In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her, COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame the pandemic that has changed everything for all of us over the past twelve months. As my brother reminded me yesterday “this thing makes a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”
She has been on my mind lately, especially when I am cleaning up after the well-meaning and hard-working Mexican men who show up every day around 8am to work on the house I recently bought. It’s an older house, the kind that needs more care and cleaning and patience than I anticipated. Home renovation is a bit like childbirth – you forget the pain – which is probably why people do it more than once – people like my parents. And, I suppose, people like me.
Before YouTube videos and apps for that, my father taught himself how to make things – and how to fix them. And, my mother was always close by, ready to hand him whatever tool he needed and to clean up after him. I remember one particular spate of home improvement when he single-handedly gutted the ground floor of our house in Antrim to create a new kitchen and dining room and then he added a laundry room outside, doing all the wiring and plumbing himself. He added a glasshouse in which he grew tomatoes and other exotic plants that didn’t really belong in Northern Ireland but they were right at home with him. He painstakingly decorated the outside of the glasshouse with dozens of scallop shells that he and my mother collected from a beach in County Donegal.
I’ve said it before and I mean it. Daddy belongs in a Heaney poem – he has the “Midas touch” of the poet’s thatcherand the grasp of the diviner. Frugal and a fixer, his is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike as a young man in the early 1960s. Ever the pragmatist, he reminds me that this began as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. His first project was a guitar for my uncle. The family lacked the means to buy an instrument for the boy who loved to sing, so my father – at 10 – figured out how to make it.
A man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, forever sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. If you’re going to do it, do it right. He obsesses about such things, and I understand now his sense of urgency over them. understand now because the truth – I think – is that we want to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. But sometimes we are no match for the things that cannot be fixed.
My mother knows this, having lost too much sleep since that November evening a decade ago when her phone rang too late to bring anything good. I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on the telly, so she can hear me deliver the blow. “What? What’s this? What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And again, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone once more, unable to fix my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from us.
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and get vaccinated and stay home.
And, I’m home again.
There is a clothesline in my garden, and every time I look at it, I am immediately transported to my childhood home on the Dublin Road in Antrim. One day, shortly after I bought the house, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in County Clare, to a little shop in the village. “Si amiga,” and she handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to my sunny kitchen and while the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and then I turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “there’s great drying out there today.”
Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother is with me. She is rescuing a great armful of sheets and towels and daddy’s shirts from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Soon there will be the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s remodeled kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon.
Facing each other, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we met to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took our pictures and wrote our names in the sand, knowing the tide would wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“
As her T-shirt reminds me, “good things will come.” Soon, I hope. It is my darling girl’s birthday today, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places, we’ll have to make do with Facetime. I woke up missing her the way I knew I would and remembering that I can’t remember life before her . . .
Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse.
I stayed home with Sophie for a year after she was born. It was the best year of my life, with her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for being a mother, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me.
Just the way I like it, business was slow that first year. Some days I made it out of my pajamas – only some and only if felt like walking out to the mailbox, unlike Dolly Parton, who checks the mail in full makeup and heels. Fair play to her. Other days, I also showered, but mostly, I was mostly like the imaginative little girl I had once been, the one who had to be reminded to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I still liked him before he weighed in on COVID with bad songs railing against social distancing and masks. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I inhaled, and I remember thinking about sixteen years later, that a bottle of that very fragrance would go a long way, if only to mask the Teen Spirit.
There were interminable hours spent simply looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, and wondering how it was that two imperfect people had made this one perfect thing. She didn’t mind the attention. Or she did, but this was before she had words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We used to call it hand ballet.
Mostly, my baby girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly and still do albeit from another country and much to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. My mother made it worse, urging me to do so by reminding me the way only an Irish mammy can that the day would come when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. Wouldn’t it be great if we mothers could bank all those hours of holding and comforting for such a day, like the day, I lay in the ICU following eight and a half hours of surgery while my fourteen-year-old girl wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep? This is why I hate cancer.
When the time came for me to go back to work and take her to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – mine and hers – that came immediately before and continued for some time after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in shorts from the Gap and Birkenstock sandals, gossiping over coffee in mugs they’d filled at home – this was in the days before there was a Starbucks on every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Grand Ol’ Opry, I like to believe I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. But only on the verge – where I faithfully remain. I had returned to my career in education as an assistant principal, trying to impress on someone – by someone I mean me – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”
Sophie was not impressed at all and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. In retrospect, I made this a much bigger deal than it needed to be, realizing eventually that there must be some sort of lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry. By accident, I discovered that if I didn’t put things in the tumble dryer, the dry-clean only blouses turned out just fine. So after forty odd years, I have taken umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans. I still don’t get the concept of a dryer for people who live in a desert. The clothes will dry if we just hang them on a clothesline, but nobody in our Phoenix neighborhood had a clothes line in the backyard. Bizarre, given that the sun shines most days and also that “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, having grown up in Northern Ireland. In the old country, everybody hangs clothes out on the line and then runs like hell to rescue them when the rain invariably falls. I remember the first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check from not-really-a-job as a receptionist at a local “leisure” center, was a tumble dryer from the Electricity Board.
