Yesterday, I wrote a hopeful piece to mark Election Day 2024. Saving Hope, admittedly personal and sentimental was nonetheless about hope.
At about one o’clock this morning, I knew the presidential election would not turn out the way I’d hoped. I was deeply disappointed, but I wasn’t shocked by the result. Not for a second. It’s early days of course, but I have some grave apprehensions about how America will look for my daughter and her friends in the near future.
While this is a bad day for me and for many of us—scary and uncertain— it’s also a great day for many others. That’s how democracy works, right?
As for that little flicker of hope, it springs eternal. That’s how hope works.
Big political change happens not only at the ballot box. It also happens as a result of what we do in our daily lives, inching towards the future we long for—working, teaching our children, standing up for what’s right, being decent. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes we need a little help to get from where we are to where we want to be, where we should be.
Seamus Heaney once described his poems as stepping-stones:
Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Maybe the same is true in political life. Not poems, but propositions and amendments and down ballot races that don’t make the front page.
The stream keeps flowing.
Not really watching the news this morning because it wasn’t really news anymore, I remembered these words about hope in bad times from Howard Zinn. Maybe those of you for whom today is a bad day could use to hear it too.
Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. — Barbara Kingsolver
After my daughter was born, almost 27 years ago, I wrote to the White House to request a presidential greeting for her from the President of the United States. Yes, you can do that.
About six months later, a welcome letter arrived in our mailbox, Sophie’s name and address handwritten in calligraphy on the envelope and inside, a signed message from the President and First Lady. I know it was the same hopeful message, a form letter that went out to countless new babies all across the United States, but I cherished it and saved it in a scrapbook.
Hope should be cherished. Simple and fragile, it’s a good thing. I’m not naive enough to believe that hope by itself can deliver the bright and prosperous America I envisioned for my daughter. II know it wasn’t enough to fulfill the dream I pursued as a young immigrant from Northern Ireland, but hope has always kept that dream in my heart.
In November 2019, hope barely intact, I became a United States citizen. It seemed perhaps I should do something to give my dream a little nudge; maybe to be more deserving of it. It seemed I should vote, and that with my vote I could be of use.
As a naturalized citizen, it has been an honor to vote, to believe that the little difference I make by casting MY ballot can make ALL the difference – in my home state’s legislature, in the United States Congress, in the White House and, yes, in the world.
Today’s general election is underway, with the first poll closing in a handful of hours. They say it is the most consequential in the nation’s history, its outcome likely to be decided by only thousands of votes in places like Pennsylvania. That means my individual vote matters. Yours does too. For those of you who believe it doesn’t, it’s a good day to remember that in 2016, 78,000 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin allowed Donald Trump to win in the Electoral College over his Democratic rival even though he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes nationwide.
With the first poll closing in a handful of hours—you can find yours at I Will Vote, I’m reminded that America is still there—a great idea, no matter how hard it is to see sometimes, no matter how well it’s hidden behind all the rhetoric and the rancor.
A little fire of hope is still burning, and regardless of where I am—even in one of the oldest villages in Western Mexico— I’ll stand up for it. And, as long as I am able, I’ll vote for it, for the America my daughter will inherit.
This weekend, inspired by an Instagram post about a perfect Fall appetizer, I bought a pumpkin. Looking at it taking up too much space on the kitchen counter, it occurs to me that it’s too big for the Hot Honey Pumpkin Baked Brie I planned. It will be better as a jack-o’-lantern by the front door. This leads me to Halloweens past and a story you should know.
Where I’m from, there’s some debate about Halloween, with some saying it’s derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain and others that it started out as Hallows’ Eve, the day before All Saints’ Day. Whatever it is, it remains my favorite time of year when, on the cusp of winter, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us.
Halloween in 1970s Northern Ireland was different from the holiday I eventually embraced in the United States. There were no expensive costumes and no elaborately carved pumpkins—there were no pumpkins. Wrapped up in our duffel coats, “disguised” in hard plastic ‘false faces’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe we roamed the estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:
We roamed the housing estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:
Halloween is coming and the goose is getting fat, Would you please put a penny in the old mans hat, If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do, If you haven’t got a ha’penny then god bless you
Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light up our faces. Sweating under our false faces, I suppose we thought we looked menacing. Meanwhile, our parents stayed at home and watched television. If we were lucky, somebody gave us sparklers which was very exciting because fireworks had been banned—outlawed due to fears that they might sound like bomb blasts or gunfire. I suppose there were also concerns that they might be used to make bombs or weapons.
