Because I know it will get lost in a flurry of Tweets and status updates on Facebook, I’m going to put this tribute to Belfast right here for safe-keeping. I don’t know who wrote it and wish that I did so I could say thank you, and with a nod to Van Morrison’s Coney Island, “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?”
A Belfast poem (author unknown).
I’ll speak to you dear stranger, if you really want to know,
So listen and I’ll tell you why I love this city so,
Belfast is an Ulsterman with features dour and grim,
It’s a pint of creamy porter and a Sunday morning hymn;
It’s a grimy little cafe where they serve you dainty teas,
It’s a fish and chips in paper or vinegar with peas;
It’s a banner of July the twelfth, a sticky toffee apple,
A righteous little Gospel Hall, A Roman Catholic Chapel;
It’s a Telly Boy with dirty face, a piece of apple tart,
A fry upon a Saturday, a coal breek on a cart.
It’s a Corporation gasman, complete with bowler hat, It’s a wee shop at the corner, a friendly bit of chat; It’s an ould lad in a duncher, a woman in a shawl, A pinch of snuff, a tatie farl, a Loyal Orange hall. A tobacco smell in York Street, a beg o yellow man, It’s an Easter egg that’s dyed with whin, a slice of Ormo pan; A youngster with some spricky backs inside an oul jam jar, It’s a meeting at the Custom House, or the old Victoria Bar.
It’s mud banks on the Lagan when the tide is running low, It’s a man collecting refuse, bonfires on Sandy Row; It’s a beg of salty dullis, a wee bowl of Irish stew, A goldfish bought in Gresham Street, a preacher at a queue. It’s a painting of King Billy upon a gable wall, A fat flower seller on a stool outside the City Hall; A half-moon round the doursteps, a polis man on guard, A man who’s crying “Delf for Regs” a little white washed yard.
It’s the market on a Friday, the ships lined at the docks, It’s a shiny polished fender, a bunch of green shamrocks; It’s herrin’s fried in oaten meal, with a glass of buttermilk, It’s a snowy linen handkerchief as soft as finest silk; It’s a bap with country butter, a dander round the zoo, A climb up tough Ben Madigan, to get the splendid view. It;s a bunch of savoury scallions, a plate of buttery champ, The hopscotch on the footpath, a swing aroun’ the lamp. Its the smell of Mansion polish on the lino in the hall,
The Sunday school excursion, a treat for one and all. It’s the Islandmen who build great ships that takes us far to sea, It’s S.D. Bells in Ann Street where they sell the best of tea. It’s friends home from America, who have been thinking long, The Salvation bands on Sundays to save the sinners throng; It’s a wee walk up the Lisburn road, and back by the Malone, It’s the Albert Clock in High Street with its rich and mellow tone.
The delf dogs on the mantlepiece, yer wee man from the Pru. It’s chimney sweep on a bicycle coming in to do the flu; It’s the ever present visits to the Hills of Castlereagh, It’s the deathless hush on Saturday when Linfield plays away. It’s ‘By Killarney’s Lakes’ on the bells o’ the Assembly Hall, It’s spiky coloured broken bottles on yer neighbour’s backyard wall. It’s a visit to your Grannies, and a wee hot cup o tay; It’s bacon boiled with pamphery served up, piping hot, With Skerry spuds, “like balls of flour” cracked laughing in the pot.
It’s the Barney Hughes’ hot cross buns, a canary in a cage, An old man talking in the park of a past and glorious age; It’s that sharp expressive dialect of everyone at large, It’s a heap of coal on the Lagan floating on a barge; It’s women on the windy stool when summer shines down; It’s a great big wedge of apple tart, or a wee race into town; It’s an needle from an anchor in Smithfield’s busy mart, I think I’d better call a halt, before I break my heart.
So the answer, stranger, and now I’m sure you’ll see, Belfast–my city–is the only place in all this world–for me.”
