At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is…
T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
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 over thirty years, but had never been able to make time for it, 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.
My friend signed up with me, and like a couple of teenagers, we competed for an “A” from our photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon. Like me, she was dealing with breast cancer with 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. Bristling at our predictable photographs shot unacceptably straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light.” It was just light, and we just needed to find it and appreciate it when we did. Photography was “writing with light.”
I wanted to find that light, to be the photographer with the magic Amyn Nasser describes as
I believe in the photographer’s magic. He has 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.
Believing in us the way good teachers do, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” requiring 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 Thanksgiving afternoon, I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually stopping beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I have no idea how long I sat in the shade of those trees, 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 again this Thanksgiving, contradicting doctors, and protesting the protocols that prevented him from performing where and when he wanted to and making people sick in the process.
I prefer to think of Van Morrison as the man behind the music that is the soundtrack of my youth, the soundtrack of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast – the city that made him in the place that made me. I prefer to think of him – on Thanksgiving – as the man behind 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.”
For the day that’s in it, Thanksgiving has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence. Among those desert trees that afternoon, looking up and losing track of time, I saw the light, I suppose, and the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott once described 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.
Although the celebration of the holiday does not come naturally to me, even after living an American life for over thirty years – and now living in an ex-pat village in Mexico where, yes, I will have turkey later. Some of my friends are still surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland and that Christmas is the holiday that warms us. I can relate to Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in Washington D.C. when she apologizes to her American family and friends:
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
Last year, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik told his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude.” The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace all our known ways with new routines and rituals. It has also inspired new reasons – reminders – to be thankful – for all the people, places, and things we took for granted and swear we’ll never make the same mistake again. Hugs. Handshakes. Hanging out. Happy hour.
Keeping it Irish, I’ll leave you with this lovely minute or two from the film, “Waking Ned Devine.” The hapless Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, just as 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.
Time after time, I have stood on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is often easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about my beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland, the wee country that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter and things that need to be said out loud; and, about magic and loss.
A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland in the dark ages before the invention of products for curly hair. Born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have an artsy daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and a compulsion to write our way out of trouble.
On one of the anniversaries of September 11th Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls, then just four years old, were safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, unaware of the reports tumbling out of New York city. We were heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and transatlantic talks of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
~ Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? Maybe. Growing up where we did, when we did, confounded by the bombs and bullets, the sheer brutality and barbarism on both sides – but – we were also resigned to it, clinging to ordinary rituals and routines, that we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. Off we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
One such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. Just starting out, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. As my mother used to say, the world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and my once cherished writing ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt – and I was writing again, the way I had done in that old diary. I kept it private at first, afraid that hitting “publish” would land me in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.
But as I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer and the women who have it all and those who don’t. Cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.
Her first homework assignment was ostensibly simple – to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I promised I would print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend came along, with a plastic envelope to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a scrap of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.
Making our way up the little hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the thunderous roar of airplanes above reminiscent of the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.
There were letters and paper flowers, tiny stuffed bears on the grass below six flagpoles and candles aglow on a bright morning. I have been cleaved in two by such objects before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson I learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
In this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; and as a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, visitors fall silent and still. Bagpipes. Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as the sky airline pilots described as “severe clear” that September morning are tied around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he had come to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.
I attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole.
I said his name. Igor.
A LETTER TO IGOR
September 15 2002
Dear Igor Zuckerman
Please excuse me if I haven’t quite got your name right. It’s been running around in my head for the past few days, haunting me almost, but I’m not quite sure if it’s Zuckerman or Ziberman. Or maybe it’s Zuckleman. I do remember though, quite clearly, that your surname began with a Z.
Apart from that I know nothing at all about you; except that you lost your life a year ago, on September 11 2001. You see yours was the very last name on the list of almost 3,000 people who died with you on that beautiful sunny morning to be read out at the memorial service on Wednesday. I didn’t hear all of the names, but of those I did catch, yours has particularly affected me; probably because it took over two and a half hours to get to you. Two and a half hours of dead people. Two and a half hours before your friends and family heard someone they probably didn’t know confirm to the world that you were gone.
