On becoming an American Girl – on the Corner of Winslow, Arizona

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Editor in American Dream, Being young, Belfast, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Glenn Frey, Take It Easy, The Eagles

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Death of Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt, Lowell George, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Take It Easy

When I was young, I wanted to be Linda Ronstadt. I knew by heart the lyrics of every song she covered, and in my teenage bedroom, I sang along with her, having deluded myself that I was within her range. Bored and adolescent, I just wanted to be far away from grey skies and Margaret Thatcher and from Northern Ireland – its politics and parades, its flags and fighting. I wanted to be an American girl. I wanted to hang out with long-haired rockers who sometimes sounded a little too country. I wanted to drive down an American highway with the top down and the radio up. Forever.

I loved everything about Linda Ronstadt. I wanted to appear as confident, to stride onstage in a mini-skirt, one hand on my hip, the other holding a tambourine. I wanted to belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me. With authority. “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.

Because Linda Ronstadt covered every genre – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – she exposed me to 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 Eagles. The Eagles. Glenn Frey and Don Henley – The Eagles.

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At first, I only liked the Eagles because I knew they had been Linda Ronstadt’s backing vocalists. That’s right. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. She had lived my dream, hanging out and harmonizing 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.

In 1971, she had hired Glenn Frey and a singing drummer, Don Henley, to be her back-up vocalists, and later, when they 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 wearing a shirt tied at the waist and cut-off denim shorts. I was Linda Ronstadt, and I had the radio on.

unnamed When I pulled over, the sky was on fire. 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. Because I could.

I was an American Girl.

For that, I am forever in your debt, Glenn Frey. Rest easy, now.

Glenn Frey, November 6, 1948 – January 18, 2016

thank goodness, thanksgiving & astral weeks

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by Editor in Art, Belfast, Christmas, Memoir, Photography, Saying Thank You, Thanksgiving, Van Morrison, Writers

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Amazing Grace, Annie Lamott, Astral Weeks, camera angles, christmas, gratitude, Happy Thanksgiving 2015, identity, immigration, Life Lessons, Memoir, perspective, photography, prayer, thanks, Thanksgiving, trees, Van Morrison, Words of Wisdom, Writing

In the Fall of 2012, my friend and 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 just never been able to find the time for it. I had been so 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.

I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal 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. 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 don’t know 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 us the way he does when he seems younger than the grumpy old man he sometimes appears to be. I can hear 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 as I gazed up at those shimmering leaves, but that would not be true. Even after living in America for almost 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.

Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I may even have found 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.

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.

Thank you, my friends.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Paris – Heartbreak Beat.

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Editor in 9/11, Anything can Happen, Being young, Belfast, bombing, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Heartbreak Beat, Northern Ireland, Paris Attack, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Psychedelic Furs, The Troubles, War

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9.11, anything can happen, Barclay James Harvest, Belfast, Heartbreak Beat, Mr. Roger, Northern Ireland, Paris, Seamus Heaney, terrorism, The Helpers, The Troubles

“They stopped France when its guard was down,” announces the BBC reporter from a TV in the corner of my house so far away from Paris. Of course they did.

I should know by now that a popular concert venue in Paris on a Friday night is not an unexpected place, that there are some for whom Paris is “a legitimate target.” I should know by now not to be shocked that a gunman would fire indiscriminately into one restaurant at the intersection of Rue de Charonne and Rue Faidherbe. And then another. Learning that two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France during the friendly football match between France and Germany, I am reminded of 1994, the year Ireland qualified for the World Cup. The country was ecstatic, its factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in plenty of time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. We had thought of going out to the pub to watch the first-round match, but my father convinced us to stay at home, have a few jars, and watch the match from the comfort of the living room. So we gathered around the TV and held our breath as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. Like Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series, we were afraid to look.

The second half of the match was well underway when two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub, The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men who had gathered around the bar to watch Ireland take on Italy. They killed six of them, and according to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was in his eighties, someone’s grandfather, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup. In the same moments, the jubilant Irish football team was making its way out a Giants Stadium awash in green, held aloft by the chants of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by news of what had happened in a country pub back home.

Anything can happen.

