I 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, we spent a week in Ballycastle, County Antrim, that culminated with a concert for our parents, but this July would be my first away from Northern Ireland, from one bitterly divided place to another, the latter split in two by the Berlin Wall.
I knew only a little about Nikita Khruschev’s wall. I knew it had been built two years before I was born. As I grew up, I came to understand it as a symbol for the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945. And then in the summer of 1978, I was standing in front of that symbol, its graffitied messages preaching to the choir.
I remember Stephen, one of the lads in the woodwind section, urinated on the Berlin wall, offending, as he did, some passersby who perhaps did not understand that the wall was infinitely more offensive with its barbed wire and watchtowers and its armed guards with their shoot-to-kill orders. In retrospect, I wish there had been more like him, outraged and outspoken.
We were curious and a little scared, I suspect, when we took a trip beyond the curtain and into East Berlin. We were given strict instructions not to photograph any bridges or buildings, and a young tour-guide was assigned to us. Although we were all from Northern Ireland – except the conductor and his son, who were English – most of the Catholics among us had Irish passports whereas the Protestants carried the British counterpart. This caused some delay and confusion at Checkpoint Charlie where I acquired the first stamp in my very 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 zAvisit 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 The Boss 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 when the wall came down was one of the greatest events of my personal history. I remember hoping that 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 from 1989 until 2013, he photographed what he described 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.
From July until November, 2013, Wiedenhöfer’s Wall on Wall exhibition featured 36 giant panoramas of modern man-made barriers glued on the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the installation helped spark a conversation about why so many of 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 out: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Perhaps it played a part in the story I saw splashed across the front page of the Belfast Telegraph this weekend, that the walls have been coming down, thanks to negotiations that did not make the front pages. In the past two years, six of the walls have been removed, and more are slated to come down.
Peace comes dropping slow.
The walls of the “Peace Line” 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.
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 wondered if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and we wanted to be farther away still, to escape, to “teenage kicks all through the night.”
Now this may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie that was playing on my flight back home, except that Terri Hooley opened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after “the day the music died” in Ireland, and as I watched 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’d play it on the record player for everyone in the shop to hear. And when he did, you would never have known 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 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 think I maybe even understood – if only for a moment – what Joe Strummer of The Clash meant:
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 Northern Ireland lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing would have been to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends 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 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. So 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 something terrible 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 didn’t think anything of it until they were ordered out of their vehicle and told to 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).
While the band members waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of their 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 air. Des McAlea suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. He recalls the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, I can recall the shock and revulsion – 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?
What happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else. 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.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers said his band was “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” Terri Hooley may have been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were scared. There were some who thought that the musical life of Northern Ireland was over. Performers from the UK mainland were afraid to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, it 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 remember being shaken to my very core – again – by the inhumanity of 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 of whom were 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.
And 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 him. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owing a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in taking either side of the sectarian divide; he wanted young people to have another option, another kind of country where a young person would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. And 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 – “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a much 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 just one. After all, 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.
We had three TV channels from which to choose in the 1970s, 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 the liner notes and 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 to listen to music on vinyl. 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 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 did his research (imagine, in the days before the Internet!) and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable that had 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. I loved 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 line was 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” go around and 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 your 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.) And 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 wrote in “Ode to a Mix Tape”
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 last November was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by the very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland – back to Phoenix.
Before we were married, when I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, my husband bought me another hi-fi. 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 the turntable. 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. He 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. I would have liked just one more spin.
Maybe, like vinyl, the handwritten letter will make a comeback as well. I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by phonecalls, text messages, Skype, and e-mails that are simply not the same. How I miss opening my mailbox to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a certain 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.
The last time I hoped Arizona Governor Jan Brewer would do the right thing was in the summer of 2010. I was sitting in my Principal’s office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting announcement regarding SB1070. Surely our state’s Governor would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented immigrants and would require state and city police officers to check the immigration status of a detained, stopped or arrested individual, if they reasonably suspect he or she could be an undocumented immigrant. Surely a Governor of these United States in 21st Century America would veto any legislation that had the potential to institutionalize racial profiling?
She didn’t. Perhaps she still doesn’t get the difference between the right to do a thing and doing the right thing, because in a heart-stopping instant, Governor Brewer showed us that the lessons of history apparently do not apply to her. Swiftly and proudly, she signed an inhumane bill into law, and the world finally paid attention to an Arizona that, measure by measure, would continue to make the American life unlivable for immigrants.
