Families separated by their immigration status – some of them for decades – were reunited yesterday. For just three minutes during the Hugs not Walls event, relatives clung to each other in a concrete canal between the border cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez. Mothers and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and newborn babies, all on the honor system and under the watchful eye of both Mexican and American authorities – those on the American side wore blue T-shirts and their relatives in Mexico wore white. For some of them, this was the first physical contact in over a decade – a beautiful moment that transcended the bitter divide on which they stood. Too soon, it was over, and they were separated again.
l always thought Robert Frost was very sensible to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it is that good fences make good neighbors:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
If walls could talk, what stories would they tell? I never pondered this more than in 1978 when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, our summer trip was two weeks in Ballycastle that culminated with a concert for our parents on the final night, but this would be my first time away from Northern Ireland, from one bitterly divided place to another, the latter split in two by the Berlin Wall. At the time, I knew only a little about the wall that had been erected under the direction of Nikita Khruschev two years before I was born. By the time I was old enough to understand it, the wall was the definitive symbol of the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945.
I remember the teenage bassoon player who urinated on the Berlin wall, offending, as he did, some passersby who did not appear to understand that the wall was infinitely more offensive with its barbed wire and watchtowers and armed guards with their shoot-to-kill orders. In retrospect, I wish there had been more like him – outraged and outspoken, but we were curious and circumspect, a little afraid, when we took a trip beyond the curtain and into East Berlin, where the young tour-guide assigned to us instructed us not to photograph bridges or buildings.
Although we were all from Northern Ireland – except the conductor and his son, both English – most of the Catholic kids among us had Irish passports whereas the Protestants carried British papers. This caused some delay and confusion at Checkpoint Charlie where I acquired the first stamp in my first passport, documenting forever the borders that bear down on us, closing in on us, constricting rather than expanding our vision of what our world could be like . . .
On the other side, I remember staring out the window of an old bus at an austere city, its sad grayness a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue – Ku’damm – on the West side, where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember crying for the young woman who had served as our tour guide, understanding in full that she would not be able to join us in West Berlin, to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program. I don’t suppose a group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made much of an impact in 1978, but a decade later, Bruce Springsteenpaid a visit to East Berlin, telling a crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking balleven then, that he was there to rage against the injustices built up in that wall:
I’m not here for or against any government. I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.
I like to think it was Springsteen rather than Ronald Reagan who urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that walland that somewhere in that crowd, was the teenage bassoonist who had relieved himself against the Berlin Wall ten years earlier.
Watching on television as the wall came down was one of the greatest events of my personal history. As jubilant Germans clambered over bricks, I wondered if our young tour-guide had been reunited with family and friends in the West. Photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer documented it, believing that the fall of the Berlin Wall would end forever the notion that a wall is the answer to some of the most complex issues of our time. But since 1989, he has photographed what he describes as a “renaissance of walls” that includes the Peace Lines in my beloved Belfast, Northern Ireland, the West Bank fence that separates Israel and Palestine, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and the border between Mexico and the United States.
In fact, since the Berlin Wall came down, 28 new border walls have gone up all around the world. Ironically, these walls that are going up at such an alarming rate reflect not totalitarian regimes intent on keeping their people form seeking freedom and opportunities beyond their borders; rather, democracies such as these very United States, intent on keeping such people out.Wiedenhöfer’s Wall on Wall exhibition features 36 giant panoramas of modern man-made barriers glued on the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall.The intent of the installation was to spark a conversation about why the walls between us today are taller, longer, and stronger than any we could have imagined on that jubilant November day in 1989 when echoes of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in 1963 rang in our ears: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Why are we so afraid?
