Valley PTA, Ireland, Jeannie C. Riley, misogyny, Nell McCAfferty, Repeal the 8th, Sexism

Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is, and that such decisions should remain between patients and their doctors. Today’s Supreme Court opinion will live in infamy as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights.

~ Hillary Clinton, June 24 2022

The headline in newspapers around the world today – including The Irish Times – is some version of this: Roe v Wade: “US supreme court strikes down abortion rights – Biden says decision to overturn 1973 ruling ‘taking the country back 150 years.”

Four years ago, the Irish national paper was focused on a different story, when President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins signed into law the Thirty-Sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, repealing what until then had been some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. It was a seismic moment for Ireland, a moment to also acknowledge how things had changed for women over the previous 50 years – at work, at home, in the bedroom, and even in the pub.

In the late 1960’s, I was a little girl concerned mostly with riding my bike and making daisy chains. I was often oblivious to The Troubles that dominated the news and even more so to the double-standards that affected the women in my life, most of whom were stay-at-home mothers. Most of them didn’t drive, a few worked outside the home, and I don’t remember ever seeing any of them go to the pub by themselves. I know now that this wasn’t because they were too busy doing other things; it was because it was considered unladylike for women to drink beer in pubs – and out of pint glasses. In fact, some pubs wouldn’t even admit a woman unless they were chaperoned by a man, and legally they could refuse to serve pints of beer. It wasn’t until the Equal Status Act of 2002 that this practice was outlawed, thanks in no small measure to women like Nell McCafferty who led a group of thirty women into a Dublin pub, where they bellied up to the bar and each of them ordered a brandy. After the drinks were set up on the bar, the group ordered a single pint of the black stuff. Upon being refused a Guinness by the bartender, the women drank their brandy and walked out – without paying.

The double-standards and the discrimination didn’t stop there. Women working in civil service had to resign from their jobs when they got married, the rationale being that they were taking a job that would otherwise go to a man. It wasn’t until 1977, when I was a teenager, that the Employment Equality Act removed the “marriage bar” for women.

Because of Ireland’s family laws, women had few rights at home.The law did not permit them to seek restraining orders against abusive husbands. Because a woman could not own a home, her husband could sell it without her consent. If she was being abused, therefore, her only option was to leave her home or return to her abusive spouse. Domestic violence in Ireland wasn’t recognized in Irish statute until the Family Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act in 1976 with the introduction of the first civil remedy for domestic violence, enabling women to seek a a restraining order. That same law also granted Irish women the right to share ownership of he family home. And, it wasn’t until 1985, around the time I graduated from university that Irish women could legally ‘choose’ their official “place of residence.” Previously, it was wherever her husband lived. And, until 1974 with the passage of the Social Welfare Act, only fathers could collect the payment of state subsidized children’s benefits.

This notion that a married woman was considered neither legally or economically distinct from her husband was deeply embedded in Irish law. Thus social and legal inequality flourished – in the boardroom, the courtroom, the bedroom. Women couldn’t sit on juries until 1976, they couldn’t get divorced until 1997, and they couldn’t refuse sex with their husband. It wasn’t until 1990 that marital rape was deemed a crime, and they couldn’t buy contraceptives. The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalized the import, sale, and distribution of contraceptives illegal. AIDS was now a fact of life – globally – yet the sale of condoms was illegal in Ireland except under very limited stipulations. In 1985 the law was amended to permit the sale of contraceptives to anyone over 18 but only in the pharmacy. I remember finding out that Dublin’s Virgin Megastore was prosecuted for selling condoms in 1991, an illegal practice, until later that same year when the sale of contraceptives was liberalized. By that time, I was far away in America and married. I’m ashamed to say I was unaware of the decades of struggle that had secured all I was taking for granted – contraception, divorce, jury duty, property ownership, pints of Guinness in a sports bar. That struggle was happening in America too.

May be a black-and-white image of 9 people and people standing

Fifty years ago, American women were fighting hard for many of the same rights that eventually came to their Irish counterparts. In 1968, there were no federal laws to stop employers from firing a woman if she became pregnant. Most women could not apply for a credit-card without having their husbands co-sign. signature. President Lyndon B. Johnson would eventually sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action plans for hiring women, and a year later, California adopted the country’s first “no fault” divorce law, allowing divorce by mutual consent.

