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.
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter most and things that need to be said; and, about magic and loss.
A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland long before curly-hair products had been invented. Both of us born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have a teenage daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and we are compelled to rite. On September 11th of that year, Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls were just four years old, safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The reports tumbled out of New York city, stopping us in our tracks. We were heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and transatlantic talks of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
~ Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? I don’t know. Growing up where we did, when we did, we were confounded by the bombs and bullets, by the brutality and barbarism on both sides. But we were also resigned to it, as we clung to our ordinary rituals and routines, the ones we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. So we refused to surrender to fear and we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
For myself, one such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. A young woman, just starting out on my own, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. The world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and writing in my diary, my once cherished ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt. And I began to write again, the way I had done in that old diary. Just for me. I kept it private at first, afraid to hit “publish.” Inexplicably, I felt like I was speaking out of turn or that I would get in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.
As I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” I found that here, I could lean back rather than Lean In obediently just because all the other women were doing it. I could take stock and trade. I could light the match if I wanted to burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs. But that has happened only once. This is my home away from home, so I keep writing. For myself. I suppose cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.
Lesley’s first homework assignment in that class was ostensibly simple – to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I knew what to do. I promised to print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend brought a plastic bag to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a bit of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.
Making our way up the little hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the roar of airplanes above ensuring we will not forget the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.
Letters and paper flowers, candles aglow in the bright morning, tiny stuffed bears on the grass at the bottom of six flagpoles – I have been cleaved in two by such things before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, and everyone falls silent and still; then bagpipes and then Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names. We remember them.
I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he came to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.
I said his name and attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole. Before turning away, a whisper “Godspeed.”
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.”
My first bike arrived on Christmas morning, 1967. It had training wheels, or “stabilizers” as we called them in Northern Ireland. Stabilizers – my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance – a firm hold. Perhaps had Santa Claus read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, he may not have been so adamant about finding a bike with stabilizers. The professor dismisses training wheels entirely, pointing out the obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal. Given that bicycling is the quintessential balancing act, it indeed makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice 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.” Little wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels. We have to learn how to balance, much like the way we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end. But if we get rid of the training wheels, then we must say goodbye to a rite of passage . . .
A lifetime later, with a little girl of my own, one morning after Christmas shimmers in my memory. Her father and I had taken her to the park to ride her bike – without training wheels for the first time. Officially “A Big Moment” in our family’s story, the morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he joked about giving me the Protestant discount, before sending me on my way with a bag of Tayto. Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. As expected there was some cursing and fumbling with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers.
Standing by impatiently, in a new sweater that reminded me of my mother’s knitting, and her pig-tails braided, she was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. She grins for the camera, having lost her two front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa has done well, delivering the pink bicycle she wanted, complete with sparkling streamers. (Lest you judge me, gentle reader, about reinforcing gender stereotypes, our girl loved pink that year. In her letter to Santa, she even asked that he bring “pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” The next Christmas, she had moved on; she wanted a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant).
Older and wiser, we didn’t tell her we had brought band-aids along with the video camera that would record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .
Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only the once. She cried, too. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And soonshe was riding a bike! Round and round the park she rode, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and she, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum.” Equipped for bicycle riding. Forever. And waiting in the wings, two parents ready to catch her. Two parents A safe place to fall . . .
Her father was her first word. He picked her up from school every day and bought her ice cream every Friday afternoon. It is beyond her grasp that this is the fifth Father’s Day without him and that one day it will be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since he last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store. To keep her warm. Much missed, he has missed too much and too many rites of passage. There was her graduation from high school, her first paycheck, the first time she voted in a Presidential election. He would have liked that she voted for the woman he thought would make “a damn fine President.” He missed her first boyfriend and the subsequent first heartbreak – probably a good thing. And, he missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And she missed him. It was on the first Christmas Day without him that our daughter took me for a drive. My father, a world away from rural south Derry, had been teaching her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road. Every day, he sat in the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of her Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, encouraging her to “go easy” and to just believe in herself, in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the roads around Antrim in the late 1970s. I almost burst with pride, looking on as she signaled and proceeded down the avenue, maintaining a slow, steady 25 mph and taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood, unaware and unafraid. Behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me of Seamus Heaney and the symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain
~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.
We are fit for it.
On a morning like this one, it is just the two of us in the car. She is driving me to the bank and then to the mechanic. Watching as she signals and turns right onto the highway, I am reminded again of that day long ago when her father took the training wheels off her bicycle, when he let her go for the first time, which in return reminds me of Nikki Giovannini on bicycles:
Because love requires trust and balance.
Living requires trust and balance.
Sometimes I wish he would come back for a moment, the way the dead dad returns in the movies, a wise ghost with just a little time to tell his daughter the one thing he wants to make sure she knows – that it’s just like riding a bicycle, to believe in herself and the promise of blue skies ahead and inevitable tumbles around the corner.
I’ll maybe pick up the phone and call my father – Perhaps the training wheels don’t come off quite yet.
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.
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
“The first grip I ever got on things
