match point ~ seeking romance & mr. right

13 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora, Feminism, Love, Meg Ryan, Milestones, Nora Ephron, Online dating, Relationships, Rob Reiner, Social Media, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail

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Bob Dylan, first impressions, nora ephron, online dating, relationships, Rob Reiner, Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney, When Harry Met Sally

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and likes Bob Dylan and will open doors for me? Why not?

Between the time I met my husband and the time he died twenty-four years later, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online, a perfect place for me to spend time, my dearest friends told me. It would be fun, they said, a simple way to reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been in the days before smart phones and texting and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy, hiding behind pictures that only show my good side, dodging questions with cryptic clues about what I did for a living or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, it would be easy to filter out men who didn’t like my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who didn’t care if I was as comfortable in jeans as I was a little black dress but did care – thanks be to God – about when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having evolved (not really) from her Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I immigrated to the United States. Yes, my next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.

Fictional Sally was an extension of Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. And, while most of us remember her most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, for me she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who will still show up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she asserts, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right. When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday.”

Sally is barely thirty and sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride to tell you that I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a glossy magazine that featured Meg Ryan’s many haircuts. For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me a Meg Ryan haircut. Any Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50-ish, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless the late Nora Ephron is writing it.

Remember when 40 was an eternity away from 20? It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.” And, now I’m gonna be 60 . . . one day. One day soon. It’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself, the “alternative facts” if you will. Some are minor – I don’t have sensible hair, and until lately I have spent a fortune coloring it and trying to tame it. Then, there are fonts. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t – if I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I won’t shop there, and Comic Sans on homework assignments forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I recently found out that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the E (for empty) light comes on. Because I really don’t care any more, I can tell the world that I don’t like Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I don’t like Coldplay. A music major, I have to also admit that opera doesn’t do it for me either, and I only went to the ballet once because all the other mothers were taking their daughters to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas. I resent the aging process and the way it sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once upon a time, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle (in French and English). Now, I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at concerts over the past forty years than on something as graceless as aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much better today at finding my way around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. To be fair, if I have been somewhere at least eight times, I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I must lean on Google maps, Siri, my daughter reading directions from the phone that is smarter than both of us, and those friends and colleagues who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they are already waiting.

Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and more patient – with myself and others. Those who know me best will attest that I have yet to reach a level of proficiency in either area. You see the circumstances around my husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty and made me cautious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. At the end of the day, it’s all about survival and control.

But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? Even Nora Ephron would probably not have described herself the way her son’s documentary characterized her as having “a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your curriculum vitae – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés and divulging your home address. You have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.

Awkwardly, I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status while taking some liberties with other details like hair color and the frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was resume writing, right? My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.

About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not?

I took a chance.

I. Took. A. Chance.

#ITookAChance

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who would deem his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football (the American kind, for God’s sake) and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.

Box checked.

He said he worked out every day – of course he did. And, no religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention.

Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan (deal-breaker) and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. Why so cynical? Well, let me just tell you there are more than a few men in the land of online dating who claim to live in the Arizona desert – but also enjoy moonlight walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I’d gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name, anticipating instead the possibility of being number five or six in ‘the dating rotation.

It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 at a well-lit bar. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closest from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, my hairsylist, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beachy highlights (just in case a moonlight walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I’m probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley I’d seen in the photo was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was a good sign.

Onward.

He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.

Over beers and banter, we sized each other up and over-shared, checking off those boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – sorry, musicians, but you have a reputation to uphold – I was also smitten. The bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you anywhere.

Having read and committed to memory the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew this was another red flag. First dates that are too long (or turn into second dates on the same night) are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and most nights since. We’ll do it tonight too.

A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.

As for the rest of the story? The rest of the story is for me. And for him. As Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:

‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.

P.S. Because I know you want to know, I asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He says he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I tell him there’s a song in there. Let’s sing it.

The work of a November. . .

