I tell people I have a good memory, and that’s less true than it used to be. I’m a bit forgetful. I’m also differently forgetful these days.
It used to be that I’d file stuff away in a mental cabinet and retrieve it later, usually right after the time I needed it … people’s names, titles of movies, passwords, the season finale of whatever series that won’t be back until next year.
There’s evidence to prove I’ve been to hundreds of concerts – a book full of ticket stubs and set-lists and anecdotes from friends who went with me. But I don’t actually remember being at lots of those concerts. I suppose I don’t remember where I put my mental filing cabinet.
At the same time, there’s other stuff I remember effortlessly – my first phone number 64604, the shade of lipstick I bought at the Mac store in 2003, what you were wearing and what I was wearing when we went to see that movie, what I heard you said about me to someone you didn’t know would tell me. That goes in a whole other filing cabinet.
This realization reminded me of Nora Ephron’s collection of essays, “I Remember Nothing,” published in 2010 before she died. I remember I bought it at an airport bookstore, but I don’t remember where I was going. This morning, I discovered that I remembered to bring it with me to Mexico.
My favorite entry in this book isn’t an essay; it’s a list of what Nora Ephron will miss and what she won’t, after she’s gone. I suppose it should have been a sign to us in 2010 that she wouldn’t be with us for much longer.
Now, I have no intention of dying anytime soon, but if I were to make such a list today (it might change tomorrow) it would include the following:
What I’ll Miss
Sophie – Scott – Scott singing – Dogs – Texts from my brother – Phone calls with my parents – Strangford Lough – Dreams of living in Strangford, Portaferry, Ardglass or Groomsport – Slippers – The Christmas Tree – An Ulster Fry – French Toast – Butter & Marmalade on Toast – A whistling kettle – A turf fire – The pub – The idea of a turf fire in a pub – Vegetable soup & wheaten bread in the pub – A session in the pub – The first sight of the little church on the road to Ballintoy – Reading in bed – Clouds the color of buttermilk hanging over Lough Neagh – The Glens of Antrim – Botanic Gardens on a cold, dry morning in Belfast – the Arizona desert in December – The sun rising over Lake Chapala – Online friends that become best friends in real life – Pajamas – Shirts fluttering on a clothesline – Windchimes – Castlerock – Rediscovering something Seamus Heaney wrote – Tea in a china cup – Traybakes – The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving Day – Boots – Scarves – Sunglasses- Second chances – Davy Spillane on the Uilleann Pipes – A good hair day – Bluebells – Church bells pealing in old villages – Van Morrison’s “When the Healing Has Begun” – Airport arrivals – Finding the right word at the right time – The craic – The first cup of coffee.
Half-watching The Emmy’s, I looked up when Candice Bergen took the stage in a sparkly dress.
Bergen has always had a relevance in my “American life.” In December 1988, shortly after she showed up as Murphy Brown on primetime TV, I took up permanent residence in the USA. And for the next decade, I liked knowing I could find her if I needed her on a Thursday night at nine o’clock.
For many women, Murphy Brown was what Mary Tyler Moore had been to Candice Bergen, “I think Mary Tyler Moore really made women feel they were entitled to a career and to be defined without a man.” Following Moore’s death in 2017, Candice Bergen said Murphy would never had existed had Mary Richards not paved the way. In fact, Bergen had been told during the production of “Murphy Brown” to look to her predecessor for inspiration. “You want to see the yardstick of a great sitcom? Watch ‘Mary Tyler Moore.’”
Characterized as “Mike Wallace in a dress,” Murphy Brown was tough and didn’t suffer fools. She was also described as “one of the boys,” a moniker that has been applied to me a time or two, prompting me then— and now— to consider what it really means to be a boy, to be a man. On this question, I wouldn’t have consulted Dan Quayle in 1992 nor would not ask J.D. Vance in 2024. Given what the contender for Vice President has said about what it means to be a woman, I think I can figure out the rest.