With this behind me by the time I became a mother in the United States, I embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory, unaware of its origins in my native land. I didn’t know until recently the legend of Stingy Jack who had been sentenced by the devil to roam the earth for eternity, his path lit by a burning coal inside the carved-out turnip he carried. To scare away Jack and any other wandering evil spirits, Irish people eventually made their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips placed in windows. When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-o′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern. Indeed they do.
Every year, we’d go to the nearest pumpkin patch for three perfect pumpkins which would be carved and decorated, and when the sun went down on Halloween, my husband lit candles inside them to welcome the scores of children who walked to our door over the years. It always reminded me of that whimsical scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, even the sitting President of the United States.
There was never a trick, always a treat from a big popcorn bowl filled with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and full-size Snickers bars. Word on the street was that all the good candy was at our house. Between us, we took turns handing out the candy, but I preferred to be with the merry band of trick-or-treaters, strolling along Montebello Avenue, stopping only a few paces behind to wait while my miniature make-believe princess knocked on the doors of strangers. This annual trek through the neighborhood always ended with her sprinting to our front door, where she rang the doorbell and called out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door open and fill her plastic pumpkin basket to the brim.
Our last family Halloween was quiet. It was a school night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Not yet a United States citizen, I couldn’t vote, but I nonetheless studied the pamphlet of Arizona Propositions on our kitchen table, and my husband let me fill in the bubbles on his ballot. I remember promising him I would become a citizen in time for the next presidential election.
When I voted early last week, I imagined him smiling down at me. Imagine. Me, early.
That particular Halloween didn’t feel right, with November just hours away and the night air still hovering around 80 degrees. Nonetheless, when the sun went down, our ritual began. We lit the candles in the pumpkins, and Sophie decided it was her turn to dole out the Halloween candy. Sporting ears of a fictional Japanese cat and a black tail, both hand-sewn by her best friend, she took great delight in the younger children who couldn’t wait to be scared by the pale motion-sensitive ghost howling above our door.
I remember I was preoccupied, sitting at my computer paying bills for the breast cancer treatment that had dominated our lives that year, scrolling through work emails I hadn’t found time to read at work, and following news of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. I was also half-listening to Van Morrison playing in the background, and as he repeated the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I remember feeling a strong pull to days gone by. Surreal and visceral, maybe the kind of moment Greill Marcus described in his Listening to Van Morrison.
Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.
In an instant, Van Morrison takes me back to County Antrim and into the lives of two sisters I have yet to meet in real life. The first, Mary, had once stumbled upon something I had written online and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world. You know how it goes—we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this much smaller world, I learned that her cousin, Pauline, had been my hairdresser in the 1980s.
Every time I visited her for bigger hair or more highlights, there was always a moment—a ritual— when I considered silently, the family pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stood on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. Nondescript, it was the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look, unremarkable except to those of us who knew about the horror that had visited on May 24, 1974. When I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it.
It wasn’t until one night years after I had left Northern Ireland, that I learned more about what had happened at The Wayside Halt. I don’t remember how the subject came up—my father was maybe trying to explain The Troubles to my American husband, and the ways in which we were all impacted by those years. He recalled for us that evening, when one of his friends had suggested they call into The Wayside Halt for a quick pint since it was on the road home. Knowing the unlikelihood of a “quick pint” and because he was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, my father declined.
Even in the days before cell phones, news in our place always traveled fast. Before daddy reached Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that a mob of Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt and shot at point-blank range, Mary’s uncles—Shaun Byrne and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked too, their places of business vandalized because they had remained open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974 a seminal two weeks in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles.’ Just a child at the time, I remember the rolling electricity blackouts—the “power cuts” that meant candle light and dinners cooked on a camping stove to cook. In my naivete, I didn’t know I had any reason to be afraid.