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Editor in Act Two, Amputation, Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Treatment, Breast Reconstruction, Cancer Language, david bowie, Diagnosis, Glenn Frey, Language matters, Mastectomy, Memoir, Milestones

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Breast, Cancer, cancerversary, Deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey, DIEP Flap, dolores o'riordan, Lumpectomy, mastectomy, medical euphemisms, Memoir, Piestewa Peak, reconstruction, Sherman Alexie, sniglets, Surgery, Tom Petty

We end the set with what has become one of our songs. I make a joke about how I only sing in C. My love knows that’s not true, but he humors me because he knows I panic if he says it’s in A minor. Without saying it aloud, I remind him not to sing my verse. You know the one, the one about most Novembers and why they make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C” – a sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – for anyone who is sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it; it is a song for November.

Eight years ago, on a too-bright November morning, I was diagnosed with Stage II invasive breast cancer. I am loathe to declare the November date a “cancerversary,” one of those cheery-sounding sniglets used to mark milestones in cancer country. The scars on this body that carries me from one moment to the next are daily and unavoidable reminders of that Halloween morning when I discovered the lump and the afternoon thereafter when an earnest young doctor, a stranger, delivered my diagnosis. For cancer patients, there are plenty of these milestones – the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung; the completion of radiation or chemotherapy; the momentous day, five years after diagnosis, when a kindly oncologist will make the pronouncement of NED – No Evidence of Disease; and the day we dread most – discovery of metastasis.

Maybe it’s because there are no right words to respond to cancer, that we invent others to minimize and manage its havoc, to shelter us from it or make us smile through the illusion of it even as it terrifies us. And, make no mistake; we are terrified.

Filed away is an imperative from novelist, Sherman Alexie who once told an audience of writers that they “must share the scariest things about their lives.” Intrigued, I bought a ticket to hear him speak at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, bearing in mind advice he had given elsewhere: “Don’t lose the sense of awe you feel whenever you meet one of your favorite writers. However, don’t confuse any writer’s talent with his or her worth as a human being. Those two qualities are not necessarily related.” Accompanying me was my daughter, at the time a junior high student immersed in the words and drawings of Alexi’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. ALong with everyone else, we laughed conspiratorially as he shared what were surely the scariest things about his early years on the Spokane Indian Reserve. Describing his father’s booze of choice,”Squodka” – a mix of Squirt soda and vodka – Alexie’s cheery nonchalance belied, I imagine, the anguish of a young boy confronting the reality of an alcoholic father who would disappear for days at a time. He knows, I know, that alcoholism on the rez is no laughing matter.

Nor is cancer. It is a serious disease deserving of serious words, but we do a lousy job of talking about it in a way that conveys its reality or leads us to knowing what causes it or how to prevent it. So we rely on codes invented to keep this scariest of things at a safe distance. Code is acceptable in the cancer conversation and not just in the pink stuff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – “save the boobies” fare. “Mastectomy,” code for “amputation,” causes me to wonder if I were an amputee in the “traditional” sense, if I would ever refer to the day I lost a limb as my “ampuversary.” I think not.

The truth is that in the mythology of cancer, medical euphemisms abound. Myself, I have bandied about “lumpectomy” as though it is the thing we do to remove an inconsequential wart. In reality, it is a partial amputation. When I was first diagnosed, I presumed a lumpectomy was in the cards for me. As a word, it didn’t pack much of a punch, so it didn’t frighten me. Then I met the surgeon who pointed out that my cancer was not amenable to lumpectomy given its proximity to the nipple and the fact that I was not endowed with large breasts. Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. As her meticulous notes would later confirm, “dissection was very difficult given the very small circumareolar incision used for the skin-sparing mastectomy.” It would require additional time and effort, not to mention skill and patience. So she recommended – and I nodded sagely as though I knew what she was talking about – a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. Duly spared – spared, no less – the skin would then accommodate a reconstruction using my own tissue. Simple.