At the end of the 1991-92 season of Murphy Brown, the nation was in a stir, with 38 million viewers tuning in for the finale to see Murphy give birth and then sing “Natural Woman” to her newborn son. The White House tuned in too. A fictional single mother with a fictional baby boy drew the ire of non-fictional Vice President Dan Quayle who, during President George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign, told an audience at the Commonwealth Club of California:
It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.
Chiding Murphy Brown, a make-believe divorced news anchor in her 40s for her decision to have a child outside of marriage, these words would come to define Dan Quayle nearly as much as his ability to spell “potato.” The White House explained that his remarks were intended to “stir a debate” over “family values” and Hollywood’s treatment of them. Mission accomplished. The nation lost its mind. The media salivated. And then the nation moved on to something else, like Murphy’s latest hairdo, meanwhile the issue of policies that might have something to do with the percentage of absent fathers went undiscussed.
For a few moments at The 2024 Emmys, the nation was reminded that we haven’t changed that much since 1992, divided again—or still— over the values by which Americans should raise their families.
When the Murphy Brown show ended in 1998, Murphy had a son, and I had a brand new baby girl. Smitten, my baby made me feel like a natural woman too, but she also intimidated me like no other force in my life – six pounds of pure hope in my arms. An “older” first-time mother, I often wondered if I was up to the task of motherhood. I know now that I was. I am.
Motherhood had exposed a vulnerability in the irascible Murphy Brown, as did the diagnosis of her breast cancer in the final season. The latter was a vulnerability that was no match for her big hair or the business-suit armor and the smart-ass attitude. Out of the blue – the way life happens – I would meet a similar fate 13 years later, not fully aware of what the woman who played Murphy knew. I’m aware now. Cancer and widowhood and storms that pass remind me still of Lou Reed’s wisdom – “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.”
I have been an incredibly lucky girl. Which is why when a big shadow falls … it feels like the rug is being pulled out from under you, as if to say, “Now we’re going to give you the real stuff.” That’s how the universe works. Life is wondrously and appallingly surprising. Anyone who doesn’t know that is unarmed.
In its rebuke to Quayle in 1992, Murphy Brown incorporated some of his comments into the show, drawing about 70 million viewers. “Perhaps it’s time for the Vice President to realize that whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes, and ultimately what really defines a family is commitment, caring and love.” Real news on a fake news show.
In her rebuke to J.D. Vance tonight at The Emmy’s, Candice Bergen opened with this:
For 11 years, I had the tremendous privilege of playing the lead in a comedy series called Murphy Brown. I was surrounded by brilliant and funny actors. Had the best scripts to work with. And in one classic moment, my character was attacked by Vice President Dan Quayle when Murphy became pregnant and decided to raise the baby as a single mother. Oh, how far we’ve come. Today, a Republican candidate for vice president would never attack a woman for having kids. So as they say, My work here is done. Meow.
Meow.
P.S. With only 50 days until Election Day, please make sure you have all you need to vote. Please visit Vote.org to check your registration status, register to vote, vote by mail, and get election reminders etc. We have a ways to go.
I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America – the dream of it. For me, as a child growing up in a very troubled Northern Ireland, America was always the promise of a sunny day. My grandmother was responsible for this. Although she died when I was very young, she is vibrant in my mind’s eye. I can still hear her voice, gentle but urgent, coaxing her daughter – my mother – to follow the sun as she had once done.
In the 1920s, she and my grandfather had emigrated to America, settling in Connecticut. They loved the boundless opportunities before them and knew they had made the right move, but a relentless stream of letters from back home, guilt-spiced reminders of familial obligation, ultimately pulled them back across the ocean to rural Derry, with their American-born children – four sons and a daughter.
My grandmother isn’t smiling in the photograph that would be placed in the family passport and stamped as she boarded the boat to return to a part of the world that would one day enchant the global literati as Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney’s HomePlace. But in 1932, the farmhouse on the Broagh road was an austere and unwelcoming place for my grandmother and her young American children.
Defeated, with an air of resignation that stayed with her always, she and my grandfather resumed the known and expected ways of ‘home,’ abandoning forever the glittering possibilities in America. Within six years, their family was complete with two more daughters, one of whom is my mother.