Since 1994, when the United States began beefing up border-enforcement, the Arizona Recovered Human Remains Project reports that the remains of more than 6,000 people have been recovered on the United States-Mexico border. Donald Trump’s core principal of immigration reform – a wall across the Southern border of these United States and the deportation of undocumented immigrants already here – would guarantee a continued loss of life. Think about those deported individuals who have lives here in America; wouldn’t they risk everything to return to their families? Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Often, they must choose treacherous crossing routes to elude border patrol agents and hike high in the mountains or deep into desolate desert scrub where the temperatures soar above 120 degrees. Combined with lethal heat, the uncompromising desert terrain causes the most common form of death – dehydration. No More Deaths – No Más Muertes works tirelessly to bring an end to this humanitarian crisis, providing assistance to migrants, faithfully leaving water and food in remote and deadly parts of the Sonoran desert. The mission of the organization is noble and humane, reminding me again that the very best of humanity coexists with the very worst.
“ No Más Muertes aims to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative: the conviction that people of conscience must work openly and in community to uphold fundamental human rights. Our work embraces the Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform and focuses on the following themes:
• Direct aid that extends the right to provide humanitarian assistance
• Witnessing and responding
• Consciousness raising
• Global movement building
• Encouraging humane immigration policy.”
But we are so very far away from humane immigration policy aren’t we? When there are those who are so enraged by the kindness in leaving water jugs for desperate, parched travelers, that they take it upon themselves to slash open those water containers and allow the water to pour out on the parched desert. It takes my breath away to consider the extent of the inhumanity. Yet, we continue to invest in more walls, and the Republican nominee for the highest office in the land has an ardent following hell bent on building a wall to barricade ourselves in and others out. I will never understand it.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and wants it down.
Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
~ Robert Frost
Less than a week ago, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Let that sink in. I haven’t – yet. Buoyed – and delightfully distracted – by the progress of both the Ireland and Northern Ireland football teams in the 2016 UEFA European Championship, I have yet to absorb the ramifications of Brexit. It’s complicated, because it concerns who I think I am. Let’s face it, my cultural identity has always been a bit suspect, depending on who might be in the room. Declarations of nationhood have always raised an eyebrow – British, Irish, Northern Irish or an Ulsterwoman – and, casting a wary eye over the past 40 years or so, could also be dangerous, if not fatal.I have been away for a long time, yet I have not forgotten the bombings and bullets, and roadblocks and the border, or the subtle (and more overt) means we employed to determine one’s religion – one’s fate.
In May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who lived there, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland often display a mutual need to know, from the start, about a person’s background, so they are safe to continue in the conversation and in the wider relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” I too have danced this dance, taking cues from our last names, the names of schools we attended, the way we pronounce an “H” to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties? to determine the borders between us.
So who am I? Well, to the chagrin and confusion of some friends and family back home, I consider myself Irish first – and European – and British too, but only when it’s convenient. My “documentation” suggests a split identity. I have an Irish passport, but because I was born in Northern Ireland, I may also carry a British passport. If I’m honest, the latter has been more for the sake of expediency at airports. A resident in America, my permanent residency card clearly states Ireland as my country of birth, but my birth certificate states my birthplace as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Sometimes, I am considered one of her Royal Majesty’s subjects; other times, I am not, like the time a waiter in a bar at Heathrow Airport refused to accept my money because, although Stirling and legal tender, it was printed on a Bank of Ulster note. My money had identified me as something other than acceptable to him.
I have never forgotten the way he made me feel, and in the moments after the news that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the EU, I felt something akin to that way again. Sickened and scared. I didn’t want to leave the EU. Northern Ireland didn’t want to leave either as evidenced by its vote, but here we are. Out of it. It is early days, of course, and we’re not sure what it means. How could we? Our destiny appears to have been an afterthought. Still, some of my younger friends back home and my American friends here, are telling me to calm down. Don’t panic. Why panic?
Why panic?
To explain, I need to go back – to a place of panic, to the country that made me, to a border and men with guns asking to inspect our papers or rolling below our car to check for a bomb underneath it; to men in uniform examining my daddy’s driving license to confirm – presumably – that he wasn’t a terrorist. Does that elicit a little panic? It should.