With family and friends just a mouse-click away, we might be forgiven for believing we can feel at home wherever we are in the world. Migration seems less complex and consequential given the abundance of opportunities for virtual connections to home, but “the ache of the uprooted plant,” persists, reminding us that sometimes there is no substitute for a real social network in a physical space. For the Irish Diaspora or for anyone seeking to connect or reaffirm a connection with Ireland, an unlikely opportunity exists in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun, best known for its 299 days of sunshine each year and its multi-city sprawl – each of those cities boasts a sister city in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Just north of downtown Phoenix, stands the McClelland Irish Library, a latter-day 12th century Norman castle. Such an architectural juxtaposition may seem incongruous in other urban landscapes, but not in Phoenix, a city that is barely 150 years old.
Although considered a new city, its network of canals – more miles of waterway than Venice and Amsterdam combined – are reminders that Phoenix was built on the ruins of the ancient Hohokam civilization. With sticks and stones, the Hohokam carved almost a thousand miles of canals into the desert, creating the most advanced irrigation system in the New World to deliver water from the Salt Water river to their crops. After tending fields in their desert oasis for more than a millennium, the Hohokam civilization disappeared in circumstances that remain a mystery for archeologists. The Valley of the Sun lay empty for 400 years, just waiting for European settlers, the pioneers who would uncover the ancient Hohokam water routes to shape the canal system and the city that continues to rise from the ashes of its mythical namesake – Phoenix.
Phoenix is a big city, the 5th most populous in the United States with over 1.6 million people, 10% of them claiming Irish ancestry. It is big but not entirely urban. Surrounded by mountains, the neighborhoods of Phoenix are various and distinct, some separated by over thirty miles and more than one freeway, some sprawl across acres where citrus groves, horse pastures, farms, and fields of flowers once flourished, all coaxed by canal waters. Phoenix is also a city of newcomers, that, according to U.S. Census Data, added 220 people a day in 2017. And although it has been synonymous with suburban sprawl for decades, more people are flocking to the city. Downtown Phoenix, Inc., a think tank established to encourage more businesses, residents, and visitors, reports that in 2018 Phoenix has already seen an 85% spike in its downtown population. People want to be less dependent on their cars; instead walking or taking the light rail to restaurants and cultural destinations. This bodes well for recent Irish emigrants in search of the craic – they might just find it in a place like the Irish Cultural Center and the McClelland library – a bold expression of Irishness in the heart of a desert city.
The library bears the family name of Norman P. McClelland who passed away in 2017. He was the son of W.T. McLelland, an immigrant from County Down, who settled in Tucson in 1912, about a month before Arizona became a state. In many ways, Norman McClelland was typical of the Irish in America, who Eileen Markey characterizes as “tenacious in in their cultural identification, claiming an Irish identity a century or more after our forbearers stepped off the boat.” This tenacity is reflected in McClelland’s genealogical research, painstaking work that would lead him to envision. a library that would also provide access to dynamic Irish culture, arts, and education for the entire community. Head Librarian, Chas Moore, explains that “Norman researched and published four detailed family history volumes, one on each of his grandparents who grew up within a ten-mile radius in County Down, N. Ireland. His dedication to family and helping others discover their roots and write their family histories is what guided his huge investment of the library that bears his family name.” McLelland’s active involvement in the Irish Cultural Center of Phoenix and his eponymous library is what Arizona Senator John McCain described as “a testament to Norman’s steadfast leadership and genuine dedication to serving his community whilst paying homage to his Ulster roots.”
The largest of its kind in the Southwestern United States, the three story library houses 8,000 books from Irish authors, poets, and genealogical sources as well as a permanent exhibit on The Book of Kells, several reading rooms, and computer access to various disciplines of Irish and Celtic studies including genealogy. While conducting his own genealogical research, McCelland met Dr. Brian Trainor, former Research Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, Director of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and Chairman of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. Just this week, Dr. Trainor passed away in Belfast and as testament to McCelland’s commitment to preserving the history and genealogical record of the people of Ireland has bequeathed to the McClelland Library his personal collection, helping realize what Librarian Chas Moore reveals as McLelland’s greatest hope, “to have an entire bookshelf lined with Irish in Arizona family histories. We are well on the way to achieving that goal with our new Irish in Arizona project.”