There was little opportunity and no easy money for them. As a matter of economic necessity, the family was ‘off the grid,’ all of them resigned to hard work. There was, my mother tells me, a vague awareness of education as a way up and out, but it wasn’t really enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “the pen was easier handled than the spade.” For my grandmother, America would always be the best option. She urged my parents to go for it, knowing my dad’s entrepreneurial spirit would have paid off. Yes, it would. But the right time to leave Northern Ireland eluded my parents.
A Spectacular Risk
For me, it was different. I grew up unafraid to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin once called that “spectacular risk” – to leave my home country. In the late 1980s, as Northern Ireland’s Troubles raged around me, I left. I suppose I was something of a cliche, part of the “brain drain.” Young, well-educated, a bit wild, I couldn’t wait to get out of there and maybe live out my grandmother’s dream. I remember I wrote a clever poem to the local bank manager – I really did – and subsequently got an overdraft to pay my fare to New York.
I packed my backpack and off I went, looking for America. Just like that.
I loved what awaited me. I loved diners and convenience stores that were conveniently open 24 hours a day and roads that went on forever. I loved cars that I had only seen in movies and I loved percolated coffee and bagels and New York style pizza by the slice. I loved bowling alleys, and I loved baseball. I didn’t understand it, but I loved it. I loved the Champion store in Hyde Park or maybe it was Poughkeepsie, where I bought T-shirts with the names of baseball teams emblazoned on them. I loved the road-trip that would eventually take me from upstate New York to Phoenix, Arizona.
I thought I was in a Bruce Springsteen song.
Much to the chagrin of my parents, my first job was in a Phoenix bar. A dive bar by any other name. With my Northern Ireland accent and the right amount of naiveté about America, I was the main source of amusement for the men who stopped by for a shot and a beer after their shift at a nearby manufacturing plant. They greeted me every day with “Hey Irish, gimme a beer.” And, I’d ask what color because I hadn’t memorized yellow for Coors, silver for Coors Light, blue for Miller Lite etc. My beer knowledge was limited to Guinness, Harp, or Bass. Those avuncular guys taught me how to play liar’s poker and cribbage, and they took care of me, making sure I got home safely to my apartment every night. The best part of the job was that I was also in charge of the jukebox and every couple of weeks I’d go to a big warehouse somewhere in Phoenix, where I perused aisles of 45s and brought back the ones I liked. That jukebox had a new lease on life by the time I was finished.
The worst part of the job happened one morning, following a hasty tutorial on how to make cocktails. The bartender had decided it was high time I graduated from serving beer in colored cans to making mixed drinks. When Cliff, one of my favorite customers walked in at 10am, instead of serving up his regular bourbon, I offered him one of my new concoctions. I don’t remember what he chose, but he thought it was cute that I had written down all the recipes in my little notebook and that I was planning to learn them off by heart.
Casting the Stones of Silence
While he drank his free cocktail, pretending to like it, we chatted about nothing important, mostly about how hot it was already. It was quiet, the jukebox silent, the AC humming. Two men I didn’t know were at the other end of the bar, smoking and talking low. As I stood there, cutting lemons and limes to garnish my new cocktails, not a care in the world, one of those men called out to the owner, back in the kitchen and out of sight. “Hey Bud, since when do you allow the help to talk to n****ers?” Silence. Again. “I said since when do you allow the help to talk to n***ers?”
I froze.
I was afraid. Instantly, I recognized it as the same fear I had felt years before, when I turned a page of the Belfast Telegraph to see a black and white photo of a young Catholic woman who had been stripped and tied to a lamp-post, hot tar and feathers poured on her roughly shorn head, because she had committed the crime of falling in love with a British soldier. I wasn’t in America anymore – I was back in 1970s Northern Ireland.
I chose to say nothing to those two men. I was too scared, and I was also ashamed that I was too scared. To Cliff, I mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.” He looked right in my eyes, not with anger but with a kind of resignation that told me he was used to it. He picked up his hat, put it on his head, stood up, and walked out the door. He left a $20 tip. I never saw him again.