The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has all but disappeared in recent years, in large part because of our common membership in the EU and EU laws enacted from 1998-2014, the most recent of which confirming what we all know – that we have a long way to go in terms of reconciliation. Accordingly, funding from the EU has supported much of the Peace Process, recognizing that it will not happen overnight. Sensible people know that once a wall, a border, goes up, it takes time to tear it down. It becomes a part of our external and internal geography, at once keeping us apart and a part. Therefore, it makes sense that the EU would formulate long range plans such as its current PEACE IV project intended to run through 2020. It was designed to promote reconciliation through targeted engagement with young people, education, and the creation of shared spaces in areas most affected by the conflict.
We were making slow and steady progress. Look at us now! Northern Ireland is a tourist destination, and even though I don’t watch Game of Thrones, I smugly boast to my American friends that I am from County Antrim where much of it is filmed. Belfast, where I lived in the 1980s, is now a bustling cosmopolitan city. No more armed security checkpoints, no more a “no go” area – the time has never been better to visit, urges National Geographic. The Good Friday Agreement and EU laws contributed to the creation of this Belfast that I love so well, so why wouldn’t we want to remain in the EU? It gave us the kind of city we could only have dreamed of some forty years ago.
I wonder if those who voted so vehemently to leave the EU stopped to consider the price of peace – and perhaps more importantly – if the UK would continue efforts to maintain what we have already accomplished. Did they stop to consider the possibility of a return to the way things were, to the reality of Northern Ireland’s past, to the devastating loss of life during The Troubles, some 3637 people killed and God only knows how many more horribly injured, such as these following the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant in Belfast in 1972, when I was just nine years old:
One girl has lost both legs, an arm and an eye. Her sister has lost both legs. A male victim lost two legs, and a female lost one leg and one arm. Another female lost one limb, and three of the injured have lost eyes.
Did some of those who voted to leave also forget that the violence and pain of our Troubles was not confined to Northern Ireland? England – the mainland – suffered too. Horribly. Rewinding the mental tapes, I recall black and white news reports of Aldershot, of cars packed tightly with explosives that blew up outside The Old Bailey and in Whitehall; The M62; bars in Guildford, then Birmingham; and, Warrington, Canary Wharf, and Brighton. And more, so many more. Following one of these atrocities, I recall someone on the radio remarking that it “would give the Brits a taste of The Troubles.” Let that sink in.
Why panic?
I can’t help it. Sitting in my Phoenix living room, shortly after the results of the EU referendum were announced – and knowing that my mother and father and my friends back home would be waking up to the news – Martin McGuinness called for a border poll on a United Ireland. An unrealistic and opportunistic move, but still it awakened in me the fear of a return to the Northern Ireland of my childhood, to the violence which ripped so many of our families apart.
And I wept.
In the days before the Referendum, I had been ecstatic, rejoicing along with thousands of football fans – the Green and White Army and the Boys in Green – as both teams from our tiny island made it to the Round of 16 at the EUFA European Championship. Hailed as the best fans in the world, we sang through every match, singing on even in defeat, long after the final whistle:
Such pride. The last time I experienced such a feeling was in 1994. A visit back home had coincided with the miracle of Ireland qualifying for the World Cup. The country was jubilant, 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 back home – 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 87 years old, someone’s grandfather, the oldest victim of The Troubles, 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 delighted 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.
Six minutes into Ireland’s match against Belgium in France last Saturday, football fans were asked to stand in silence to mark the 22nd anniversary of the murders of those six men slaughtered in the Heights Bar. I thought of their families and all that had been lost, of recent painful revelations about collusion, of reconciliation as a still-elusive thing. I thought of how far we had come, that Northern Ireland’s youngest football fans have never known a bomb scare, a security checkpoint, a civilian search. I thought of their grandparents and their parents – people my age – who are still anxious and recovering from decades of sectarian tension. Traumatized by it, but hopeful, in large part because of the symbolism of an open border and the free movement across it afforded by membership in the EU, that we were well on the road to recovery.