Architectural Photography by Michael Baxter, Baxter Imaging LLC
Impressive and imposing against the desert sky, the McClelland Library is modeled after an ancient Norman castle and stands on the campus of the Irish Cultural Center along with the Cottage, An Gorta Mor The Great Hunger Memorial, and the Great Hall which has hosted an impressive trail of ambassadors, academics, historians, poets, and politicians. Last Fall, John Deane gave a poetry reading at the center and in January 2019, Jim Rogers, Editor of the premier Irish Studies journal in the United States, New Hibernia Review, will deliver a lecture. Diverse programming such as this that resonates with Phoenix resident and editor and publisher of Reading Ireland, Dr. Adrienne Leavy, who first became involved with the McClelland Library and the Irish Cultural Center some years ago when her daughter Niamh began taking Irish language classes there. Leavy praises the staff “who take their stewardship of Irish culture very seriously,” and the Center’s impressive programming, “whether it be lectures and exhibitions, or the various language, music and dance classes offered.” Part of the creative team that organized the 1916 Centenary exhibition, Leavy points out that perhaps the most gratifying aspects of that project, was that it “exemplified the cross-cultural mission of the ICC, with the opportunity to work closely with the Louth County Museum in Dundalk, who made the research for their excellent 1916 exhibit available to the library.”
In 2018, the Irish Cultural Center and McClelland Library presented a full season of activities exploring the theme of Peace and Reconciliation, featuring book discussions, lectures, events, and films as well as a lecture on the impact of the Good Friday Agreement on contemporary Ireland by Robert O’Driscoll, Consul General of Ireland to the Western United States. Other dignitaries include President Mary MacAleese, who during her visit to the Center in 2008, foreshadowed these collaborative endeavors, acknowledging the promise of the new library to “build connections as never before,” and reminding those gathered that the will to do so is part and parcel of our Irish DNA
It is what keeps us clan and family to one another through all of life’s vagaries. This [Irish Cultural] Centre, and its new library, will be a hub for those connections, and a home for the new networks of friendship and shared interests that will keep Ireland and Arizona close, even across the miles.
Writer, Yvonne Watterson pictured with Former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese and her husband, Martin.
Back home, that simple mouse-click away, my parents still live in rural South Derry, but my father would be right at home in the McLelland Library. In my mind’s eye, he is surveying the arch above the doorway, calculating how much limestone and labor went into it, and marveling when I tell him that the Irish blue limestone was quarried in County Galway, then cut and carved in a County Clare workshop by master stonemason, Frank McCormack, the kind of Irish craftsman who belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem along with the blacksmith, the diviner, and the thatcher, each well-practiced in the techniques and tools of ancient crafts. Just like my father. McCormack, who has been practicing stonemasonry since 1989, did all of the stonework at his workshop, Irish Natural Stone Products. The three tons of limestone were shipped to the United States by boat through the Panama Canal, and after arriving in Los Angeles, transported by truck to Phoenix, where McCormack and one of his finest master stone masons flew to fit the pieces of stone in layers. His wife, Mary, describes the difficulty of working in the Phoenix heat, “They were on site at dawn ready to work and had to leave at the height of the sun and then work again as the day cooled down. Should a mistake be made and a tool left in the sun hands were burnt and this slowed work.” It took a month for the team to recreate in the desert a masterpiece of ancient Irish civilization. McCormack reminds us that
If you look at that doorway, you’ll see old history; you’ll see we used the chisel the same way stonemasons did 1,000 years ago. It’s the real deal.
Courtesy: Irish Cultural Center
Lib The inspiration for the doorway came from library architect and President of the Irish Cultural Center, Paul Ahern. He had visited Ireland in 2005 “to see the churches, monasteries, and castles in order to absorb some of the design character of these old, old stone structures.” While the basic conceptual design was completed before Ahern began searching for a specific historical reference image for the doorway, he knew what he wanted – relatively simple geometric shapes without religious figures or Celtic crosses. He focused an Internet search on County Clare because of the relationship between Phoenix and her sister city, Ennis and while perusing possibilities, he discovered a photo of the former St. Brigid’s church on Holy Island, Lough Derg. A 10thcentury structure, “St. Brigid’s arched entry seemed to have the right character so I developed the design by scaling up the original to fit our library.” To help him recreate the doorway, Mary McCormack explains that her husband made a number of trips to Holy Island to photograph the details, and that it was Frank who had the idea of carving “McClelland Library” into the arch, “a permanent recognition of Mr. McClelland’s involvement in the project.”