I know this is fast becoming a rant, that has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in Phoenix? I once asked my late husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. Clearly, the directions were lost on him or he had an aversion to phrases like “tumble dry low,” “remove quickly from dryer,” “dry flat,” or “dry clean only.” His favorite setting was “Permanent Press,” but I don’t think he ever knew what that meant. Also, he was a man, the kind who never read manuals or labels or asked for directions. Never. To be scrupulously honest, I don’t know what “permanent press” means except it has something to do with often reducing some of my favorite skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. But back when I was pretending to be a grown-up – for a whole year at home with Sophie – he didn’t do the laundry. I did. All the clothes were safe. And so was I. This is not to suggest that I’m dangerous now, but, I am, as earlier noted, on the verge.
In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie wasn’t impressed with me. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl, and she would try to placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it three times, Bonnie showed amazing restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. I know, I know I was irrational to expect that Bonnie would spend hours staring – as Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) – at my beautiful girl and cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something for the first time. Anything. I was mad and sad that I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or cracked a nut – this was a thing in her Montessori classroom – or completed a puzzle. I would miss telling her father, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – about any time she had experienced another developmental milestone like that time she had spoken her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – for daddy – or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – who had the magic trick to distract my inconsolable daughter and make the damn crying stop. Walking away from my little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I’d pretend to leave, but instead I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on but also with the window down so I could continue to listen to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. I would wait until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and when she finally stopped, I would reapply my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and not even a glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Meanwhile, all the other mother’s children were crying. It always amazed me that out of that early morning cacophony, each of us could pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety. Mothers know the cries of their babies.
Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt. Like me, Appelt knew the anguish of leaving a child. She experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”
I found it on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times – on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read to Sophie the story of Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
How it eased those morning goodbyes with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. And there were lots of them. Never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew her best, we kept switching schools. By the time she was in 2nd grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. That one teacher never showed up.
I remember one summer she took a drawing class at a community college, and I remember watching from my car as she strode onto the campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. She was as tall as me but infinitely more brave. I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. And she did. She never lets me down. Kathi Appelt’s rhyming verse still sparkles:
So blow a kiss and wave good-bye –
my baby, don’t you cry.
This love is always with you
Like the sun is in the sky.
Thus our days began, each of us released to our respective distractions and mundanities, finding therein both delight and difficulty, the way we all do. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, things that matter and things that don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s doing, and I’ll find myself smiling as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love – a tiny red heart – so cleverly hidden on each page.
And sometimes, I wish this book had been available to my own mother, given all the goodbyes and the sweet reunions we have shared at airports on either side of the Atlantic. I love that my baby girl knew that the love was all around long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in Love Actually.
In the end, if you’re looking for love, you are sure to find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.
Happy Birthday, Sophie. It’s a privilege to be your mother.
Almost a decade ago, I enrolled in a college photography class. Not a bucket list kind of thing by most standards, but it was something I had been meaning to do for thirty years. I had never been able to find the time for it, always too busy being busy and bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher. At the same time, I had also been waiting for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.
A dear friend signed up with me, and we were like teenagers competing for an “A” from the photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it and appreciate it when we did. It was “writing with light.”
I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the 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. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . So it was that on a Thanksgiving afternoon, I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I have no idea how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying me the way he used to do before he became dangerous, denying the COVID-19-pandemic that has left so many families grieving the loss of loved ones this Thanksgiving, contradicting doctors, and protesting the protocols that prevent him from performing and making people sick. For just a moment this morning, I’m remembering Morrison when he was merely grumpy and not as dangerous as Donald Trump. For just a moment, I’m remembering the beautiful Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of the holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving has something to do with that moment of transcendence among the trees in Arizona as I gazed up at those shimmering leaves. But that would not be true. Even after living an American life for over thirty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. Some of my American friends are still surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland, that Christmas is the holiday that warms us. Thus, I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
It was something else. Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I saw the light, I suppose, and the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
Thank you – a powerful phrase that often goes unsaid right when we need to hear it the most, especially during a pandemic.
There’s a lovely minute or two in the Irish film, “Waking Ned Devine,” that never fails to remind me of this. The hapless Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right when Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Always quick on his feet – and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and delivers this:
As we look back on the life of . . .
Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
This year, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik tells his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude.” In these times, when we are replacing all the known ways with new routines and rituals, showiong appreciation is more important than ever.
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes. CD burners, iPods, and iTunes Have taken the place Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon Enough, clever introverts will create Quicker point-and-click ways to declare One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor. But I miss the labor Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song At a time. It sometimes took days To play, choose, pause, Ponder, record, replay, erase, And replace. But there was no magic wand. It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape Was sculpture designed to seduce And let the hounds loose. A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave, A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,” Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye. The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” or something by Hank. But O, the last track Was the vessel that contained The most devotion and pain And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her, COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame the pandemic that has changed everything for all of us over the past twelve months. As my brother reminded me yesterday “this thing makes a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and get vaccinated and stay home.
