Category Archives: Dispatch from the Diaspora

When the Ancients Speak to Us

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

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Dawn light began stealing
Through the cold universe to County Meath,

Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,
Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones
Millennia deep in their own unmoving

And unmoved alignment.

(from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney)

From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reminder – a reassurance –  that the light is coming.  I suppose ancient rituals help us keep the faith, not necessarily in a god or in any religious doctrine, that good times lie ahead.

In the Mexican village we call home, such rituals are all around. The legacy of pre-Columbian civilizations can be viewed in a ceremony on the waterfront almost daily – La Danza de  los Voladores. Its origins are attributed to the Totonacapan region of Veracruz, which in 2009 boasted 38 of the 56 volador poles officially recorded in Mexico. First written about in 1612 by Franciscan chronicler, Fray Jaun de Torquemadam, the ritual is a powerful testimony to the tenacity of indigenous groups in adapting their customs and practices to the new order imposed by the Spanish and also in ensuring they live on from one generation to the next.

A handful of onlookers on the Ajijic malecon pause for a moment to watch, smart phones at the ready to record as the voladores, in  traditional costume, begin their solemn procession to a 30m high pole between two trees. One by one, four men climb the pole to reach its summit, where they are closer to the sun god, each of them representing the cardinal points as well as the elements.

All is quiet, and then a haunting melody begins, when the leader, the caporal, hoists himself up to perch atop a tiny wooden platform, the tecomate. Bending, balancing, hopping from one foot to the other, he plays his flute and beats on a tiny drum, turning to face north, south, east, and west, while the pole below him sways precariously in the breeze.  No harness. No safety net. Only faith.

Then the moment we have all been waiting for – the flyers hurl themselves into the air. Headfirst, arms outstretched like wings, they allow the thin ropes tying them to the platform to unravel as they spin in ever-widening circles around the pole, streamers the color of the rainbow trailing behind them in the sky. The plaintive tune continues during their majestic descent, each man hoping to make 13 circuits – 52 representing the number of years on the Aztec calendar – imploring the gods to return the sun. Right before reaching the ground, a final flourish – a quick somersault. Mortals again, they land softly, to quiet utterances of ‘bravo’ from a small group of spectators who know they just witnessed something sacred, something from another time, for all time. Legend has it that if they land on their feet, the Mayan gods will be pleased and bless us with longer days.

Far from the shores of Lake Chapala, in a massive neolithic tomb in Newgrange, Ireland, the Winter Solstice is being celebrated. Last year, for the first time, due to COVID restrictions, anyone with internet access could enter the tomb, a place older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and observe the phenomenon  a lottery usually determines who will experience the phenomenon as it was intended by the Stone Age farmers who created it 5,000 years ago. It has attracted sun worshippers and archeologists, ethnographers and tourists, and regular folks like you and me. In the year before the pandemic changed everything, only 16 out of 30,000 applicants from as far away as the United States, were selected to experience the spectacle of solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunately, Irish weather provides no guarantee of sunlight, and clouds  once again kept the light out. But in  in the time of corona, no lottery is needed. As long as they have access to social media, the chamber is open to anyone from Meath to Mexico. In the darkest days of a December, there is a light on the horizon.

In its roof is a little opening aligned to the ascending sun. When that single sunbeam shoots through the roof-box at around 9AM, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the burial chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved in the ancient walls.  It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year. It is a time when the ancients speak to us, reassuring us that no matter how dark the days, the cycle begins again.

Photograph: Cyril Byrne 

Maybe it’s an act of faith that brings us together to celebrate an ancient light show in a tomb in Ireland or a sky dance above Lake Chapala in a magic village in Mexico. Together, on sacred ground, we are connected to both the past and the future. “The long night is over. Let’s look forward now to brighter days and all good things to come,” whispered co-host of the livestream last year, Clare Tuffy, as sunlight flooded the ancient chamber. 

Knowing the light is up ahead, we too can take a spectacular leap, voladores, arms outstretched, to welcome the new year ahead.

My Father’s Ulster Twilight

09 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by in Aging, An Ulster Twilight, Castledawson, Christmas, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood

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The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane

At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil …

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It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a satin bow in her hair, the little girl in the faded photograph is joyous, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers.’ Her first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability and steadfastness, a firm hold, balance.

Santa and his helpers must not have read MIT engineering professor, David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science in which the scientist dismisses stabilizers, pointing out that training wheels do not teach a child how to balance; they teach how to pedal. Bicycling, Professor Wilson says, is the quintessential balancing act and advises instead to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.”  Most children have no time for practice. When they push off for the first time without their training wheels, they have to learn how to balance – quickly –  just like the way they would be expected to swim if they were thrown in the deep end.