Shaun and his brother Brendan were executed while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture Mary sent me, the only child not home that evening was the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.
Eight fatherless children. Two widows. A community devastated.
The Byrne Brothers.
The Quinn brothers – Richard, Mark, and Jason – three little boys burned to death on July 12, 1998. Just eleven, nine, and seven years old, they had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through their bedroom window. In our small world, their grandmother was the subject of my brother’s first interview as he started a career in journalism covering the kinds of atrocities that should only have happened once.
Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on a little black and white television.
So many names.
Too many ghosts among us.
This is Anne Byrne’s Halloween story first posted on November 1, 2005. Like her sister Mary, she had left a comment for me. The world contracts once more.
Uncle Brendan and the Hallowe’en Parties
I loved Hallowe’en when I was wee, except it was called Holloween in those days. Next to Christmas, it was the best holiday of the year. It was also mid-term break. Holloween was always celebrated in our house. When we were very small my mother would make a lantern from a turnip she’d scobe out with a knife which, if you’ve ever tried to do it, is bloody hard work. The next oldest sister to me was very keen on traditions even ones she’d made up herself. When she was around eight she decided that every year she and I would make witches’ hats out of newspapers rolled into cones and blackened with shoe polish. So we did this for at least 3 or 4 years. We’d run around the yard with the pointy, floppy hats falling down over our eyes, our faces and hair stained with polish, singing:
I’m Winnie the Witch, Witches can fly and so can I, I’m Winnie the Witch’
I have no idea where this came from.
In the evening we would tie apples from a string attached to the ceiling and try to bite lumps out of them or duck for apples in a basin of water set on the kitchen floor. This involved much splashing on the quarry tiles and younger siblings spluttering and snottering into the water. I was pretty crap at it but my brother would have drowned himself rather than admit defeat. He would suddenly rear out of the water, his whole upper body soaked, grinning so widely that he was in danger of dropping his prize. Later we’d have apple tart with hidden money in it wrapped up in silver paper.
When we all got to be a bit older my aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own, held a party each Hallowe’en. They only invited our family and one set of cousins which meant they had 15 children in attendance. There was always a bonfire and sparklers but no fireworks as they were banned in Northern Ireland.In the middle of the party there would be a loud clatter on the door and my uncle would go and investigate. Without fail he would return with a scary stranger with a stick, wearing a thick coat and a scarf wrapped round his face. Usually the stranger did a lot of muttering and, more often than not, he’d use his stick to take a swing at you if you came too close. As the evening progressed and we worked ourselves up into a frenzy the stranger would suddenly reveal themselves to be the man who lived next door or even occasionally our Aunt Mary. Presumably she got drafted in by my uncle in the years when he couldn’t persuade any of the neighbors to come and scare us half to death. I think the parties started coming to an end when I was in my early teens but by then I’d grown out of them.
I always think of my uncle at this time of year. He was murdered, along with his brother, in the mid 70s but in Spring not October. The scary, masked strangers who came to the door that night didn’t reveal themselves to be friends or family.
All this happened a long time ago and besides, the past is a different country – but it has been haunting me lately.
a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand:street markets where local artisans display handwoven textiles, painted ceramics, and leather goods
“We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” ~ Seamus Heaney
I was on the phone with a friend the other day when I heard a high pitched whistle from the street. My friend heard it too, and I took a little detour from our conversation to explain that we were hearing the distinct sound of the knife-sharpener passing through my Mexican neighborhood. I like it. More than a call to potential customers, the knife-sharpener’s tune is a reminder of the presence of old ways amidst modern life.
I’ve been reluctant to take my dull knives out to the knife-sharpener, because I should know how to hone them myself. I know the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel from my childhood home, my dad making the long metallic strokes on each side of the knife that ensured an edge sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast. Honing knives is simple, he once told me, requiring me only to exert equal pressure on each side of the blade and then ever so carefully to test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. Over the years, I have tried – driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I cannot get it right.
It is my father’s birthday today, and I’m remembering an evening from this summer, back home in rural South Derry. One evening, I spotted him in his garage, perusing his collection of hand-tools for something my brother might be able to use. It’s a gentle start to the “cleaning out of the garage” that he and my mother talk about in ways we’re all afraid to take seriously.
