How to ride a bike . . .

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by Editor in Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, John Lennon, learning to drive, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, riding a bicycle, saying goodbye, Starting over, Time, widowed

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developmental milestones, father's day, identity, Learning to drive, learning to ride a bike, Memoir, mother daughter relationship

“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”

~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY

It’s Father’s Day. It’s a big deal. In a recent survey, the National Retail Foundation found that 76 percent of Americans plan to celebrate today, Father’s Day. The celebration looks different for all of us. Scrolling through social media, my feed is already lit up with photos of fathers – including my own – all poignant reminders that my daughter has been without her dad for some of the biggest moments of her life, the moments that don’t happen on Father’s Day. It feels unfair. We can’t dodge it of course. On the one hand, we celebrate my dad, her grandfather – we’re grateful for the fatherly people in our lives. On the other, the day is a keen reminder – like every other day – that my daughter’s father is physically not here. The list of milestones continues to grow, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and Facebook memories. He has missed so much – her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America he had dreamed would be hers. He missed meeting her boyfriend, a gentle soul with hair as long as his used to be and a vinyl record collection and who studies archeology – the subject he once told me he would study in his next life. He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands – the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And, she missed him.

It was on our first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from home, had been teaching her to drive on what he considered the wrong side of the road. Watching from the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, he encouraged her to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s. Watching from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, I was transported from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me then and today of Seamus Heaney’s symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain

~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.

We are fit for it.

When I’m in Phoenix, she drives me to places I miss – to Target and the bookstore. One morning, as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park – the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite, ” the one where her father removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas – and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.

Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.

~ Nikki Giovanni

sophbike

Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her note to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I am taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy – the color was irrelevant.

The pink bike had training wheels – “stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child. Stabilizers – my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold. Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson handily dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal.

Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” No wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage, a milestone. In our family’s story, it was A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and made a joke about how he had given her ma the Protestant discount. Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. We were not convinced and therefore had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .

Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only once and with only a few tears. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was riding a bike! Round and round the park, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and she, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum,” equipped for bicycle riding, for inevitable tumbles and the promise of a blue skies ahead. Just like her mother.

And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.

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.

How to ride a bike . . .

18 Saturday Jun 2022

Posted by Editor in Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, John Lennon, learning to drive, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, riding a bicycle, saying goodbye, Starting over, Time, widowed

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developmental milestones, identity, Learning to drive, learning to ride a bike, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, new motherhood, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, widowhood

“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”

~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY

15 Father’s Days. Too few.

Much missed, he has missed so many milestones, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and social media updates. He missed her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America we had hoped for her when she was an infant. He missed meeting her boyfriend – with hair as long as his used to be and a student of archeology – the thing he said he would study in his next life. He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands – the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And she missed him.

It was on the first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from his home in rural Northern Ireland, had been teaching her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road. He spent every afternoon in the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove her dad’s car around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, encouraging her to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s. I watched from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, the whole scene reminding me then and still of Seamus Heaney’s symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain

~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.

We are fit for it.

During a visit to Phoenix this past winter, she drove me to the drugstore. Watching as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park – the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite, ” the one where her father removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas – and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.

Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.

~ Nikki Giovanni

Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her letter to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I am taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.“By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy – the color was irrelevant.

The pink bike had training wheels – “stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child in Northern Ireland. Stabilizers – my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold. Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal. Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” No wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage one that was – in our family’s story – A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and made a joke about how he had gone out of his way to give me the Protestant discount. Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. We knew better and therefore had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her daddy would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .

And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.

The Eagles – on a Corner in Phoenix, Arizona.

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Editor in American Dream, Being young, Belfast, Concerts, Eagles Tour 2018, Glenn Frey, Irish Diaspora, Take It Easy, The Eagles

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Deacon Frey, deacon grey, Death of Glenn Frey, Eagles 2018 Talking Stick, Linda Ronstadt, Lowell George, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Take It Easy, Vince Gill

When I was young, I only liked the Eagles because I knew they had been Linda Ronstadt’s backing vocalists – and I loved Linda Ronstadt. I wanted to be her and therefore learned by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. In my teenage bedroom, I spent hours singing along to her records, dreamy and delusional, telling myself that I was absolutely within her vocal range. Bored and adolescent, I longed to be far away Northern Ireland and its grey skies, from Margaret Thatcher, from politics and parades, from flags and fighting – far away from a country that has “no prairies to slice a big sun at evening.” I wanted to be an American girl. I wanted to hang out in a place called California with long-haired rockers who sometimes sounded a little more country than I thought I liked. I wanted to drive down an American highway on a sunny day with the top down and the radio up. For miles.