Now what? Given that immigration is at the crux of the Brexit vote, then it would make sense presumably for the UK to restrict its border with Ireland (still a member of the EU). What will that mean for Northern Ireland and its precarious peace? Early days, I know, but I also know that the Peace Process is still relatively new, with The Good Friday Agreement signed only in 1998. We are still figuring out how to live in peace, many of our walls are still erect. And yes, for the most part, the violence has ebbed, but the distrust and suspicion remains, creating a breeding ground for the kind of panic that has settled in my chest. What was possible seems to have been snatched from us.
We were only just beginning . . .
The rather patronising English joke used to be that whenever the Irish question was about to be solved, the Irish would change the question. And now, when the Irish question seemed indeed to have been solved, at least for a generation, it is the English who have changed the question.
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.
In April 2015, when the Northern Ireland Assembly voted – again – against same-sex marriage, I was disappointed, but I was not without hope that change is coming. If a month later, the Irish Republic could become the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular, national vote, then surely the tide must turn in the North? What happened in Ireland last month is momentous, a seminal moment for a tiny country of less than 5 million people, a place where homosexuality was still a crime just 22 years ago, where divorce did not become legal until 1997, and where a woman still must travel to another country to have a legal abortion. Ireland acquiesced, acknowledging to the world that the sky is not falling; rather, the walls are coming down.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Lest we lose hope, the walls have come down in Northern Ireland in places we would never have expected. The walls of the “Peace Line,” over thirteen miles of them, started going up in 1969, intended to keep apart Belfast’s two divided communities. While these walls were erected only as a temporary measure, many have been standing for over four decades. That’s the thing about a wall – once it goes up, it seems to take a very long time to come down. It becomes a part of our external and internal geography, at once keeping us apart and a part. But they are coming down, in part due to negotiations that did not make the front pages. Since 2012, six of the walls have been removed, and more are slated to come down, but it will take time, as even an American President acknowledged in a visit to Belfast, invoking Dr. King’s assertion about finiteness of disappointment but the infinite nature of hope:
There are walls that still stand, there are still many miles to go . . . you have to remind us of hope again and again and again. Despite resistance, despite setbacks, despite hardship, despite tragedy, you have to remind us of the future again and again and again.”
The people of Northern Ireland know how to do the right thing.
I remember once upon a time, before Home Economics was standard fare on the Northern Ireland curriculum, there was Domestic Science. Other than Physical Education, which I skillfully avoided with a note from my mother when I “had cramps,” it was my least favorite subject in school. It involved the planning of meals, cooking, baking, and, for a brief period, knitting. There was even some sewing, during which I learned how to finish the edges of something, presumably a blanket, with blanket stitch. I vaguely recall stitching the six letters of my name on an apron and wishing I had been christened, simply, “Eve.”
There were no boys in Domestic Science, nor were there any girls in Woodwork, Metalwork, or the exotic-sounding Technical Studies. Unbeknownst to me, however, there were some people who saw the fundamental unfairness of this situation. Apparently they had some clout too, because along came The Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order of 1976 which made unlawful the inequality of access for boys and girls to all areas of the curriculum. Landmark legislation, it enabled boys and girls in the same classroom, to partake of Craft, Design, and Technology, although it would be another 14 years before a National Curriculum would be implemented. For me, the “craft” component of both Domestic Science and CDT remained elusive. To be honest, two thirds of the latter course would have been beyond me unless the “craft” entailed extra-curricular knitting, which my mother would have done for me, bailing me out as she had done in Domestic Science when I was required to knit purple slippers.
In a classic case of putting the cart before the horse, my country was investigating ways in which to make Domestic Science and Technical Studies curricula more gender-neutral while at the same time segregating its children. Catholics and Protestants were educated in separate schools in often bitterly divided communities, until finally, a small group of Belfast parents dared to change the course of history, to force the issue, to confront aloud what happens to the heart of a country and the identity of its children when they are educated in segregated schools. Ordinary Catholics and Protestants, we already knew what happened. It was time for change, to demand an answer to questions such as this, asked in 1957 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lester Bowles Pearson:
How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?