In 1969, the woman who would almost five decades later become the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, Hillary Clinton, was the first student to address the graduation class of Wellesley College at commencement. This woman would subsequently warn us that the decision of the United States Supreme Court On January 22, 1973, in favor of “Jane Roe” (Norma McCorvey) – which held that women in the United States had a fundamental right to choose whether to have abortions without excessive government restriction and struck down Texas’s abortion ban as unconstitutional – would be overturned, as it was today.

It is chilling to observe the hypocrisy of the Republicans celebrating the end of Roe v Wade, those who call themselves “pro-life” while at the same time opposing the very programs that nurture life – food stamps, funding for child-care, maternity leave for both women and men to name a few. The truth is they don’t care about life, do they? They care – maybe – about potential life, but not the life being lived by real live people no longer in the womb. It’s unrecognizable, this America, where my own daughter now has fewer rights than her grandmother in Northern Ireland.

Hypocrisy is not new of course. When I was five years old, the song at the top of the charts was Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA,” a catchy cross-over tune that made her the first female artist to land at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Hot 100 charts with the same song. Written by Tom T. Hall, it was an enormous hit, exposing the small minds of a small town that is no match for a teenage girl’s widowed mother who’s accused of scandalous behavior because she wears mini-skirts and, in response, shows up at the PTA meeting to call out – by name – every member’s hypocrisy.

Coincidentally, no other female artist would top the charts until Dolly Parton in 1981 with an equally catchy “9 to 5,” an anthem of sorts for millions of middle-class white women who entered the workforce at the same moment when many of those same women were exiting marriages they had entered in the 1950s. And, in the movie of the same name, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda sock it to their boss, showing him and the rest of us that they will no longer be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”

Watching the news unfold this morning, I’m angry. We have come too far to be controlled by “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigots.” Wondering what Hillary Clinton thinks, I turned to social media to find her being right. Again.

Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is, and that such decisions should remain between patients and their doctors. Today’s Supreme Court opinion will live in infamy as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights.

What can we do? It’s not enough to just voice our opinions on blog posts and social media updates and around the dinner table. Our opinions don’t matter unless they are expressed on the ballot. Remember that most Americans did not want to see Roe V Wade overturned – at least that’s what polling data has consistently shown over the years.

Let’s sock it to ’em at the ballot box. Click here to make sure you’re registered to vote and then do it.

“This is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”

separation anxiety

15 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by Editor in 9/11, Awesome Women, cancer, Children's Books, Education, Emmylou Harris, Family, favorite teacher, Love Actually, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Ordinary Things, Pre-school, Soundtracks of our Lives, summer camp, Teaching, Themes of Childhood, Van Morrison, Van Morrison, Women and careers

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airports, Antrim, baby, bookstores, Cancer, children's books, children's literature, Dolly Parton, heroic teachers, Ireland, ironing, Jane Dyer, laundry, life-work balance, Love Actually, Motherhood, Northern Ireland, parting, stay-at-home-mom, Sweet Sorrow in the Wind

I stayed at home with my daughter the year after she was born. It was the best year of my life, with Sophie attached to me in one of those baby carriers without which I would have been unprepared for motherhood. That’s what the salesperson in Babies R Us said.

Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. I was usually bare-faced unlike Dolly Parton, who is always in full-make up, “ambulance, tornado, and earthquake ready” – and who is always – always – ready with the right words at the right time.

Some days, I showered. Most days, I resembled the child I once was, the one who had to be reminded more than once to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play; the child who made wishes on dandelions and chains out of buttercups and daisies. I loved playing with my very own and very real baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with the softest toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her dad off at work, she was all mine. Drunk on new baby smell, I danced in the afternoons around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road.” Over 25 years later, I can still smell it.

In those first months of her life, I spent interminable hours looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. I examined every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents. I often paused to ponder how it was that two imperfect people had made perfection. She would stared back, cooing like a little bird, babbling and gurgling before discovering the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, Sophie bounced with joy and curiosity. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered. I still do, albeit virtually and to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the minute she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me to do this, reminding me there would be plenty of times as an adult when Sophiewould have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. My mother was right.