If you’re still reading, let me describe the scope of my naiveté. I had assumed there would be no racism in 1980s America. To explain this, let me take you back to my adolescence, to Sunday evenings in our Dublin Road living room, when my parents and I – along with everyone else we knew – gathered around a tiny television to watch ‘Roots.’ We were horrified when Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery in America and whipped within an inch of his life for trying to escape. Aghast, we watched every episode. As the entire country seemed to be galvanized by the story unfolding on Roots every Sunday night, I suppose we all held onto the notion that surely America would have learned and subsequently adopted a kinder, gentler attitude. And surely America would be kinder and gentler than 1980s Northern Ireland.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”
But that morning in a dive bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I couldn’t have been farther away from Gambia, West Africa in 1750, Kunta Kinte’s place of birth. I couldn’t have been farther away from the Dream of America. I couldn’t have been further away from the right thing to do. I said nothing. I have never forgiven myself for casting the stones of silence.
You know where this is going. That morning in the bar taught me a hard reality about America – one that has resurfaced many times in recent years for all of us, captured on cell-phones and broadcast all over the world.
I stayed in America for almost 30 years, always confident that I find the Dream of it. I fell madly in love with an American man and married him and together we bought the house that would become the home where we raised our daughter. I eventually left the bar and found a grown-up job in public education. I was good at it too. I worked hard. I paid my taxes. Because I wasn’t a citizen, I couldn’t vote.
Earning the right to vote
I participated in civic live in other ways. I helped register voters, knowing that voting is perhaps the most important privilege of democracy in the USA. Maybe I delayed my decision to become a citizen because I felt a kind of guilt for all the other immigrants in Arizona – especially my immigrant students – who couldn’t vote. Even though they had lived there since they were very young, perhaps even taking their first steps or speaking their first words on American soil. Even though they pledged allegiance to the flag every day in school, they couldn’t vote, nor were they permitted to apply for a social security number which would allow them to work, drive, enjoy all the benefits afforded to those like my American daughter who was born here. I devoted a great deal of time to working on behalf of undocumented kids. That work is unfinished, and as I write, many of these immigrants are in jeopardy.
I couldn’t vote in the 2016 election that placed Donald Trump in the White House. His election is what finally motivated me to pursue American citizenship. I wanted to vote. I wanted my voice to be heard. Because I had the means to do so, I hired an immigration attorney to help me with the process. There was a lengthy application, a $670 fee, an interview during which a USCIS officer assessed my civic knowledge with 10 random questions from the 100 question citizenship test. Then there was the ceremony in November 2019, where, along with new Americans representing 70 countries, I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I have no adequate words to describe the collective disappointed and disgusted groan that emanated from an audience of hundreds that morning when we were directed to watch the screen for a message from then President, Donald Trump. This is not hyperbole. It was the sound of damage done.
A woman from England stood next to me. She and I chose to look away from the screen, and afterwords we wondered if such a thing had ever happened at a swearing-in ceremony before. I doubt it. I couldn’t imagine a video message from Carter, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Obama eliciting such an immediate and negative response from a crowd of families and friends of freshly minted immigrants waving Old Glory.
America unfinished
I left the United States two months later. For better. And, on September 18, 2020, I voted for the first time in any election. Absentee voting is not an option in Ireland. And, because of rules about the length of time away between elections, I am also ineligible to vote in Northern Ireland/UK. I poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table in a house in Mexico to vote for Joe Biden. As I uploaded my vote, a news update flashed on my phone that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. I remember wondering what would happen next to the Supreme Court. I know now.
The next part of my American story is unclear. My daughter lives there. My friends and her friends live there. I’m grateful to America for making possible some of the most beautiful and miraculous moments of my life. To ensure those kinds of moments are possible for my daughter and her generation, I know I will vote for the democratic nominee.
Do I like the choices before me for American President? No. Two old men. But even if I’m disappointed with the Democratic Party, especially because they wouldn’t expand the Supreme Court when they had the opportunity, and even if Joe Biden stays in the race, I’ll vote for the Democratic party again.
I’ll vote for that Constitution I swore to defend in 2019. I’ll vote for the America my grandmother wanted for me.
Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the yellowing cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades.