Perusing the details of my surgery, you would be forgiven for dismissing the removal of a breast as painless. At times it sounds regal, befitting a fanfare of trumpets for that climactic moment when my breast tissue was “elevated off the pectoralis and delivered from the wound.”

While three surgeons operated on me, my then-alive husband and our girl waited in a waiting room where a set of paintings of the desert at dusk hung on the walls. It would have been about ten o’clock in the morning when my surgeon came out to find my weary, tiny family leaning on each other , waiting for the announcement she would later document, that “the frozen section was negative for metastatic disease.” There were no abnormal nodes and no further dissection was necessary. Celebrating, she and my husband performed a silent high-five in the hospital hallway. Three hours later, having removed all the cancer she could see, she went about her day, leaving me in the capable hands of two highly sought after plastic surgeons, one being one of the best in Phoenix, the other a master of DIEP flap reconstruction, who had flown in the previous evening from Texas. When I eventually emerged from the ICU, high on Dilaudid, they say I told the young nurse on duty to pretend I was Madonna. Before I went home, she shampooed my hair.

In surgery, they worked on me for the next six hours, and two days later released me back to my life. Eight years later, I am told I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, or I summoned the courage to show you, that I really don’t look like myself. Not my original self. Hidden under my clothes, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny white scars. Below it, a thin crooked scar, faded to white, stretches from hip to hip, with ‘dog-eared’ reminders on either end where JP drains pulled excess bloody fluid for several days after the surgery. I have a right breast too. Sort of. It is in the shape of a breast, impressively so, now that all the post-surgical swelling and discoloration has gone. Its skin is the same, spared by the mastectomy that removed its cancerous tissue through a very small incision around the areola also removed with its nipple.

As a rule, I tend not to dwell on the macabre, but I sometimes find myself obsessing about my old right breast, now a mastectomy specimen preserved in a container of formaldehyde solution. It weighed 294 grams, “the words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.'”

Contemplating all that has happened in the past eight years – the cancer, the plunge into widowhood two Novembers later, the shift in priorities – I hear my mother say, in the parlance of home, that I have “come through the mill.” Lest I wallow too much, somebody will always be there to point out that things could be worse.

One evening, shortly after the death of my husband, I bumped into a former colleague. He hadn’t seen me for a few years but had still kept up with my professional exploits. Standing in the produce department at Safeway, he tendered his condolences and then wondered aloud if I had ever read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Of course I have. Several times. I know great chunks of it by heart. It is an exquisite study of loss that blows open my heart. And then he said to me, “Well, at least your daughter didn’t die.”

At least your daughter didn’t die.

The sentence hung in the space between us for too long. I don’t remember what I said. Something perhaps. Probably nothing. I know I scrambled internally to excuse him as someone who had never lost anyone that mattered much to him. I know I also hated him.

At least your daughter didn’t die.

No. She is right here. Just 21 years old and beautiful, tough without being hard, unmoored without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a Dairy Queen, since demolished, on Fridays after school. She learned to drive his Jeep without him and she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma without his cheers ringing in her ears. He would have liked that they used the Talking Heads for the graduation processional – “This Must Be the Place.” He would have tapped his feet and winked at me and brushed away a tear, because by then, he would have grown sentimental – all the more if he’d had any inkling of the milestones on her horizon. She would earn her first paycheck without the ready winks and smiles that had always encouraged her to keep being great at being herself regardless of the bullshit that comes with a part-time job in retail. In spite of her trouble with math, she is navigating her way through the degree program that will allow her to one day work with teenagers who are lost without their parents. She is lovely, reminding me sometimes of the kind of bird that only flies in a faraway place. Exotic. Rare. Endangered.

On one of the anniversaries of his death that November morning when we were far from our home, she told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm.

At least my daughter didn’t die.