I loved everything about Linda Ronstadt and wanted to appear as confident, to stride onstage in a mini-skirt, one hand on my hip, the other shakin’ a tambourine. I wanted to belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me with the kind of authority that after all these years alludes me still – “Well I met a man out in Hollywood/Now I ain’t naming names.” I would never have imagined the woman behind that heartsome voice could know vulnerability or inadequacy. I know better now. Moving through the world to the beat of a different drum is not always easy.

Linda Ronstadt covered every genre – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – exposing me to the dozens of American musicians who would score the soundtrack of my life. Buddy Holly. Roy Orbison. Smokey Robinson. Jackson Browne. Lowell George. Neil Young. Warren Zevon. Bob Seger. The Flying Burrito Brothers. The Eagles. The Eagles. Glenn Frey and Don Henley – The Eagles. That’s right. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. Linda Ronstadt was living my dream, making harmonies – sweet harmonies – with long-haired rockers:

I got tougher being on the road with the Eagles. I walked differently, I became more foulmouthed. I swore so much I sounded like a truck driver. But that’s the way it was. I was the only girl on the road so the boys always kind of took charge. They were working for me, and yet it always seemed like I was working for them.

KXgoR3T

In 1971, she had hired Glenn Frey and a singing drummer, Don Henley, to be her back-up vocalists, and when they later decided to form their own band, she helped them. In 2014, when Linda Ronstadt was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but unable to attend due to illness, it was her long-time friend, her former back-up singer, Glenn Frey, who paid tribute to her. He made a point of saying that it was a long time coming, and he reminded everyone of what she would later reveal in Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir about why she sang:

people sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.

Glenn Frey knew this delight. He knew why people sing. He knew how to give voice to our heartaches and hangovers, to lying eyes and life in the fast lane, to Desperados, and to James Dean. He knew how to sing to the girl who might slow down in a flat bed Ford just to take a look at him, in Winslow, Arizona, where I drove one day in 1987. I was 24 years old without a care in the world and a tank full of gas. It was 110 degrees, and I was hot and bothered wearing a shirt tied at the waist and cut-off denim shorts. I was Linda Ronstadt, and I had the radio on.

unnamed The sky was on fire when I pulled over to the side of the road. It didn’t matter that it was late in the afternoon. It was close enough to a tequila sunrise. I turned up the music, got out of my car, and I stood on the corner. Of Winslow Arizona. I was an American Girl.

For that moment, I am forever in your debt, Glenn Frey. But, I never saw him perform in concert, somehow missing the Eagles every time they rolled into town even after they reunited – when hell froze over. And then Glenn Frey died, and I remember thinking this meant the Eagles had died too. But last week, I found out that their “Greatest Hits” album overtook Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” to claim the top spot on the list of best-selling albums in the United States, and that they are touring sold-out stadiums all over the country. How could that be? I wanted to find out. In retrospect, I wish I’d wanted to find out earlier than two hours before they took to the stage in Phoenix, but better late than never. It was just plain wrong to be settling into a night of binge-watching on Netflix knowing that the Eagles were playing just a few miles away from my boyfriend’s condo. The Eagles were playing – without Glenn Frey – but still. The Eagles were playing, and we didn’t have tickets. Linda Ronstadt’s back-up singers were playing in Phoenix – and we didn’t have tickets. Unacceptable.

Now I’m not going to tell you what we paid for those tickets. I’m still surprised that two were available on a dubious website just 90 minutes before the Eagles stepped on stage with a flawless performance of “Seven Bridges Road.” But I will tell you I’m very glad we did.

In place of Glenn Frey were Vince Gill and a young man in a red plaid shirt and jeans, his long hair pulled back under sunglasses, looking as though he had just grabbed his guitar from a flat-bed Ford. Then he announced that he was going to “sing one that my dad used to sing, if that’s okay.” Sentimental? Yes. But also pitch perfect, reminding me of the first time I saw the E Street Band without Clarence Clemons, when Springsteen introduced the big man’s nephew on saxophone.

With thousands of people singing along and waving illuminated smart phones, Deacon Frey, sang lead on “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” the resemblance to his father unsettling and magical. And, as the final chord rang throughout the arena, a black and white image of his smiling father, Glenn Frey, appeared on the screen behind him – a reminder of his legacy, not that we needed it.

A little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit, Steuart Smith, Deacon Frey, and Vince Gill, shimmered through a set that as it unfurled, affirmed for everyone in that arena that life’s been good and that we can forget about the news for a couple of hours. As Henley pointed out, “It’ll all be there in the morning.”