When was it that a Bob Dylan song first mattered to me? I cant remember. Nor can I remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue.
Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than the rest of us to measure the success of a Dylan song. Pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, was not among them, writing that Street Legal is “one of Dylan’s most important and cohesive albums . . . of astonishing complexity and confidence delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices.” Granted, he points out that it was badly produced, but that certainly didn’t occur to teenage me. What mattered to me then and still and to anyone else who has ever missed someone – or something – is “Where Are You Tonight?” It remains a staple in the soundtrack of my life. I’m sure you have one too.
But without you it just doesn’t seem right. Oh, where are you tonight?
“Hey, hey, HEY, hey.”
Where are you tonight?
Picturing the picture on the cover of the Street Legal album, it occurs to me that this was the first time I had considered Bob Dylan in color. Until then my idea of him was monochromatic, an iteration of the Dylan we know from the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video – forever flippant, flipping over cue cards, dropping them in the alley. Deadpan.
Laid Off. Bad Cough. Paid Off. And, finally – naturally – What??
During one of my first summers in the United States, an American cousin took me to Buffalo to see The Grateful Dead open for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. In color. Previously, I had seen Dylan perform at Slane Castle in Ireland in the summer of 1984–a mighty performance with Santana and Van Morrison.
This was different. This was as American as the idea could be. Deadheads. Tie-dye. Weed. The Wave. This was the Fourth of July. “It doesn’t rain on the Fourth of July!” Bob Weir told the crowd, and like poetry, the heavens opened. True story.
As a going away present, that same cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of black and white photographs by Daniel Kramer, indelible images taken over a period of two years, revealing a young man Kramer characterized as someone “who set his own marks and did not allow himself to be manipulated.”
For Kramer, Dylan was “someone worth photographing,” someone worth seeing from different perspectives. For me, Dylan is someone who forces you – without telling you – to shift a little in order to see better. Thus we find him perched on a branch in a tree or in an alleyway in London or Stuck Inside of Mobile. Or in the falling shadows.
Photography is just light, of course, and the good photographer will always find the right light. It is writing with light. As Amyn Nasser describes there is a kind of magic in this
. . . ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. [The photographer] respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Like a welder … seeing things in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. The self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items, spanners, chains, car parts, and axes. Some include reminders that he is also a musician – a treble clef or a guitar. Born and raised in iron ore country in Hibbling, Minnesota, Dylan writes in Chronicles, that he has always worked with iron in one way or another. Paul Green, the president of the Halcyon Gallery in London – which first showcased Dylan’s iron works explains, “He’s drawing from an industrial past, a working man’s past . . . It’s partly about looking back but it’s also about resurrecting these items and the physical act of putting these objects together.”
Why do gates hold such appeal to Dylan? He says it’s “because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”
What??
Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones?
Something is happening here, and Nobel Prize winner, Bob Dylan, doesn’t have the answers either.
His Never Ending Tour began in 1988 and continued for more than 3,000 shows until COVID-19 changed plans. During his time away from the road, he stayed busy, releasing three original songs from a new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. “Murder Most Foul,” a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music, arrived unexpectedly one midnight with a Tweet from Dylan: “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”
Two years later, The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour began, and it continues with Dylan scheduled to join Willie Nelson along with an impressive lineup that includes Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, John Mellencamp, and Billy Strings at the 2024 Outlaw Summer Festival.
Why does he keep touring?
I keep touring because: it is a perfect way to stay anonymous and still be a member of the social order,” he said. “You’re the master of your fate. But it’s not an easy path to take, not fun and games.
Wall Street Journal
Happy Birthday, Bob. I find myself remembering you on a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988. You were playing at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during “Mr Tambourine Man.” Of course it did. At the time, a brand new immigrant to the United States, those were days of wonder for me, days before we worried about what waited around the corner – before we were observant, and before we knew better.
As easy it was to tell black from white It was all that easy to tell wrong from right And our choices were few and the thought never hit That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
On your birthday – and every day, Bob Dylan – may you stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.
P.S. I see you’re heading back to Buffalo in September. Maybe I’ll be seeing you again. I love a full circle moment.