In Paris last night, I imagine some in the crowd guessed or hoped or dismissed those blasts outside the Stade de France as something else, the way we convince ourselves that it is a car backfiring on the freeway not a gunshot, that it is merely a clap of Monsoon thunder not a bomb detonated on a railway line. But then comes the scream of sirens, the plumes of grey smoke, the unmistakable stench, the blood thick on the aisles at The Bataclan and the realization of being under attack, once again in the lingering aftermath of two planes that crashed with such force into the heart of a city, on a clear Autumn morning that had been full of possibilities, the Manhattan skyline sparkling in the sunshine.

Until that grotesque morning in September 11th 2001, I know I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as a woman who had traded Northern Ireland for America. Foolishly, I had too quickly dropped my guard. I had grown complacent and smug, confident that – unlike her mother – my American daughter would never have to look twice at an unattended shopping bag that had been simply forgotten by someone in a hurry, or that she would never find herself standing stock still with her arms over her head to be searched before proceeding through airport security, or wonder while poring over international headlines, how a complete stranger could hate her because of her nationality; or, that she would find out from her grandmother on a Facebook message that 129 people were confirmed dead following a shooting at a rock concert in the center of Paris.

As bits of sentences sped across time and distance with harrowing news of suicide bombings and indiscriminate shootings, I kept going with my Friday evening plan to attend The Psychedelic Furs concert in Scottsdale, nostalgic for the verve of the 1980s.

I kept going, all the while knowing that such horror was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic? Has my heart grown numb? And what fear lurked in the minds of The Psychedelic Furs as they took the stage in Scottsdale, Arizona, aware that just hours earlier, the Eagles of Death Metal were performing in Paris, forgetting, the way we do, that anything can happen, that gunmen can storm in and slaughter scores of fans with automatic weapons.

Anything can happen.

On September 11, 2001, it seemed that the world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. My little girl was just four years old, safe in her pre-school, learning how to be away from me. As the news tumbled out of New York city, I found myself unable to think or do, momentarily frozen by a revulsion familiar to children of The Troubles. Blindsided again. I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and talk of peace and renewal, I had grown complacent. How could I have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen? Anything. I 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 I did, when I did, I was often confounded by the bombs and bullets, the brutality and barbarism on both sides, but at the same time, somehow – and sadly – resigned to it. I held tight to the ordinary rituals, those I thought I could control. I tried not to be afraid that “it” might happen to me. I never fully gave into the fear as I went to school or the shop or to the pub on a Friday night or out to a concert. Had I succumbed to the fear, I might never have left the house.

With hundreds of people out and about in the city of lights, there is the potential for a tremendous loss of life, and a profound sense of sadness and weariness accompanies this awareness. It reconfirms my fear that it is impossible to defeat terrorism. At the same time, it is impossible to live in constant fear of it, otherwise you might never go outside, as my mother often told me when I was a young girl growing up in Northern Ireland.

So what can we do today and tomorrow and the next day as we wonder why and how or when it might happen again? We will find, long before the answers, the highest expressions of humanity and kindess within the hearts of ordinary people who will emerge as heroes. Mr. Rogers calls them “the helpers.”

While we struggle to find the words to explain the inexplicable – again – we can remind our children – and ourselves – of the helpers and their humanity that shines through the darkest days:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

We’ll walk down the avenue again . . .

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Editor in A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun

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BBC Radio Ulster, Cyprus Avenue, Homesickness, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Sense of Wonder, Van Morrison 70th Birthday

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

~ from “Had I Not Been Awake” In The Human Chain by Seamus Heaney.

Had I not been awake early this morning, I would have missed the goings-on on Cyprus Avenue. It is Van Morrison’s 70th birthday, and it crosses my mind again that his music – like Seamus Heaney’s poems – has scored much of my life. For the crowd gathered up on Cyprus Avenue to celebrate his birthday with him, a sense of wonder; for me, a homesickness Stephen King aptly describes as “a terribly keen blade.”

Social media and BBC Radio Ulster are doing their best to assuage the lump-in-my-throat melancholy, while at the same time making it worse, reminding me of the thousands of miles that stretch between us. I am not there.I am not there, with my college friend Ruth, to sing along and wonder if he might indulge us with a rendition of Cyprus Avenue which everyone surely wants to hear – for old times sake and because it is fitting. But you never know where you are with Van; you just remember where you are from.