What I found most harrowing then, with my personal baggage as an immigrant from Northern Ireland living in Arizona, was the prospect of immigrants being required to have their immigration papers on their person at all times. Shades of my home country in the 1980s, during The Troubles, when it was not uncommon for me to hand over my driver’s license for inspection by a member of the British Army or an RUC officer at random road closures and checkpoints.
I well recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in Belfast. A student teacher, not yet twenty-one and heading home for Christmas, I was moving out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. My little silver Datsun weighed down with library books and lecture notes, clothes and toiletries, boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, a collection of concert posters wrapped in rubber bands, my prized hi-fi, and a violin, I somehow looked less like a university student and more, perhaps, like an IRA terrorist. Even though I had my license and could answer politely and truthfully, the young soldiers’ questions about where I had been and where I was going, still I had to step aside in the slush and the snow, watching and waiting as they rifled through the contents of my car, looking under the seats and in the trunk, emptying out my make-up bag, disturbing the folders of college papers. All in the name of security I know, but to this day, I question the randomness of it.
I remember raging inside – seething – that I was being subjected to such treatment in my own country. My. Own. Country. I said nothing. Of course, I said nothing, and I was soon sent on my way, but I never forgot it or the way it made me wonder about what it was about me on that particular day, that would cause British soldiers with guns to interrogate me and have me step out of my vehicle and search its contents? Did I fit some profile? Did I look like a terrorist? What was the ‘reasonable suspicion?” Why me?
Fast forward to 2014, and we find ourselves waiting again to see if the Governor of a beleaguered Arizona will do the right thing. SB 1062 has passed both chambers of the Arizona legislature, and only Governor Jan Brewer can stop this discriminatory rule from going into effect.
By a 33-27 vote, the Arizona legislature passed this bill that would grant businesses the right to refuse service to anyone, as long as servicing those individuals would be a substantial burden to their religious freedom. You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, for wondering about the homophobes who might be able to make a religious claim that refusing service is, you know, consistent with their religious beliefs.
Under the bill introduced by Republican State Senator Steve Yarborough, individuals and businesses would be granted the legal right to refuse services to individuals or groups if they claimed that doing so would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. In other words, business owners acting on sincerely held religious beliefs, can refuse services – discriminate against – groups that they perceive act in ways contrary to their religious beliefs. If signed into law, the bill would essentially legitimize discrimination against the LGBT community. Come to think of it, there is the potential for discrimination against other protected groups including non-married women, minorities, gays, people of other religions, or anyone they refuse to serve. You get the picture, and it is a distressing picture, given that we are, after all, in America in the 21st century. Well, we’re in Arizona, which often seems very far from the noble, inclusive idea of America itself.
I’m a straight woman, a newly single parent, an immigrant, a widow, a cancer patient. Often, I am the one in the room that represents everybody’s worse nightmare – my dead husband and my breast cancer reminding folks of what they fear the most –disease, loneliness, their own mortality. So why do I care so much about SB 1062? Because it is yet another bill with immeasurable potential to hurt good people, to deeply wound families who want nothing more than to get up every day knowing they are valued in their homes and schools, by their churches, and by their elected officials; knowing they are not “less than.” A bill like SB1062 terrifies me because it signifies a hardening of the heart in Arizona, an indelible mark we find in deeply wounded faraway places. Places like my Belfast. Like Sarajevo. Like Johannesburg. Like Gaza.
This evening, I wonder what I can say to my hairdresser? Topher is a gay man, not yet thirty years old, a restless soul who came to Arizona – like me – in pursuit of sunny days. By all accounts, he is doing well. He has been promoted four times in one year, he has a full clientele, and he has even begun contemplating owing his own salon. In Arizona. My daughter adores him. In the weeks following her dad’s death, Topher brought a smile to her face by cutting her bangs and straightening her hair, knowing how important such things can be when you’re sixteen and insecure about your looks.
As more states legalized gay marriage, he and his partner, Ian, changed wedding plans and finally settled on Hawaii, for an intimate ceremony in front of close family. One day, he hopes to raise children with the man he loves, and until today, he envisioned doing so in Arizona. But at what cost?
As he styled my daughter’s hair this evening, I asked him about SB 1062. He told me of his shock, that at the beginning of the year, he had begun to believe that the times really were a-changin’, that we were genuinely celebrating each other’s differences, and slow as it was, change was being embraced.