I still don’t have the words to hand to the man who asked me about Joan Didion’s book. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t remember if I’d said Goodbye to my husband, if he’d heard me say it before my cellphone died the way it always does because I never remember to charge it. I wanted to tell him the last conversation our little family had was a transatlantic phone call – my daughter and I on top of the Titanic museum in a foggy Belfast, my husband in our Phoenix living room, all of us unaware it would be the last time we talked and laughed together. I didn’t. Instead, I reminded myself of Lou Reed reminding me of magic and loss and of Sherman Alexie lighting up the Heard Museum with a coping strategy for those times when we despair at the lack of compassion in the world. Remember, he had said, “the world gave us Hitler – but it also gave us Springsteen.”

The world gave us Bruce Springsteen.

And Prince. And Dolores O’Riordan. And Tom Petty. And Donald Trump. And Steve Earle, sorry for all the lonely nights he put her through, for not remembering if he said goodbye. And all the people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We just have to find the sweet spot in which to live and die.

Magical thinking . . .

How shall I mark this day?

I will climb again to the summit of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It has been almost a year since I stood there, arms akimbo, high up and far away. I have missed it up there, looking down and romanticizing the sprawl glittering below me. I think I’ll go back and wonder the way I do up there about Wordsworth when he first stopped to consider the view. It’s ’emotion recollected in tranquility. ‘ It’s just an illusion.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Caught One More Time . . . Happy Birthday, Van Morrison.

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by Editor in A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun

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BBC Radio Ulster, Cyprus Avenue, Homesickness, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Sense of Wonder, Van Morrison 70th Birthday

Original post for Van Morrison’s 70th birthday ~ Cyprus Avenue, Belfast, 2015

“And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it”

~ from “Had I Not Been Awake” In The Human Chain by Seamus Heaney.

Had I not been awake early one hot summer morning, I would have missed the goings-on on Cyprus Avenue. It was Van Morrison’s 70th birthday – Van Morrison whose music – like Seamus Heaney’s poetry – has scored much of my life. For the crowd gathered up on Cyprus Avenue to celebrate his birthday with him, a sense of wonder; for me, a homesickness Stephen King rightly describes as “a terribly keen blade.”

Social media and BBC Radio Ulster did their best to assuage the lump-in-my-throat melancholy – while at the same time making it worse – reminding me of the thousands of miles that stretch between there and here.

I am not there.

I am not there, with my college friend Ruth, to sing along and wonder if he might indulge us with a rendition of Cyprus Avenue which everyone surely wants to hear – for old times sake and because it is fitting. But you never know where you are with Van; you just remember where you are from.

Eight hours behind and a lifetime away, I related easily to those fans who traveled from other continents to sit among the eighty five trees that guard Cyprus Avenue and absorb Van’s Belfast, if only for an hour or two. Clicking on the link to the BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, I was transported instantly to my teenage bedroom in my parent’s house on the Dublin Road, tuning in to Radio Luxembourg – in the Days Before Rock and Roll.

Justin . . .

I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

Specific and evocative, the names of streets in Van Morrison’s songs – Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue, Fitzroy – as much as the characters that people them and the rituals that shaped those lives – Madame George, the window cleaners taking a break for tea with Paris Buns from the shop, you taking the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, kids collecting bottle-tops, all of us tuning into Radio Luxembourg on our transistor radios, going to the pictures, or the chipper, and filling ourselves with pastie suppers, gravy rings, Wagon Wheels, barmbrack, Snowballs – all these with a Sense of Wonder that has a universal resonance.

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking,
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

I understand the pull that brought fans from other continents to Cyprus Avenue that day. They remind me of the time I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah – places Lowell George immortalized in Willin’. While they turned out not to tourist destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight, I could hear Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George growling about her every mile I covered. Too, I remember my first visit to San Francisco, drawn less by St. Dominic’s Preview and more by the sight of orange boxes scattered against a SafeWay supermarket in the rain. Can you hear the echo of Patrick Kavanagh in Van Morrison’s songs. I can. And I can understand how he might be finding God in ‘the bits and pieces of everyday.”