If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting in some sort of emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency – like the night I spent in the ICU following eight hours of surgery while my daughter wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep.

I hate cancer.

When it was time for me to return to work after that year at home with her, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that came immediately before and continuing some time after I placed her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where all the other mothers appeared not to have jobs outside the home. Every morning, they loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstocks, drinking coffee from mugs filled at home. This was in that time before a Starbucks occupied every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I imagine I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. An assistant principal at the time, I was trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother” who could do it all and have it all and “lean in” blah, blah, blah. I’ll tell you. I’ve had my fill of leaning in.

Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. I made this a much bigger deal than it was, eventually discovering that if I didn’t put the blouses in the tumble dryer, they survived. Realizing there must be a lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry, I took a lasting umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans.

For all the years I lived in sunny Arizona – where any Northern Ireland mother will tell you there’s “great drying” most every day – I never understood why I owned a dryer. Where I grew up, everybody hung the washing out on the line and then ran like hell to rescue it when the rain invariably began. The first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board.

I remember I once asked my late husband about the logic of owning a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me like I had two heads. He loved that machine so much that he used it to dry all clothes, regardless of fabric. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, and he used it for all my favorite clothes too. I’m not sure I know today what this setting means. It doesn’t press anything permanently, but it has done a bang-up job of reducing some of my skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. To be fair, when I was pretending to be a grown-up with a real job that required more than pajamas, he didn’t do my laundry. I did. All my clothes were safe. I was too.

My safe clothes and my sensible job held no clout with Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed her my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie attempted to placate me with repeated reassurances that Sophie would be fine as soon as I left. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it at least three times, Bonnie showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation. I wrestled with the reality that Bonnie had other children to attend to. She would not be spending hours like Madonna – mother of Jesus, not Lourdes – at my perfect child or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when Sophie did something for the first time. Anything.

I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or blew bubbles or cracked a nut in the classroom nutcracker. Not your typical developmental milestones, but Bonnie’s boss deemed them important. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that she had experienced another genuis-level achievement like that time she spoke her first word – daddy – or when she clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of our hands and stood straight like a little warrior to an ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

If I’m honest – all these years later – I could have and maybe I should have stayed at home for another year. And another.

I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie, with some magic trick up her sleeve, who would charm Sophie’s tears away. Every day, I walked away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” pretending to leave but I stayed in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, prolonging the agony, listening to Sophie cry. When the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop, I reapplied my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Off I went – to work for other people’s children.

Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt who understood the rhythm of these daily separations – and reunions – and experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college—and inspired by Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind—she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”

I found it on a discard table in a Borders when central Phoenix still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically—and in the shape of a little red heart— it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime 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.

And 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.

It eased the morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and all the other teachers throughout the years. There were lots of them. I was never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was Sophie’s first teacher, that I knew her best. By the time she was in 2nd grade, Sophie had become a tourist in Arizona’s public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. We never stopped looking. I’m not sure the superhero teacher ever showed up, and Sophie’s formal education is now over with her post-graduate program completed.

One summer morning, I watched from my car as she strode onto a community college campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. As tall as me but braver, I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. She did. She never lets me down.

So blow a kiss and wave good-bye – my baby, don’t you cry. This love is always with you. Like the sun is in the sky.

Sometimes, in an unguarded moment – me in Mexico, Sophie in Arizona – between emails and Zoom meetings, home improvement projects and grocery store runs, things that matter and things that don’t, we’ll each wonder what the other is doing and pick up the phone.

She’s only a phone call away, a couple of hours on a plane, and although I miss her terribly, I can’t help but smile as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the tiny red heart leverly hidden on each page.

Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scatted around my home – and hers – are little reminders in stone and glass and fabric that the love actually is all around – something we have known long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in. If you’re looking for love, you can always find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for a clothesline strung across the backyard. Reminiscent of the rhythms of rural County Derry, it is a place peopled with the kind of characters that fill Seamus Heaney’s poems – men like my father, makers of things.

The other day, the stonemason working on the wall around our house, asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall?