Some of the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant, I made three purchases that would change the trajectory of my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and a hi-fi stereo system. At the time, I was living in a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street in Belfast along with four nerdy male engineering students who tolerated my girliness but didn’t really “get” me. At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a well-stocked and convenient off-license. In between, those houses teemed with university students, all of us imaginative misfits, showing up to our classes only when there was nothing else better to do.
There was often something better to do like the evening we spilled out of our houses onto Ridgeway Street, pelting each other with balloons full of water. Looking on, the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool and somewhat bemused Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was in no hurry to leave. Because this was in the days before the Internet and smart phones, before Facebook and its steady stream of photos of food and famous people, the only photograph is the image I see as plain as day in my mind’s eye. There he was, a few doors down from mine—a rock star—smoking his cigarette and smiling at us on the kind of Spring evening that transforms Northern Ireland into a Game of Thrones filming location.
Decades later, most of the vinyl records bought with my university grant are stowed away in cardboard boxes in my father’s shed in Castledawson. Some made it to Mexico with me, like Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary is the Eurail pass that took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day—Berlin, Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The 35mm camera? It was stolen from my first apartment the summer I arrived in the USA. It would be another 30 years before it was replaced when, for my 50th birthday, a year after my breast cancer diagnosis and because he thought I was ready to take stock and see things differently, my late husband gave me a 35mm Nikon.
Back in the saddle, I enrolled with a great friend in a college photography class. I loved it. It required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we had otherwise missed going about our daily business. Like a couple of teenagers, we competed for an “A” from our photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon who was also dealing with breast cancer. Like me, she had neither time nor patience for pink ribbons and platitudes. I loved her. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop’s post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were. With a dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important, she inspired me to do my homework and to never miss class. Bristling at our predictable photographs shot unacceptably straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light.” It was just light that we just needed to find. Photography, she told me, was “writing with light.”
I wanted to find that light, the thing Amyn Nasser once described as the photographer’s magic:
He has the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern, and wild.
Believing in her students the way the best teachers do, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” She instructed us to shoot from various angles—against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon …
So it was that before sunset on Thanksgiving , I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I don’t remember how long I sat there in the shade of those trees, looking skyward and thinking, but I remember it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to a kind of gratitude, a kind of Thanksgiving that I think has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence— among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico’s largest lake.
It’s about finding the light. Seeing the light. It’s about Annie Lamott’s Three Essential Prayers – Help, Thanks, Wow:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit. And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
At the end of the first year of the COVID crisis, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik urged his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude,” to get in, all in, to the spirit of a season that nudges us to take stock, a toll of all that we should appreciate with optimism for brighter days ahead. The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace known ways with new routines and rituals; it inspired new reasons—reminders —to be thankful for all we had previously taken for granted. For hugs and handshakes, hanging out and happy hour, multiple trips to the grocery store on the same day and meetings without masks; for hair appointments and pedicures and parties and graduations and weddings and funerals and our kids going off to school every day. We promised ourselves that we’d never take those things for granted again.
Maybe some of us have forgotten some of that, which reminds me of a lovely minute or two from “Waking Ned Devine.”
The hapless Irish Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right as Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Quick on his feet and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and begins:
As we look back on the life of . . .
Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
To my great friends, thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.