Towering over me as I enter the courtyard, is the McClelland Library and McCormack’s impressive handiwork. Under my feet is a map of Ireland, each of her counties set in brick and etched with the names of donors. Behind me, the An Gorta Mor, in memory of those who suffered in the Irish Famine. All around me, the echoes of two ancient civilizations, and I find myself recalling five years after his death, Seamus Heaney, a man who loved libraries, once exalting them and their librarians with these lines from one of his favorite poems by Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz:
“I imagine the earth when I am no more . . .
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”
Yet the books will be there.
Architectural Photography by Michael Baxter, Baxter Imaging LLC
It’s four o’clock in the morning. Sleep eludes me. I can’t stop thinking about her, the intelligent middle-aged woman who sat where 27 years ago Dr. Anita Hill sat facing some of the same men – white, powerful, aging men. One of them, Orrin Hatch, stands out in my memory, in the ways he belittled Dr. Hill’s story of sexual assault as “too contrived,” and accused her of enjoying the publicity.” Now 84 years old, he told reporters yesterday that he found Dr. Ford “attractive, a good witness,” clarifying that by “attractive,” he meant “she’s pleasing.”
Pleasing.
He just doesn’t get it. What he gets is reducing a woman to her physical appearance. What he gets – and what his colleagues get – is the power of optics. So they put their heads together and came up with a plan to hide behind Rachel Mitchell, a female sex crimes prosecutor from Maricopa County, and let her ask questions that, in the end, I’m guessing won’t matter. Make no mistake – her presence was their way of glossing over a truth that I feel in my bones, because these men are just as nonchalant about allegations of sexual misconduct as they were in 1991.
Yesterday and later today, I know these GOP senators will likely defend Kavanaugh. They will circle their tired old wagons around the misogyny and patriarchy that led to the tremble in Dr. Ford’s voice, a tremble I’ve heard in my own voice and in the voices of the women who have filled my world over these past five decades – my mother, my daughter, my cousins, my friends and colleagues, strangers who’ve shared confidences with me on buses and trains, in beauty salons and hospital waiting rooms. Every single one of us, at one time or another, recollecting trauma, summoning bravery, knowing our place, trying to please, fending for ourselves.
And what of Dr. Ford, whose circumspection and grace will stay with me for a long time, in stark contrast to the histrionics of an angry, defiant nominee and his most vociferous defender, Lindsey Graham? She is the embodiment of a lesson in civics, coming forward because she cared that the Supreme Court of these United States, the highest court in the land, is poised to include in its number two accused sexual predators.
I’ve heard that tremble before, and even though a strange man in a social media rant accused me of lying about my own #MeToo story and being disrespectful to Kavanaugh because I “lumped him in” with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, I remain convinced that what Margaret Atwood says is true:
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
While we wait, resigned to the likelihood of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I’m beginning to believe that some of these men hate women. Six of them in particular. And, here’s why. In 1994, three years after Dr. Anita Hill sat in the same seat occupied by Dr. Christine Ford yesterday, Joe Biden and the late Louise Slaughter drafted the “Violence Against Women Act.” It was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and was reauthorized in 2000 and 2005. In 2013, these six men voted against it, the same men who defended Kavanaugh yesterday.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
For longer than my daughter has been alive – and she will be voting in November – they have shown us who they are and who they care about – themselves and the ideals of their tired old party.
It’s not too late for them to do the right thing. Over to you, boys.
Today 81 year old Bill Cosby is waiting to learn his fate, facing up to 30 years behind bars for three counts of aggravated indecent assault against the woman whose allegations led to the criminal case against him. He continues to deny her allegations and those of the scores of women who came forward against him. Remorseless, he maintains to this day that the sexual contact was consensual. Of course he does.
Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court grows even more troubling, with new allegations of sexual misconduct that he vehemently denies. Of course he does. There are some Republicans defending him. It’s embarrassing to hear their dismissals of his conduct thirty years ago as something that “boys do in high school.” Others, including the President of the United States are dismissing the allegations as “totally political” going as far as to call Kavanaugh, “a fine man, with an unblemished past.” Well, Mr. President, your “fine man” has a past that includes a disrespect of women, his antics at Yale with his Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brethren memorialized in a photo of the DKE brothers waving a flag made of women’s underwear reportedly collected from women’s rooms while they were in class. Trump’s ‘fine man,’ Kavanaugh, also belonged to Truth and Courage, one of Yale’s secret societies for Seniors. An all-male club, it was also known by the nickname “Tit and Clit.” Noteworthy and important in light of the current allegations against him it is part of his record, and I’m at a loss as to why the character and record of a Supreme Court Justice nominee has been deemed irrelevant by those defending him.
Naively, I thought the Harvey Weinstein story might purge forever those predators and perverts and power-crazed men from Hollywood or Washington DC or my hometown in Northern Ireland. It didn’t. Such men still lurk around the corner – on Wall Street and Main Street, in the White House and the schoolhouse, in our churches and our universities, in the military and the media. And given the response on social media of thousands of people who are sharing their own sexual harassment experiences with the #MeToo hashtag, such men have been there for too long, their abuses of power and women camouflaged by the sad and systemic complicity of others.
The first time it happened to me, I was walking home from school with a friend. It was dusk when a young man emerged from the shadows at the end of the Dublin road, pointed to his open fly, and asked us if we wanted to play with his furry friend. My friend and I ran home. We were afraid, but we laughed as though we weren’t. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell anyone until right now. All these decades later, I remember the chill in the evening air, the sneer on that stranger’s face, and the panic over not being believed if I told anyone. So I learned to keep secret the fear that it was my fault or that nobody would believe me.
As Kavanaugh’s history unfolds, I also find myself recalling, with some disgust, the time a male supervisor, a public educator, conducted his annual employee appraisals with all his female subordinates in a local coffee shop. Except for mine. His assistant, a woman my mother’s age, scheduled my evaluation in the bar of a nearby Holiday Inn. It shocks me now to admit – even to myself – that I showed up for it. Even though I knew he was out of line, I was afraid. I was too intimidated to confront him, to ask why the different venue for me. And I was too scared to tell his superiors or to confide in the other women – my peers. I didn’t even tell my husband, afraid of the consequences he would deal out to this misogynist. While this man did not touch me, he succeeded in demeaning me, making me feel different and uncomfortable, seated with his arms behind his head, comfortable in his own skin, talking quietly to me presumably to make me move closer to him. He’d ask, “what do you have on?” And when I appeared confused by the question, he’d follow up with, “Duh. Your perfume.” I remember how he questioned my body language and wondering if he had ever commented on the body language of a man in my role. And then I’d resume my default position – “It’s not a big deal,” I told myself. So he got away with it just as he had previously (I later learned) got away with similar behavior towards other women.
Such an experience taught me to run when I was afraid, a lesson that has been reinforced during the course of my adult life. Looking back over my first twenty-five years in America, I remember how I used to spend an hour each weekday afternoon, watching Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It was Oprah who taught me about Gavin de Becker’s “Gift of Fear” – a book written the year my daughter was born – and how to predict dangerous behavior and how being nice does not pay:
Niceness does not equal goodness. We must learn and teach our children that niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction. It is not a character trait. People seeking to control others, almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.
Later, if ever I were kidnapped, Oprah taught me that I should remember Sanford Strong’s Rule #1: to never let myself be taken to the second location. These and other such lessons I passed down to my daughter, hope burning internally that she would never need them.
