Graceful and elegant, my daughter’s fingers catch the sun spilling through the window. For a minute, everything stops. My little girl’s hands are those of a young woman. Strong and steady. Earnest. She is the real warrior in our house.
Just a twinkling ago, she first discovered her beautiful hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion.
We called it “hand ballet.”
Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears. To fly, fly away . . .
I don’t know if she’ll one day tell me that she has always known about Lou Reed’s Dirty Boulevard and Van Morrison’s Cyprus Avenue. I hope so. Me, I have known forever that Holly came from Miami, FLA, that she hitch-hiked her way across the USA; that little Joe never gave it away; and, that Jackie thought she was James Dean for a day. As young as I was when I first heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” I cannot possibly have known what the hustle here and the hustle there was all about. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents – after all, this was the early 1970s in provincial Northern Ireland.
Thinking about this reminds me of somebody else’s daughter. Author, Neil Gaiman, tells how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:
You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?
That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.
I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.
If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side with Lou Reed, but I always took that walk with him anyway. And, I have never regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. There is, still. A year later, I can barely bring myself to say out loud that he is dead, and that there will be no more tales from the dirty boulevard.
Almost seventeen years later, suspended in the one thought are my baby girl and the late Lou Reed, elegant hands in motion. Laurie Anderson writes that her husband, Lou Reed, spent much of his last days on earth:
. . . being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
~ my baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, it resonated deeply with me, then a young woman from another generation, from a tiny country on the other side of the world. Maya Angelou’s story and its humanity reached far out into the universe and took up permanent residence in our hearts.
I remember reading aloud to teenagers from affluent white families, Angelou’s lyrical and clear-eyed account of the harrowing world in which she had been abandoned by her parents, abused, raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, left homeless, poor, and, for almost five years, unable to speak. But in this tumultuous life, she also fell in love with William Shakespeare and Dickens, with the written and spoken word. And we are all the better for that. The lesson for my students? As Anne Frank wrote in her diary,
I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.
And such beauty. At 86, the indomitable Maya Angelou was active on Twitter, sending out to almost half a million followers, soul-stirring messages in 140 characters or less. Messages such as this, her final Tweet just six days ago.
– reminding me again of her ability to convey something intensely personal, yet public, in the same moment.
Over the years, I have collected pieces of home-spun wisdom that I turn to when the going gets tough (as it invariably does). Growing up, I was often told, “show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” That has turned out to be true. With age, comes even greater discernment and wisdom, and with the death of Maya Angelou, I am thinking of advice she dispensed a time or two, advice I have not always heeded:
My hope for my daughter is that she will learn that the very first time a person lies to her or about her will be the first of all the other times; the very first time someone wounds her with indifference or arrogance, manipulation or meanness, acts merely as precedent. The same might be said for integrity and loyalty which I suppose is why betrayal hurts so much, or as Arthur Miller once put it, why it is “the only truth that sticks.”
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Yes. I should believe people the first time they show me who they really are, as opposed to the second or third or tenth. Then I will know, sooner rather than later, whether to walk this road with them or without them, dignity intact either way.
And for that perspective, Maya Angelou, I am forever in your debt.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
Edgar came into my life last October. I can still remember the day we met. He was standing in the center lane of a street already busy with Monday morning traffic. My daughter and I had just left the gym, and she noticed him before I did, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car, jumping out, and flailing wildly at the oncoming traffic, successfully bringing it to a momentary standstill. Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua trembling in the widening beam of the headlights before him, named him Edgar (in homage to Mr. Poe), and announced that he would be moving in with us.
In spite of having just run several miles on a treadmill, I still hadn’t had my coffee, so I was neither alert nor ready for a Monday let alone the prospect of a Chihuahua. In the back of my mind, I presumed we’d post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, and by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.
Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. He was shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, and Sophie was vexed that she could see his little ribs so plainly. Without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with Molly, a beautiful brindle, some years back, a new dog was probably not in the cards. On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had rescued Molly in the Christmas of 2008. She adored me, and the feeling was mutual. Molly was elegant and affectionate. She knew how to be retired. She wanted to lounge around the house all day, but she did not want to do it alone.