There is no better place to learn about one another, to learn about humanity, than in the safety of a classroom. In 1981, Lagan College became the first integrated secondary school in Northern Ireland to offer such a space for boys and girls, Catholics and Protestants. On the first day of school, under armed guard, Lagan College opened its doors to 28 children. It is different today. According to the school’s website, as of January 2014, there are 1262 pupils on its Lisnabreeny campus with more than 80 teachers.
It is now a 21st century school with a curriculum that includes Home Economics, the central focus of which is “the consideration of the home and family in relation to the development of the individual and society and is designed to enable students to acquire the knowledge and skills to improve the quality of life for themselves and others. During the three years, they will address the areas of Diet and Health, Family Life and Choice and Management of Resources, using a variety of teaching and learning techniques.” That sounds infinitely more important and doable than the Domestic Science of my youth, which leads me back to where I started . . .
The one thing I retained from my spell in Domestic Science was the textbook, the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook. A dust collector these days, it is of little practical use with its metric measurements. Still, I cannot bear to part with it.
I remember my mother and me, poring over the pictures in the Hamlyn cookbook when it was brand new, ma delighted to find so many cakes and sweets she already knew how to make, without as much as a precise measurement, let alone a “method” like the one we had to write out in our Domestic Science notebook. I sometimes call her now with questions about baking. Before she went back to work, she recalls, Friday was Baking Day. Like her mother before her, she did not measure, but she somehow timed everything so that by the end of the day, before daddy came home from work, the square biscuit tins left over from Christmas and assorted Tupperware containers were lined with greaseproof paper and filled to their brims with caramel fingers, melting moments, fudge cakes, shortbread, and butterfly buns. For Sunday desert, we had a choice of apple tart, Pavlova, Trifle, a Victoria Sponge, or a Swiss Roll. Honestly, I am surprised we still have teeth.
While she had actually copied down many of these recipes, which I stuck inside a book for future reference, ma never took much notice of them. She did, however, take one precaution while baking and that was to give my brother and me advance warning not to slam the backdoor as we were wont to do, if she had a fruitcake in the oven, she would remind us “Don’t you bang the door or the fruit cake will collapse in the oven!” I have resisted the urge to Google this fact. I want to believe it is something only Irish mammies say.
Not that I will be baking a fruitcake anytime soon. It is “baking day” here only in that it is going to be a ridiculous 107 degrees. Still, I wanted the recipe, so I called my mother. While I listened on the other end of the line, pen in hand, here’s what she shared with me, verbatim:
“Well now, you just put your ingredients in, boil them, and then let them cool. Add your egg and your flour, put in your margarine, sugar, and water or two cups of black tea, all your cherries, raisins, and sultanas. Be you careful when you bring it to the boil. Let it cool and then throw in two or three eggs. Stir it all up and put it into your loaf tin. That’s your boiled cake.”
Should I want to make a fruit cake instead of a boiled cake, she elaborated, “Now for a fruit cake, you just cream your butter and sugar in the mixer until they are nice and fluffy. Put in your eggs and your flour and all your fruit. Stir it all up and throw it in the oven. It will take longer to cook than the boiled cake. Use a slower oven.”
I am none the wiser, and I think it would be fair to say that my Domestic Science teacher would have dismissed my mother’s Fruit Cake “method” as highly unsatisfactory without the obligatory list of ingredients, precise measurements, and numbered directions copied into notebooks by girls – only girls – in the classrooms of segregated schools.
On June 13, I will be home in Belfast. For love and for equality, I will march for equality. It’s the right thing to do.
On the other side, I remember staring out the window of an old bus at an austere city, its sad grayness a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue – Ku’damm – on the West side, where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember crying for the young woman who had served as our tour guide, understanding in full that she would not be able to join us in West Berlin, to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program. I don’t suppose a group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made much of an impact in 1978, but a decade later, Bruce Springsteen paid a visit to East Berlin, telling a crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking ball even then, that he was there to rage against the injustices built up in that wall:
take on Italy. 
It is different today. According to the 