My daughter sometimes tells me that when faced with a challenge, she copes by weighing it against the worst thing that has already happened to her – the death of her daddy and the missing constancy of him. Other men, good friends of mine and my own father, have tried to fill the gaping hole. Kind. Watchful. Funny. And – perhaps afraid that I might fall apart as her only parent, more aware than I of my own fragility – they are there for her. Just there.There, sitting under a Jacaranda tree with her as she held her dying cat; there, cheering her on as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma; there, teaching her to drive; and, there, making a day in December feel almost like Christmas.
Between us, we provided a safe and soft place for her to fall. Prior to milestone moments – Father’s Day, his birthday, the holidays – we are extra vigilant, more active on her Facebook page with supportive comments and ‘likes’ and jokes we hope she will appreciate. Stupidly, however, we do not expect to be broadsided, as we were by a moment in a department store fitting-room where she works part-time.
My daughter is kind and warm with a personality made for retail. She’s good, but she is also nice. A college student, her first part-time job was in a local department store where her managers often assigned her to oversee the fitting room. Patient and pleasant, a pleaser, she was the perfect store associate to calm customers harried and in a hurry to find something that fits. To her embarrassment I’m sure, I went into the store one Sunday r and – worse – I even tried on clothes, so she could not avoid me, the way we avoid our parents when we are so “over them.” I remember that I didn’t notice the numbers scrawled on her hand, I was too busy embarrassing her the way I used to do when I dropped her off at junior high. Mortified that her friends might hear “my music” on the radio, I remember she would turn it down before getting out of the car. Then I would wait until she was on the sidewalk, turn up a Tom Petty tune and yell out the window for all to hear, “I love you.” It’s what mothers do, right?
Mothers also usually know when something’s wrong. I can tell by the first syllable of “hello” when she calls if it is, for example, a day when grief has her in its grip – ‘a grief day.’ I can sense it. But I somehow missed it in the department store that day. I missed it. How could I miss it? It wasn’t until she came home from her shift a few hours later, that she told me. She had written on her hand 4:30 – 4:45, the time period during which a middle-aged man – a customer – had inappropriately touched her in response to her telling him she was sorry the red shirt he was returning hadn’t worked out. She was alone. Vulnerable. Frozen after he put his hands on her, but somehow she thought to inform security of the time so they could check the videotape and “just keep an eye on him in case he came back and bothered anyone else.” Then my darling girl worked her shift for four more hours and told herself that because she was “alright,” management would probably minimize the situation. Nobody came to check on her. She ended her shift, walked to her car alone, and came home to me.
With time to reflect on this, to raise hell, to broadcast it all over social media and report it to management, to confirm that, yes, detectives were looking into it, and to ensure that a policy would be enforced to require at least two employees in the fitting room at all times, the lingering issue remains. There are menacing men who move among us every minute of every day and that women who look just like my daughter – my mother, my best friend, me – continue to be sexually harassed in public places. My girl is now one of those women. #MeToo
I know she is vehemently opposed to “mommy fighting her battles.” I don’t know if she understood I wanted to find that stranger and tear him apart until there was nothing left of him. Nothing. She didn’t hear Gavin de Becker tell Lena Dunham in response to a question about how young women can best protect themselves against violence:
. . . Do not accept the scam that violence is a strategy only understood by men. There’s a universal code of violence, and that’s not a code you have to crack; it’s all inside you. When I used to give more speeches, I would ask audiences, “Is there anybody here who feels they could never hurt anybody?” A bunch of people would raise their hands and say, “I could never be violent under any circumstances.” If it’s a woman, I would say, “Well, what about if somebody was hurting your child?” “Oh, oh, oh, well then I could rip, burn, bite, scrape, scratch, poke, shoot, stab,” and so the resource is in all of us.
That resource is in all of us. Except, we don’t really believe it, do we?
One evening a couple of years ago, I went to a local bar to play pool with one of my best friends – like me, an older woman, or as we like to say of ourselves, “women of a certain vintage.” For reference, a bad thing had happened to me the previous summer, and playing pool became the good thing that lifted me up and out of it. It was a perfect distraction. We found the quintessential American dive bar – a hole in the wall without windows, and oddly smoky even in the absence of smoke, three pool tables, a parking lot aromatic with weed, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and bartenders who tell stories and listen to yours and call everyone ‘sweetie.’ You get the idea.