As a new mother, almost eighteen years ago, far away from my Northern Ireland home and in Arizona, it was “Brown Eyed Girl” that I sang to my green-eyed girl to help her fall asleep. When she did her first little dance as a toddler, a jaunty “Bright Side of the Road” kept her going. As she twirled and clapped her hands, I reminisced about a wee dander down Sunnyside Street, heading out with my friends on a Saturday night, and this song, so jaunty that it was used as the promotional jingle for a “Belfast’s got the buzz” campaign, around the time our wee country was picking itself up from all that had ravaged it for so long.

When I got over getting cancer and when I turned a corner in the world of widowhood, it was to my favorite Van Morrison song that I turned and turn. “When the Healing has Begun,” is a tour de force from “Into the Music,” the first Van record I bought from Ronnie Miller’s Pop-In record store in Antrim. A far more satisfying thing than the school lunch I was supposed to buy – it fed my soul. I played it until I knew the lyrics by heart. And there they stayed until about twenty years later when I found a pristine copy, a German import, still in its protective plastic, at Tracks on Wax then a treasure trove for lovers of vinyl in Phoenix, Arizona – before vinyl became cool and collectible for a new generation.

I had worn out that song, which required some effort. In the days before record players like mine had to compete with tape decks, CD players, and MP3 files, if I wanted to hear a song just one more time or just the opening breath of it, there was no simple replay button, no nonchalant click; rather, the knack of placing the stylus right in the groove, in “the sweet spot,” where it would pick up the familiar repetitive rhythm, the violins, a “yeah” from Van, and “we’ll walk down the avenue again.”

Cyprus. Fitzroy. Belfast. Phoenix. it matters not. We are anywhere and everywhere. We are underneath the stars. Neither here nor there. It enchants me still – and maybe even Van himself – this song that takes him from a roar through a mumble to a barely there whisper at the end. And when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert with appreciative whistles from a Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Hypnotized momentarily. Such is the “aesthetic force” of that song for me.

Back street jelly roll . . .

And all the way back to the first time I saw him perform it, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Leaning forward from the good seats in the balcony – having scored tickets from a friendly roadie in the Crown Bar – it was like being in church, somehow knowing we should behave and be quiet, reverent even, if he was going to take us along with him on this song. And he did.

And the healing begins . . .

And we’ll walk down the avenue in style
And we’ll walk down the avenue and we will smile
And we’ll say baby ain’t it all worthwhile
When the healing has begun

Thank you, Van. For all of it. Happy Birthday.

just walk away – remembering her last first day of school

16 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You

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Cecil Day Lewis, children's books, Going back to work, Irish DIASPORA, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, Separation, Themes of childhood, Walking Away

Her last first day at school – 2015

WALKING AWAY – Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

The best year of my life was the one spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine, and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. I spent interminable hours just looking at her.

Just. Looking. At. Her.

I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, this was before she had a cache of words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, my darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let me know she was right there in front of me. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to her baby “cry it out.” I rushed to pick her up if the instant I heard her begin to cry at night. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. Indeed, it has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.

When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and (this was pre-Starbucks) with mugs of coffee brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. Back in my career as a school administrator, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – most likely myself – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.

In spite of my grown-up job, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would try to placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . .

Although she had to say it more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes – at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

It’s true. I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve that would charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then remain in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. At the same time, all the other mother’s children were crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?

Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup that I had cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained, I went to work for other people’s children.

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Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish of leaving her child, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went 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 the book I would find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love 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.

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And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. They never seemed to get it, that I was sending them the very best child I have. So by the time she was in the third 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 the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.

On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do. Watching as she strode to the car her father used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.

But I pulled myself together and gave into the day – the way I had to do – knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, that it would unfold, providing delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.

Some days, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she is doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.

And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.

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