I’ve been wondering how you died, Igor. I know it sounds morbid, but since I heard your name, the last name, I’ve become somewhat obsessed by your death. Were you in one of the towers, or on a plane or at the Pentagon? If you were in a tower, which one was it? What floor were you on? Why were you there? Were you a businessman, a janitor, a tourist, a fireman? Did you go there every day, or was there a special reason for your visit that morning? Did you know what was happening? Did you realize that you weren’t going to get out, or were you confident that you would? Did you manage, like hundreds of others, to make contact with your loved ones? Did your death come in a lift, on the stairwell, by your desk? Or did you jump?
Perhaps you were a passenger on one of the planes. That bothers me even more, Igor. Everyone has their own personal horror of that day – a moment, a memory, a story, a name, an image that will haunt them forever and flash before them for years to come when they think about that date. 9:11, a date which started off as a normal day and ended as one the world will never forget, embedded forever in history. My demon, the one that still visits me every time I see a jumbo jet soaring high above in a clear blue sky, is the image of the planes crashing into the towers. As a nervous flyer, the thought of the innocent people on all four of the planes involved in the attacks will distress me for the rest of my life. And, as a mother, the fact that there were children on board some of the flights has made me howl with rage.
But I’ve also been thinking about your life, Igor. What age were you? Where did you come from? Where did you live? Did you have a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a dog? Were you a father? A brother? An uncle? What were your passions? Your favorite film? Your favorite food? Was there a book you re-read time and time again? Were you a sportsman, Igor, or an artist; or both? Did you like to cook? Sing? Dance? Run? Were you smiling on your way to wherever you were going that morning, happy to be doing whatever you were doing? Did you look up at the deep blue sky and feel glad to be alive on such a beautiful autumn day?
And your family, Igor. Your family. I’ve been thinking about them too. Did they walk the streets of Manhattan for days with your photograph? Did they get to bury your body? How long did they have to wait before they knew you were never coming home? And how are they now; one shockingly short but painfully long year on?
I’ve been wondering what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
Some people here have been cross at the exposure of 9:11 and many didn’t want to be reminded about it last week when most of the world mourned the first anniversary. ‘What about our dead?’ they shouted. ‘What about us?’ But they’re so wrapped up in their own self pity that they’re missing the point: the dead of 9:11 are our dead. This wasn’t just an attack on the USA; it wasn’t only meant to harm Americans, rock the US administration, threaten the land of the free. It was a message to the world. It was meant to hurt us all. It was the most obvious and orchestrated single act of terrorism the human race has ever witnessed; because that is exactly what happened – the world witnessed it, with bewildered and disbelieving horror.
But perhaps that same world can turn it around, recycle the shock and fear and grief and anger to produce a global climate of trust, friendship, tolerance and respect. Wouldn’t it be great if, after that cataclysmic day, the world had said ‘stop’, ‘enough’, ‘no more’? If the terrorists themselves had become the terrified, frightened that their ultimate objective had failed? If people who hate had started to love and blame became forgiveness, and intolerance became compassion? Do you think that’s possible, Igor, my fantasy vision of a fairy tale future? It certainly doesn’t look like it right now. War is a frightening possibility, looming closer every day, and world peace seems further away than ever. I don’t know what our future holds, Igor, but I do know it’s different than the one that was lining up for us on the morning last September when you made your way towards your death under a bright blue sky.
I plan to visit New York for the second time next summer. On my first trip to the city, almost four years ago, my favorite place, the only ‘tourist attraction’ I went to twice, was the World Trade Centre. I had lunch in Windows on the World and it was honestly one of those rare ‘wow’ moments that stay with you forever. I vividly remember looking out at the myriad of buildings and bridges across Manhattan thinking: ‘it’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m here in New York drinking wine and having the time of my life.’ I literally felt on top of the world. There was something surreal and altogether magical about being there, and after that trip I always told friends who were visiting the city to go to Windows. It was my number one tip. When I return, I will go to Ground Zero, and pay my respects to everyone who died. And I’ll whisper your name Igor, and hope the wind will carry my blessing to you.
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.
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes. CD burners, iPods, and iTunes Have taken the place Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon Enough, clever introverts will create Quicker point-and-click ways to declare One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor. But I miss the labor Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song At a time. It sometimes took days To play, choose, pause, Ponder, record, replay, erase, And replace. But there was no magic wand. It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape Was sculpture designed to seduce And let the hounds loose. A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave, A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,” Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye. The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” or something by Hank. But O, the last track Was the vessel that contained The most devotion and pain And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
In this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
