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.
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
Terri Hooley has decided to close down the Good Vibrations record shop on June 13th. This one’s for him – again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, 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 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 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 knew what I’d 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 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 wept 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 about 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, almost forty 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 – 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” 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 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 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 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 right 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 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 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 – Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. 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. Making a mix tape was 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’d 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.
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.
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.
Once upon a time, before news traveled at break-neck speed to our smart phones and our Cable TV networks, we waited for it. We had no choice, and when “the news” came on at teatime, it was a serious affair that demanded our attention. It was rarely, if ever, about a new animal born at the zoo or a wardrobe malfunction of someone famous. When UTV broadcaster, Brian Baird, entered our living rooms, in black and with poker-faced authority as he told us something new, we took it as gospel.
As my brother says, “You could read nothing in that face. It was all in the voice. The face, if it told you anything, told you this: listen to what I’ve found out since I was talking to you last. This is very important, and will take only three minutes.” There was no shuffling of papers, no footerin’ with a pen – there was just the news.
I remember wondering, amid the flurry of texts and Tweets about the death of our Seamus Heaney, how the late Brian Baird would have broken the news. Would he have maintained his compusure or would he have lost what veteran American anchorman, Walter Kronkite, described as the “running battle” between his emotions and his news sense when he announced on-air, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I suspect the latter.
I first met Mr. Baird on a September morning in the early 1980s. I was a student at Queen’s University of Belfast’s Stranmillis College, and I was late for my first Modern Irish Fiction Since Joyce seminar. When I opened the door, it was to the sound of a familiar voice coming from the front of a classroom. There he was, sitting behind a desk that was too small for him, reciting Yeats, delivering the message with the same gentle gravitas with which he also read the news. Away from the TV in the corner of our living room on the Dublin Road, Mr. Baird was larger than life. As such, over the course of that year, he changed my life as only the best teacher can.
In Mr. Baird’s seminar, I discovered the novels of Edna O’Brien, the short stories of Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty, and Brian Friel’s plays. Even as I write, I can hear his recitation of Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” which made we weep a little. Indeed, it is preferable to think of Mr. Baird waxing poetic than reporting news that was mostly bad in those days.
It was he who introduced me to, Seamus Heaney. “Professionally unfussed” like Heaney’s Diviner, Mr. Baird led his students in and out of those poems, wondering always and wandering through rural places and practices I knew well, but had until then taken for granted. I felt a new pride, almost boastful that I belonged to Heaney’s places – Castledawson, The Hillhead, The Lough shore, Broagh. I found a new respect for the craft of certain men who peopled those parts and Heaney’s poems – The Thatcher, Barney Devlin, the blacksmith at The Forge, The Diviner, men like my father who I once observed “witch” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the stick in the shape of a wishbone, bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting through a green hazel its secret stations.”
My newfound appreciation for the ways of life in the townlands of rural Derry did little to make me more punctual to class or timely with submission of homework. Mr. Baird referred to me as “the late Miss Watterson,” announcing my arrival in a way that only encouraged my tardiness. I enjoyed his attention, and I saved every hand-written essay, because I loved his red-ink comments. Often, I imagined him sharing his assessments of work on the six o’clock news: “A very sound survey, which I was pleased, at last, to receive. I had had oral evidence of its existence.” Or, “This was received very late, so I can’t guarantee this mark.” I got the mark anyway.
He started out as a young English teacher in 1956, far away from Belfast, in Kuala Kangsa, a small town in Malaysia. He had accepted a post that had recently been vacated by a John Wilson, who later under the pen name of Anthony Burgess, wrote the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. After a successful five years, he moved to the island of Penang, where his son, Patric, was born. And in 1963, the year I was born, the Bairds returned to Northern Ireland, bringing with them a cargo of words and phrases, recipes and photographs, of exotic Eastern places that could not have been further away from Belfast.