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Eight hours behind and a lifetime away from where the second concert of the day is now underway, I relate easily to those fans who have traveled from other continents to sit now among the eighty five trees lining Cyprus Avenue and absorb Van’s Belfast, if only for an hour or two. Clicking on the link to the BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, I was transported instantly to my bedroom in my parent’s house on the Dublin Road, a teenager again and tuning in to Radio Luxembourg – in the Days Before Rock and Roll.

Justin . . .

I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

Specific and evocative, the names of streets in Van Morrison’s songs – Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue, Fitzroy – as much as the characters that people them and the rituals that shaped those lives – Madame George, the window cleaners taking a break for tea with Paris Buns from the shop, you taking the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, kids collecting bottle-tops, all of us tuning into Radio Luxembourg on our transistor radios, going to the pictures, or the chipper, and filling ourselves with pastie suppers, gravy rings, Wagon Wheels, barmbrack, Snowballs – all these with a Sense of Wonder that has a universal resonance.

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking,
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Maybe I understand the pull that brings fans from other continents to Cyprus Avenue today. I am reminded of the time I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah – places Lowell George immortalized in Willin’. While they turned out not to tourist destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight, I could hear Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George growling about her every mile I covered. Too, I remember visiting San Francisco drawn less by St. Dominic’s Preview and more by the sight of orange boxes scattered against a SafeWay supermarket in the rain. Can you hear the echo of Patrick Kavanagh in Van Morrison’s songs, finding God in ‘the bits and pieces of everyday.”

As a new mother, almost eighteen years ago, far away from my Northern Ireland home and in Arizona, it was “Brown Eyed Girl” that I sang to my green-eyed girl to help her fall asleep. When she did her first little dance as a toddler, a jaunty “Bright Side of the Road” kept her going. As she twirled and clapped her hands, I reminisced about walking with my friends past Sunnyside Street on our way out on a Saturday night. This song, so jaunty in fact, that it was even used as the promotional jingle for a “Belfast’s got the buzz” campaign, as we tried to pick ourselves up from all that had ravaged our wee country. When I got over getting cancer, when I turned a corner in the world of widowhood, it was to my favorite Van Morrison song that I turned and turn.

“When the Healing has Begun,” is a tour de force from “Into the Music,” the first Van record I bought from Ronnie Miller’s Pop-In record store in Antrim. A far more satisfying thing than the school lunch I was supposed to buy – it fed my soul. I played it until I knew the lyrics by heart. And there they stayed until about twenty years later when I found a pristine copy, a German import, still in its protective plastic, at Tracks on Wax then a treasure trove for lovers of vinyl in Phoenix, Arizona – before vinyl became cool and collectible for a new generation.

I had worn out that song, which required some effort. In the days before record players like mine had to compete with tape decks, CD players, and MP3 files, if I wanted to hear a song just one more time or just the opening breath of it, there was no simple replay button, no nonchalant click; rather, the knack of placing the stylus right in the groove, in “the sweet spot,” where it would pick up the familiar repetitive rhythm, the violins, a “yeah” from Van, and “we’ll walk down the avenue again.”

Cyprus. Fitzroy. Belfast. Phoenix. it matters not. We are anywhere and everywhere, underneath the stars. Neither here nor there. It enchants me still – and maybe even Van himself – this song that takes him from a roar through a mumble to a barely there whisper at the end. And when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert with appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Hypnotized momentarily. Such is the “aesthetic force” of that song for me.

Back street jelly roll . . .

I remember the first time I saw him perform it, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Leaning forward from the good seats in the balcony – having scored tickets from a friendly roadie in the Crown Bar – it felt a bit like being in church, somehow knowing we should behave and be quiet, reverent even, if he was going to take us along with him on this song. And he did.

And the healing begins . . .

And we’ll walk down the avenue in style
And we’ll walk down the avenue and we will smile
And we’ll say baby ain’t it all worthwhile
When the healing has begun

Thank you, Van. For all of it. Happy Birthday.