But this recollection is not about the bicycle or even the little girl on it. It is about the green wooden crib in the bottom left corner of the photograph. Unbeknownst to me, in the weeks before that Christmas, out in his shed, my father made it for Gloria, my first doll. He is humble about it, as he is all the other things he has made over the years.

Adept in all his balancing acts, my father belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. Good with his hands and frugal, his is the kind of artisinal handiwork that imbues the Derry town-lands he criss-crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. Reminiscing, he explains it all began as a matter of economic necessity – the farming and the gardening, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, the craft and the carpentry shaping and shaped by his home-place.

I appreciate now in ways I could not when I was young, my father’s frugality and the ways in which he crafted a thing to last.  In my mind’s eye, I can see him doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”  

In his 80s, daddy is acutely aware of the miles between us – even more since the onset of the pandemic that kept us apart for too long. I know he yearns to be just down the road, to make things and make things right for his grand-daughter and me – shelves to hang in her new house and advice to give about gardening.  I over-wound the old Regulator clock he once found for me in a Phoenix thrift shop many Christmases ago. I brought it to Mexico with me, wishfully thinking he might travel here one day to fix it. Were he here, he would make the windows sparkle with newspaper soaked in vinegar and elbow grease. A master gardener, he would know how to care for the little maple tree by the front door. 

Once upon a time, I had no time for what I dismissed as his obsessiveness. I had no tolerance for his sense of urgency over why all these things needed fixing. I didn’t understand or maybe I didn’t want to.  I understand now. I understand that each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience something as minor as a flat tire on the freeway or as heart-wrenching as the loss of someone they love. We want to make the magic last forever, to stretch time and close distance, and find the right words right when we need them to find a way forward.

With so many minutes and miles between us, it startles me sometimes to take stock of the things I traded for a life in America – all the bits and pieces of homespun wisdom from the heart of rural Derry, the gardening tips and home improvement projects that would have colored our lives had we lived just up the road. It is from too far away, relying heavily on photographs and phone calls, brown paper packages and greeting cards, texts and status updates on Facebook, that my father has transformed into the grandfather he was always meant to be, eager for news of his grandchildren’s accomplishments that he will broadcast widely. He will not admit out loud that he likes what he still refers to as “new-fangled” technology – but secretly I think he loves it. He can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. He can ask Alexa to tell him a joke or forecast the weather or help him out on Sudoku or the daily crossword. I suppose such virtual connections soften the blow of time and distance.

He is sentimental. I am too.  Seeing the photo of his only daughter on her first bicycle will bring a smile.  I can imagine him standing over my mother’s shoulder, curiosity and anticipation twinkling behind his reading glasses. Together, they will ponder Eric Dawson, Seamus Heaney’s carpenter, and they’ll ask each other which Dawson he is. “Would he be any relation to Jack Dawson, do you think?” My mother, a childhood neighbor of the Heaneys, will know. And once they place him, my father will return to the photograph and wonder aloud where in the name of God the past sixty odd years have gone.  Under his breath, in the parlance a “boys a dear,” before falling silent to remember the night he made Christmas for his wee girl.

An Ulster Twilight by Seamus Heaney

The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane

At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.

A mile away it was taking shape,
The hulk of a toy battleship,
As waterbuckets iced and frost
Hardened the quiet on roof and post.

Where is he now?
There were fifteen years between us two
That night I strained to hear the bells
Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal

Into our lane, get off at the gable,
Steady his Raleigh bicycle
Against the whitewash, stand to make sure
The house was quiet, knock at the door

And hand his parcel to a peering woman:
“I suppose you thought I was never coming.”
Eric, tonight I saw it all
Like shadows on your workshop wall,

Smelled wood shavings under the bench,
Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench
In my soft hand, then stood at the road
To watch your wavering tail-light fade

And knew that if we met again
In an Ulster twilight we would begin
And end whatever we might say
In a speech all toys and carpentry,

A doorstep courtesy to shun
Your father’s uniform and gun,
But—now that I have said it out—
Maybe none the worse for that.

* * * * * * * *
~ Merry Christmas everyone.

When all that’s left is love: the healing has begun

15 Monday Nov 2021

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Epitaph
By Merrit Malloy

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

Today is the anniversary of Ken’s death, tomorrow would have been our 30th wedding anniversary – magic and loss side by side on my calendar. Marking the day with my daughter, a grown woman with whom he spent the last 5,810 days as her dad, the desert air is thick with memories – precious but not without pain.