I remember seeing Mr. Baird one night in the foyer of The Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street, just a few doors down from where I lived when I was a student. It was before a play, and he was enjoying a cigar and a laugh with local celebrities, his thick gold bracelet chinking against a brandy glass as he raised it in my direction. I wish I had been bold enough to say hello and ask if he thought the play was going to be all it was cracked up to be. I know now he would have welcomed me into the conversation, but I was hesitant, awkwardly aware of being the first person in my family to attend university or to go to a play at The Lyric Theater – I may as well have been in Penang.
In Stepping Stones, Seamus Heaney explains to Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days,I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
A university education in Belfast was a world away from the Broagh and necessitated a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word he says, weighing its impact before he utters it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, ” you know all them things.”
From Clearances IV
Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.
In 1991, Mr. Baird would receive a letter from me. I was living in Arizona and teaching part-time. In anticipation of teaching an Irish literature class, I wondered if he would maybe share with me the syllabus from the Irish Fiction course. He obliged, and I love knowing that the elegant hand-written letter remains folded between the pages of theCollected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh.
I wish there had been more letters between us, because he probably had much more to teach me. He died in 1998, by which time I was consumed with learning how to be a new mother. I never made the time to thank him for the life-long gift of Seamus Heaney’s poetry – there has not been one day of my adult life that I have not been grateful for it.
When Mr. Baird died, then manager of Ulster Television(UTV), Desmond Smyth, described him as many of us remember him:
To a TV generation Brain Baird was the voice and the face of UTV news. He was a totally professional broadcaster and a charming work colleague with not an ounce of ego about him.
Like Seamus Heaney’s men – not an ounce of ego.
Out of the blue, one morning in April 2013, I received an email from his son, Patric. In his travels, he had found my writing and was pleased to read there about the impact of his father on yet another former student. It turns out I am part of a large and global fan-club. Patric told me that on a trip to Malay to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he met some of his father’s former pupils, now men in their seventies who recall with gratitude how their teacher had helped shape their appreciation of literature and the English language.
It was a long struggle with a rare form of leukemia that killed my favorite teacher, and Patric says he remained positive throughout the illness. Of course he did.
Sadly, Mr. Baird did not live to see his son become a journalist, nor would he ever know the full extent of his influence as a teacher and a lover of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Even though I know he is the man who kept on reading the news in spite of a fly landing on his lip, I have to believe that his inscrutable poker face would break into a smile at the thought of his son and a former student, each of us in our fifties and like Seamus Heaney, “crediting marvels.”
After my husband died and the weekend before my first Christmas without him, a large envelope arrived from Belfast. Inside, was a typed letter from Patric, who had heard the news, and a familiar volume of poems. For some time, he had been meaning to send me one of his father’s books of Heaney’s poetry, and while searching for my address, he learned of my husband’s death. In his letter, he shared with some details of his father’s death, a few days before Christmas in 1998, and told me of the long flight Patric made home to be with his family. Whether from London to Belfast or Phoenix to Arizona, the flight is too long, fraught with a desperate desire to just be where you belong.
So it was that Mr. Baird’s personal copy of “Death of a Naturalist” became part of my collection. Patric tells me it was
It is certainly the most dog-eared of the collection and probably the one he read the most. I’m sure he could think of no better person to whom he would like it passed on.
All over America this week, teachers and their craft will be honored with public fanfare and the more personal gestures as well. It’s the time of year when some teachers are counting down the days until school’s out for summer, and others are figuring out how to make every minute matter until the final bell rings on the last day of school. Cards and hand-written letters of gratitude will be saved in shoeboxes or between the pages of books and rediscovered over the years, reminders of what Henry Adams said about a teacher’s effect on eternity. “He can never tell where his influence stops.”
In the Fall of 2012, I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers.
I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also 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, and upon. And so it was that I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol on a Thanksgiving afternoon, eventually sitting below a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I don’t know how long I sat there, just 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 forgets to be a grumpy old man) with 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 today’s holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving had something to do with my moment of transcendence looking up at the shimmering leaves, but that would not have been true. Even after living in America for over twenty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. It amuses me still that some of my American friends are surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland. Christmas is the holiday that warms us, so 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.
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.