I had never played pool until that summer, but because of Paul Newman in Color of Money, I had always wanted to. I didn’t even want to be good. I wanted just one time to make that sound – the crack of a great opening break. At the time, I was a long way from doing so. I didn’t know how to hold the cue and could barely make contact with the ball. I love my friend, but she is a lousy pool teacher, so we would resort to watching YouTube videos on our phones or we would ask the advice of guys who brought their own sticks to the bar on League Night, which also happened to be Ladies Night, or on Sundays when it is still free to play. After months of practice and time spent with the man who is now my partner, the man who still quickens my heart and still teaches me how to make the shots he makes me call, I grew less embarrassed by my game. In fact, now that I have a bridge he deems almost acceptable, I win more than I lose – just not against him.
He wasn’t with me that evening when I put up my quarter. Oblivious to my surroundings as I sometimes am, I was only vaguely aware of the young man seated at the bar behind us. Remembering the shape of him now, I recall shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops, receding hairline, slightly overweight. There was nothing remarkable and no hint of danger. I remember half-noticing him talking to my friend, but I thought he was only asking about the boxes from a local pizzeria stacked on the bar and if anyone could have a slice. (Yes. Anyone could.) She didn’t tell me until later that he had rubbed against her and asked if she liked playing with balls. She froze the way so many of us do, later telling me,
Yeah, he hit on the old broad first.
Subsequently, when it was her turn to play, he sidled towards me, and said quietly to me, “Hey, hey, pretty lady. Your friend says you like playing with balls. Is that true?”
Hey. Hey.
Typically, this would have rendered me frozen as I had been every other time something similar has happened, but this time I felt an approximation to violence. A foreign and empowering feeling, it made me neither fear him nor ignore him. Nor did I run away. I don’t know what shifted in me, but something did. Clutching my cue – and wanting to break it over his head – I eye-balled him and never looked away as I told him, coolly and quietly, “Yes. Yes, I do. I love it. But you will never know since you don’t have any. Now get the f**k out of my space.” I almost scared myself.
Now I am no stranger to profanity – I’m Irish after all – but the words came out of me like razor blades, and before I could turn away from him, I watched him slither out the back door. Still, I felt guilty about cursing at him, about losing my cool, and – even worse – wondering if perhaps it had been the way I had smiled, the silky summer top I was wearing, the cut of my jeans, the length of my legs – if it had been my fault. Was it because I was in a bar on a Friday night without a man? He would not have said it had I been with a man, would he? Had I asked for it? Well, had I? And, if I am honest – mindful that I am middle-aged, menopausal and most of the time most likely invisible to men on the make – should I have been grateful for the attention? This is the maddening and shameful contradiction that sends me, recoiling and ashamed, to the disconcerting reality that I am no longer the proverbial spring-chicken, therefore, attention from a young man must mean I’ve “still got it.” Really? Yes, really. This confounds me and makes me want to cry.
Now what? Well, today and tomorrow, I will step out into the world, and I will dress the way I always do. I will “sparkle and enchant” the way I do and risk being called flirtatious which sometimes sounds very much like “you’re asking for it.” My daughter will continue to be good – but perhaps not as nice – to strangers, because she and I have been altered.
Like a thief in the night, those men – and every other entitled man who has ever touched me or taunted me or told me I smell good when I’m standing next to him in line at an electronics store or called me a stuck-up bitch and told me to suck his dick because I didn’t smile back – has taken something from me, from all of us – and we are not sure how or if or when we will get it back. Men like Brett Kavanaugh and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein know this.
One evening a couple of years ago, I went to a local bar to play pool with one of my best friends – like me, an older woman, or as we like to say of ourselves, “women of a certain vintage.” For reference, a bad thing had happened to me the previous summer, and playing pool became the good thing that lifted me up and out of it. It was a perfect distraction. We found the quintessential American dive bar – a hole in the wall without windows, and oddly smoky even in the absence of smoke, three pool tables, a parking lot aromatic with weed, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and bartenders who tell stories and listen to yours and call everyone ‘sweetie.’ You get the idea.