He was her first word. Naturally, it was towards him that she took her first tentative little steps. On one of his birthdays, she first clapped her hands. He taught her how to pay attention, pointing out things that otherwise might go unnoticed – a collectible coin in a handful of loose change, critters in a tide pool, a tiny hummingbird nest concealed within the Hong Kong orchid tree that grew outside her bedroom window, a constellation of stars in a winter sky.

She once told me she hopes to accumulate even an ounce of his wisdom – to become the kind of reassuring figure he was. His was a voice of experience and of unconditional love, and it always put her at ease. Heartening and healing, always.

She doesn’t remember some of the milestone moments the way I do – they are the stuff of baby books and old VHS tapes she is unable to watch. She remembers his unconditional love, the constancy of him – how he was there to pick her up after school every day, to hold her hand to keep her warm in the frozen food section of the grocery store, to take her to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard every Friday afternoon, to remind her to remind him to feed the family of hummingbirds that considered our patio their home.


Together, they shared hundreds of little routines and rituals that helped create an unshakeable certainty for her first 15 years. He was always there. Every single day. And, just like that, he wasn’t.


He wasn’t there to see her graduate from high school and college, pass her driving test or nail the interview to get her first job. He wasn’t there when she bought her first car or when she drove it to the university admissions office to register for grad school. He wasn’t there when she got the keys to a home of her own, or to hear the way her voice sounds when she talks about being in love. He wont be here to light 24 candles on her birthday cake.

Love is all that’s left to fill the empty spaces he left behind. Love is all that’s left to give away.


for Enniskillen and all . . .

08 Monday Nov 2021

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My grandfather died a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on November 8, 1987, he would have been wearing his pressed dark suit with his medals and a poppy attached to the lapels – not for show or to make a political statement – but as a way to honor his dead pals.  My grandfather, who fought in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, would have been proud to join the old men gathered at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh in 1987, where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. A 12th victim, local school principal, Ronnie Hill, spent the next 13 years in a coma and died in 2020.

Not soldiers. Not combatants or comrades. Just ordinary people – families –  in warm coats over their best Sunday clothes.  Civilians. 

A witness, Pat O’Doherty, told the New York Times

The explosion was followed by ”an unnatural silence.” Three seconds later, all the crying started and people were running in distress, shocked trying to find relatives, trying to search for a reason, trying to search for reality. Reality just didn’t exist here this morning.”

There was no reason.

Indefensible. Unnecessary.

It is because of my grandfather, that I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our Sunday walks. It is because of him and his harrowing tales of fighting a battle that was not of his making, that I am a pacifist.

At just 25, he had been part of what they called a “template of civic cooperation.” Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was promptly shipped off to France, where he fought, frightened yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, where half a million German and Commonwealth soldiers were ripped apart. For untold miles, he crept through the muck – weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another young soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times – lest she would forget. He told her of the raging hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm and of the thirst and the weariness that almost broke him.

My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged in his waders on the banks of the Moyola river,  fishing for trout, or at The Moss, cutting turf.  He belonged in the green and blue spaces of Seamus Heaney’s poems. I know my grandfather would have agreed with Harry Patch, Britain’s last Fighting Tommy, who died in 2009 at the age of 111. Disillusioned and devastated by war, Patch once wrote that

politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.

By the time I was a teenager, studying for my O-level English exams which required me to learn by heart Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s story of  the “war and the pity of war,” and how it had been fought on faraway fields, in particular a story of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France,  they must have felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the little stream that would slake their thirst, only to be overwhelmed by a horror that would haunt my grandfather into old age.

On his knees by the edge of the stream, he cups the cool water in his hands. As he brings it to his face, he notices its red tinge and without having to look further, he knows. He knows that flowing in the foreign water is the blood of a soldier. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details for me in a voice I can still hear. I can still see him. His eyes the same blue as mine, his trademark plaid shirt, and the Donegal tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand. Unloading the story, he pauses to drink tea.

He liked his tea with just a drop of milk – enough to barely color it – and two spoonfuls of sugar.  Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with little slurps. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over those signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced that wearing those patterns was his way of remembering what he wore and the hope he carried to America as a young immigrant. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. As she remembers my grandmother’s funeral, my mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to it seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.

Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he gave me one of the barley sugar sweets from deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.

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As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of milky tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of young Seamus speeding by on his bicycle, sandy hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:

“My grandfather could 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, digging down and down
For the good turf.”

Could they ever have imagined our world as it is today, over a century since the Armistice was signed far away in a French forest, still reeling from atrocities such as that in Enniskillen, still in the grip of a pandemic that has now claimed over a million lives and is not yet finished.

How would we begin to explain ourselves?