Other than his beloved garden, this space is where my dad is happiest, surrounded by things he can rework and repair; things he can restore.
A maker of things, a fixer, he belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. My father has the “Midas touch” of The Thatcher and even the grasp of the Diviner. I watched once, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.”
Da is also a pragmatist, quick to remind me that his artisanal handiwork began out of economic necessity, his craft shaped and sharpened by the place that produced him. Even in hard times, he sang or whistled as he worked. With an ear for music, he is one of those people who can sit down and pick out a tune on whatever instrument is within reach. He always sang in harmony to songs on the radio or hymns at church—unaware he was teaching me to learn not the melody first, but a harmony. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, daddy made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the violin that would one day open doors for me in places like East Berlin before the wall came down. My father never bought an instrument for himself.
For my fourth Christmas, knowing I wanted a cradle for my doll, Gloria, he made one himself and painted it green. I imagine the scene, my father working under the “bare bulb, a scatter of nails, shelved timber, and glinting chisels” of Heaney’s “An Ulster Twilight.” Almost six decades later, it’s still in the roof-space above his garage along with other things that need to be “sorted.”
These days, I appreciate the way my father crafted a thing to last. In my mind’s eye, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.” I know he wishes he lived just down the road from his children and his grandchildren, to make things and make things right again.
It wasn’t until I was older, a parent myself, that I understood his obsession with fixing things. I also understood that maybe, as parents, each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children won’t have to experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. Sometimes, we fool ourselves into believing we’ve outsmarted the pain don’t we? With our reframing of things and the telling stories that soften the blow. Sometimes we are no match for the thing that cannot be fixed. My father knows this.
Two days after receiving the news from Arizona that my husband had died in our Phoenix home, I began packing clothes to make the long journey back. Like an automaton, I packed our suitcases with things we didn’t need, things to carry from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and then to a house full of sadness and inappropriate desert sunshine.
While packing, I remember noticing mud caked on the soles of my boots, a reminder of our walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of the Broagh Road. From half-way up the stairs, I handed them to my father and, as if life was still normal, I asked him to take them outside to shake off the dirt. Even as I did, I knew instinctively—and I was ashamed—that when those boots came back to me, they would be polished to a high shine.
Sitting on the stairs, my favorite boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorised from Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays filled my head:
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
. . .
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? What did I know?
From the stairs, I watched him through the crack in the door. Stoic, strong as an ox, his head in his hands, a Bible open in his lap. Undone. He paused to cry out to God for help. He couldn’t fix this The man who had always fixed everything was no match for this – his only daughter widowed, his granddaughter fatherless. All he could do was polish my boots, the way he had once polished the leather brogues I wore to school.
What did I know?
I know this.
I love my father and have almost told him as much. Almost, because, as Seamus Heaney explained so well to Dennis O’Driscoll, “That kind of language would have been much suspect. We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” It was, and it is.
It is a gift to know this, and for that I am indebted to the teacher who introduced me to the poetry in which I discovered my father—a man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, a man who also understands that poetry belongs to all of us and can speak on our behalf when the right words evade us. Once, following Seamus Heaney’s death, I was asked to give a speech on the poet and include some of his poems. Stuck for which ones to choose, I asked my brother who suggested I just gather the audience on a Zoom call and have our da read “Digging.” “That will floor ’em.” Yes, it would.
Poetry is close to prayer. Carol Ann Duffy once said it is “the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.” It is also the perfect art form for gratitude and love unspoken.
I don’t know if I ever thanked him for cleaning my boots or sharpening knives or making things better, so I’ll do that now.
Happy birthday daddy. xo
A Call by Seamus Heaney
“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him. The weather here’s so good, he took the chance To do a bit of weeding.”
So I saw him Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig, Touching, inspecting, separating one Stalk from the other, gently pulling up Everything not tapered, frail and leafless, Pleased to feel each little weed-root break, But rueful also…
Then found myself listening to The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks Where the phone lay unattended in a calm Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums…
And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays, This is how Death would summon Everyman.
Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him. (From The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney)