As a young boy in Indiana, he had been bullied, beat up, and ridiculed in small schools in small towns. At about 10 years old, he knew he was different, he wasn’t sure how. By 13, he knew he was gay and soon the snide comments and the name-calling taught him that who he was, was somehow not okay in our world. In school, the place where he should have been safest, he was scared all the time. His teachers never intervened to halt the bullying. Not once. He was kicked out of his church youth group. Soon, he was in a position of vulnerability, an easy target for an older man who would abuse him.
One night, when he was about 15 years old, two big men came to the basement where he slept and took him away to a behavior modification program. For twenty-two months, he was assigned to a “family” of 25 boys. Constantly under surveillance, his stay there began with nothing. Even his shoelaces were taken away. He had to earn salt and pepper and the right to make a phone call, and occasionally a candy bar; he had to request permission to speak, to go to the bathroom. As a gay boy, he was designated to “the black cloud,” a kind of solitary confinement where essentially, he didn’t exist. He wasn’t taught how to operate in the real world and so even after being released to his family home, he would still call out “Crossing” when he crossed the line from hallway to bathroom.
Four times, Topher attempted suicide. Four times. He failed. Why? He tells me that, of course, he didn’t know what he was doing, but more importantly, while he doesn’t subscribe to institutionalized religion, he believes there’s something to be said about the undaunted human spirit, and that his spirit just wasn’t ready to leave. He forgives the Mormons who coaxed him to “pray the gay away.” He forgives the teachers who turned a blind eye to his tormentors. He says all of it has made him a stronger, better man, one who can champion for other children today, children who deserve a place at the table. Barely a month after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it pains me to know we are having these discussions in Arizona. It’s wrong. On so many levels.
When I look at this young man, his easy smile tempered by new doubt, I could almost weep for those who don’t know him, who will designate him as less than acceptable, who would put him in a box where he is neither seen nor heard. Discriminated against. Discarded.
Really. I traded Northern Ireland for a place where a young and joyful man – interested only in what we all want for those we love and who love us – might be turned away?
Dear Governor Brewer, you have five days. Do the right thing. Veto SB1062.
Please share this message if you stand opposed to the dangerous “license to discriminate” SB1062, which would allow businesses to deny services to LGBT Arizonans
We cannot be silent or passively enable the passage of the Arizona Legislature’s so-called “Free Exercise of Religion” (House Bill 2154 & Senate Bill 1062) bill which was passed this past week. The legislation apparently is ready for Governor Janet Brewer’s signature as soon as this coming Monday.
From the Arizona Republic, “We need to veto the dangerous anti-LGBT “license to discriminate” legislation, saying SB1062 is a “do-it-yourself black eye” that would severely harm economic growth and make it harder for businesses to recruit and retain top talent to our state. SB1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizonans.
Many groups and organizations such as the Greater Phoenix Black Chamber of Commerce also is urging Gov. Brewer to veto anti-gay legislation.
Join the Anti-Defamation League, the Human Rights Campaign and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council to immediately contact Governor Brewer’s office asking her to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062. E-mail the Governor’s top staff: Scott Smith at ssmith@az.gov and Lorna Romero at lromero@az.gov to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062.
SB 1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizona. Please take action
Our poet, Seamus Heaney, will be buried in Bellaghy tomorrow evening, his body brought home from Dublin to rest next to the grave of his little brother, Christopher, whom many of us know from “Mid-Term Break,” a poem now learned by heart by Irish children in schools North or South of the border.
The first time, I heard Mid-Term Break, was when Brian Baird, the late UTV newscaster and my beloved Anglo-Irish Literature Tutor at Stranmillis College, read it aloud a seminar one morning. It cleaved my heart open:
Mid-Term Break
“I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying– He had always taken funerals in his stride– And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble,’ Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.”
The young Seamus Heaney wasn’t there when it happened. He was away at school. Just another mundane evening, Christopher and another brother had been sent to the bus stop to give the bus conductor a letter to post in Belfast, as was the way in those days; his mother was at home, hanging clothes out on the line; his other two brothers, Pat and Dan, were walking down the other side of the road, on an errand to fetch paraffin oil. Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones that he can hardly bear to think about his little brother, just three and a half, noticing his big brothers on the other side of the road and running out from behind the bus to greet them. The driver of the oncoming car hadn’t a chance, and within only hours, Christopher died at the Mid-Ulster hospital in Magherafelt. He was later buried at St. Mary’s Parish Church in Bellaghy, where his big brother, Seamus, will be buried too, in the South Derry earth from which his father, Paddy, famously cut turf:
from “Digging”
“By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
“
If you were to ask me to draw a map of my child-world, the one in which I moved before I started school, all Heaney’s places would be marked on it. I belong to those places too, and they are mine: Magherafelt, Bellaghy, Castledawson, the Moyola river, The Moss, Upperlands,The Hillhead, Toomebridge, Cookstown, the Lough shore – and The Broagh – where my mother grew up.
from “Broagh”
. . . Broagh, its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades
ended almost
suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.