Molly & Me (Xmas 2008)
Ultimately, we had to surrender Molly to the Arizona Greyhound Rescue. Her separation anxiety grew so severe, that she just couldn’t stay in the house by herself. I was heart-broken the day I returned her to the man who would place her in a foster family where someone would be home all day as well as another greyhound to keep her company. Life with Molly – although brief – had helped seal the deal as far as any future pets were concerned. We would be a one-cat family. No more dogs. No way.
But there were tell-tale signs that this little Chihuahua was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” Ken said. He bought dog food. He drove around the neighborhood, looking for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. He checked the newspaper and Craigslist every day to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took Edgar to the Humane Society where he was informed that they didn’t take lost dogs. Still, they checked for a microchip. No chip. No collar. Nothing to suggest that he belonged to someone. They estimated “Edgar” at about five years old, determined that he hadn’t been neutered or cared for. He had bad breath and worse teeth. He was malnourished and dirty. He weighed three pounds. Barely.
Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. Dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He came running when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all in love with him, as poet Mary Oliver writes,
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
When my daughter and I were far away in Northern Ireland a month later, visiting my parents in South Derry, Ken died in our Phoenix home. Sometimes in the early hours of the morning, when I am contemplating all that has happened in the past couple of years, I find myself wanting to be reassured that as his fragile heart stopped working, Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
That day, on another continent, in another time zone, I had been keeping my fingers crossed that a friend would come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. But I was distracted – repeatedly – by thoughts of foreboding, by the unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls home went straight to voice-mail. Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling,” I sent a text to my best friend, Amanda (the original BFF) to ask if she would drive to my house to check on things.
I have a flair for the dramatic and, conventional wisdom be damned, I sweat the small stuff. The devil is in the tiniest of details after all. I make mountains out of molehills which sometimes works when I can produce a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But this? This was the second most significant detail of my adult life, wrapped up in a persistent phrase that travelled via text from Castledawson to Chandler at 12:25PM Mountain Standard Time:
“Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt/dead.”
I was on the phone with Amanda as she walked to my front door, as she looked through the bay window to see little Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what we had yet to discover, waiting for her to find the keys under the doormat, to come on in and call my husband’s name three times before finding his lifeless body on the bed, hoping he was just resting but knowing he was gone.
It has been seven months, and Sophie tells me that every day without her dad begins not with sorrow and dread, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile. He is ready, always ready to help her get ready to walk out into the world.
“But what about Edgar?” she asked me over pancakes one morning last week. “What if he spends every day just waiting by the door for me to come home? What if he’s lonely? Doesn’t he need a friend?”
Yes. He does. Don’t we all?
So last Thursday, I set about finding a friend for Edgar. It didn’t take long for me to learn that there are thousands of dogs just like Edgar, in need of friends. According to the Arizona Humane Society, dogs like him have replaced pit bulls as the most abandoned breed. From January to March of this year, 821 Chihuahuas have been surrendered or brought into the shelter for a variety of reasons. And in 2013, the Arizona Humane Society and the Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, the two largest shelters in Phoenix, received 10,535 Chihuahuas and euthanized 2,100.
So I drove to the Arizona Small Dog Rescue after work on Thursday, having spent my lunch hour perusing picture after picture of tiny dogs who needed a home, one in particular – a little black and tan Miniature Pinscher Chihuahua mix, just two years old. The volunteer told me she had come from a “hoarding situation,” but she was “as sweet as can be, quiet, mild mannered and gets along with all dogs and people who are nice to her.”
And with that, I knew she would be coming home with me, that Edgar would have a new companion, that we would name her “Gloria” – with a nod to the most requested encore at a Van Morrison concert in Belfast, and, of course, Ms. Steinem – and that my 16-year old daughter’s tender heart would expand once more.
This Mother’s Day weekend in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, 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 kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in on an August evening.
Facing each other, a blue 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.”
~ my baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.