One of seven children, she was reared on a farm not far from the Heaneys. She remembers the man Seamus immortalized in “Digging,” his father, Paddy Heaney, in yellow boots and a heavy coat, trading cattle at the local fairs. She remembers Seamus as well, riding his bicycle, his face against the wind, his sandy hair flying behind him.
As a young mother, she frequently took me “up home” on the bus from Antrim to the Hillhead and then we would walk the rest of the way along the back road to my grandparent’s house. I still remember being scared of what might be hiding in the shadows of sprawling rhododendron bushes and the beech and alder trees that hung over us, but of course there was nothing to fear.
As I grew older and The Troubles boiled, indeed there were other things to be afraid of on the road back to Antrim. Real things, as we wondered silently what lurked behind the questions asked by British soldiers when they stopped my father’s car on our way home. Dimming our lights for them. Answering obediently. Waiting for them to release us onto our roads.
from: The Toome Road
“One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them?”
But when I was a little girl, I was oblivious to all of this. I stayed at my grandparents house in Broagh (Irish for riverbank, bruach), absorbing the rustic rhythmic speech of the men cutting turf, digging potatoes or baling hay, and the lovely heartsome sighs of my granny as she carried buckets of water in from the pump in the yard and then made milky tea for the men coming in from the fields, men like Big Jim Evans. Forty-five years later, and I can still see her, wiping her elegant hands on a flowery apron, wearing a sunny yellow cardigan and a big indulgent smile for me. How she loved me.
1. Mossbawn Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.”
There were the long walks with my grandfather, down well-trodden Broagh byways that were wild with bluebells and foxgloves. On warm days, with my hand in his, he took me to McGurk’s shop for sweets and ice-cream sliders. Sometimes we spotted gypsies, or tinkers, as Granda called them, setting up camp. I remember thinking they must live charmed lives in a story-book world, with their tents and their colorful clothes and their caravans and ponies. Then, as now, I grappled with the idea of always being in between places.
The men were tinsmiths, hence the name, and one of them, Mr. Sweeney, used to visit my Granny. She made him tea and in exchange he brought hand-made tins for milking. The older I get, I find myself pausing to appreciate hand-made things, such as those my father still turns over in his hands, things I would have too-quickly dismissed all those years ago.
Fosterling
“That heavy greenness fostered by water”
John Montague
“At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.
The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can’t remember not ever having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.”
I shared with Seamus Heaney the phenomenon of being first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school. In Stepping Stones, he 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.
There are other tricky steps to learn as you move through the various dances of Northern Ireland, but once learned, they stay with you for a life-time. InMay the Lord in HIs Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who live there, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have this mutual need to know, right from the start, about a person’s background, so they can proceed in the dialogue, in the longer relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the housing estates where we lived, the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” all became clues to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?” I remember the first day of my teaching practice in a Rathcoole classroom, when one of the pupils, showing off, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Roman Catholic. He thought I was “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, and my first name, Yvonne, could have been Catholic. How should I answer, knowing where I was and who I was?
from Whatever You Say, Say Nothing:
“The famous Northern reticence,
the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the “wee six” I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap.”
Artfully, we balance these two worlds, at once straddling the one that made us and that stretching far out in front of us, unknown. Far out. With age, I find myself turning inward and back to that first, to the Northern Ireland that made me and filled me up with questions and doubts; yet, at the same time, on an August evening when I’m alone in the car, a Phoenix sky a-tremble with gunmetal thunder-heads, I look intentionally homeward to the vast and too-bright spaces of the Arizona desert:
from Known World:
Were we not made for summer, shade and coolness
And gazing trough an open door at sunlight?
For paradise lost? Is that what I was taught?
Whatever I am made for, I am sad that there will be no new words from Seamus Heaney to help me get there, that he has gone back to his first place just when I need him most.
Anahorish
My ‘place of clear water,’
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
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 zAvisit 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:
opposing sides © Sheila Dee
I well recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in 
The men were tinsmiths, hence the name, and o
