I came into the pool on a mission, and the mission was accomplished
~ Michael Phelps.
Watching Chad Le Clos watch Phelps go on to victory and a twentieth Olympic gold medal, I found myself thinking back to 1982’s Oscar winning best film, Chariots of Fire, and its depiction of Eric Liddell, who stunned everyone with a world record breaking gold medal win in the 400 meter race. He wasn’t supposed to win.
Liddell pushed himself like a man possessed. He didn’t weaken. With the tape only 20 yards away . . . Liddell threw his head farther back, gathered himself together and shot forward.
A man possessed.
The legendary Eric Liddell ran only for the glory of God. He had refused to run the 100 meter race – his best event, and one he was expected to win – because it was scheduled on a Sunday, a holy day. Instead, he ran those races in which little was expected of him. He would go on to win a bronze medal in the 200 meter race and then to smash the world-record with a gold medal win in the 400 meter race – triumphant and true to himself. Doing the right thing.
Edging closer to the fifth anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, a milestone of sorts, I am thinking about Liddell – the man behind the athlete from the 1924 Paris Olympics -and his resolve not to run on a Sunday. Eric Liddell didn’t bargain. I cannot say the same for me. When cancer came to call I reverted to childish ways of bargaining with God. Half prayer, half promise: “Dear God, I’ll be a better wife, mother, daughter, friend, boss, human being in general, if you could just see to it that my Oncotype DX number falls in the really good range,” or “I will never complain about anything ever again, God, if you could just keep the cancer at bay.”
I have questions for this God, too, and they come in rapid succession, disturbing my rest to this day: “Did I get cancer because I used my cellphone while driving, or was it directly related to my having a baby at 34, at what some pregnancy books in 1997 described as “advanced maternal age.” Perhaps it was because I hadn’t been able to breastfeed nor had I been diligent about buying certified-organic produce. Or maybe it had more to do with the full-bodied Zinfandel I used to enjoy at the end of a day, pre-diagnosis. Will the cancer progress because I have been sloppy about diet and exercise? But mostly, the question for which there is no satisfactory response, “Why, oh why, did my darling daughter’s life have to be interrupted by my cancer?” At some level, I think I believe that I caused my own cancer, that it is my fault. I must have done something, right? From the ridiculous to the religious, I wander, and I wonder if perhaps I have rebuked God.
I don’t know when I last heard someone use “rebuke” in any context, but this cancer continues to conjure what Edna O’Brien describes as the inescapable themes of my childhood, which today are wrapped up in the long-ago Sunday morning church services at the All Saints Parish Church in Antrim. I can almost hear the minister, like many before him, deliver from the book of Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 11 – 13:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Childish things – like praying to a “quid pro quo” God. So my spiritual struggle continues, all the while mindful and moved beyond measure by charity and love and the knowledge that my name remains on the prayer lists of people I don’t even know.
Childish things and questions of faith and Michael Phelps in Rio bring me back to Eric Liddell’s story, a story I know only because of its interpretation on the big screen. How I love the movies, especially those based on a well-written screenplay. While it has been highly entertaining in some social settings, being able to quote huge chunks of script has proven only useful in the observation of classroom instruction. With a nod to Dr. Madeline Hunter, I am a master of what is known in the teaching trade as “script taping.” An auditory learner, I can often recall what I heard verbatim. Admittedly, it is a selective kind of memory that did not serve me well as a student trying to recall the stuff of lectures that would prove to a crotchety professor of an excruciatingly dull Philosophy course that I had, in fact, been listening during his lectures. Nor did it help me readily recall anything I heard from the doctor who informed me of the tumors in my right breast. No. That would have been too useful. Instead, because I’ve wrestled with the same angst as, let’s say, the eponymous Shirley Valentine, I know by heart what she says while staring down the camera:
Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings, and dreams, and hopes if we don’t ever use them? That’s where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.
Ah, that Willy Russell knows how to get into the head of a woman in the middle of her life.
But this evening, it isn’t Shirley Valentine or Jane Fonda’s Sally Bender in Coming Home. It is Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, holding court with a group of admirers at the Highland Games, waxing lyrical about faith and God in the context of a race:
I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.
His sister, a devout missionary cannot comprehend why her brother would choose a secular sporting event in paris. Poignant and gentle, he rebuffs his sister, smiling with the assurance and grace of a man who is doing the right thing:
I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.
I feel his pleasure.
I am no athlete, but once upon a time I loved to run. I had planned to run the 2012 Belfast marathon, but cancer got in the way, forcing me to abandon that dream. I recall January of that year and a tentative post-surgical lap around a hospital ward. Bedraggled and unsteady with all that was attached to me – the urinary catheter and the JP drains, and the stunning realization that standing up straight was an impossible feat just three days after a DIEP flap reconstruction – I thought I would never run again, but magically, just two weeks later, I was walking along the Arizona Grand canal with my husband and our girl. Standing a little straighter, I was thrilled to be outside, the last of the JP drains removed, albeit frustrated to be reduced to a stroll. My feet wanted to break into a run.
The third day of my adjuvant tamoxifen therapy coincided with the first truly Spring like day in Phoenix, the temperature almost at 80 degrees. No side effects to report with 1,822 days to go, by which time my daughter would have voted for the first time. It was my season of rebirth and recovery, and it began the morning I ventured out for my run. Entirely alone. Not too strenuous and no more than a “good stretch of the legs” along the hard, packed dirt of my favorite stretch of canal, it was perfect. There was no hint of pain, and it was quiet save for the sound of my feet pounding on the dirt.
That silent sound was familiar and comforting, taking me back to daily runs through Antrim Castle Grounds and along the pathways of the Lough Neagh shore. And whispering in my ears then and still, the voice of Eric Liddell.
The only non-book on my bookshelves is the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart says, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.
Every night at 8PM my husband used to ask me, “So are you ready for Tony and the boys?” and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we had seen before, knowing what would happen but lured nonetheless by James Gandolfini’s charisma. So it is still surreal to watch his Tony Soprano fight about money with Edie Falco’s Carmela, knowing he died in Rome three summers ago.
Before the creation of Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini was playing the part. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,
the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.
Brilliantly. I had seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance. In the latter, Gandolfini’s performance crackles with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, I could barely watch the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end – quintessential Quentin Tarantino. Still, even though I know Tony’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I have been – and continue to be – charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness – duped, like many of his victims, by a relatable and likable vulnerability. Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. I suppose that is what makes it so difficult to accept that James Gandolfini was with us for the briefest sojourn, dead at 51.
The actor and what he left behind for his baby daughter, poked those well stashed thoughts about my own mortality. My daughter does not read this blog often. So young and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later. When I am gone, she will open the jar. This beautiful strategy to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview. Illustrated in this animated film by Christoph Niemann, is the purest expression of mortality I have ever heard, Sendak’s impassioned entreaty:
Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Hearing Maurice Sendak tell the interviewer,
Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you . . .
is especially poignant knowing that he died just over a year before James Gandolfini left us. I think Maurice Sendak would have missed the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best and most heartsome performance may have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max whose punishment for behaving badly, is being sent to bed without any dinner. Subsequently, he sails across an ocean to a place where wild things roam. When he returns home, it is to a happy ending, with dinner waiting and still hot.
As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as hose that flutter across his face as Tony Soprano or any of the other wild things he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the very embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination, those of Max who has run away from home. I suspect that every child knows where the wild things are. In my case, I remember my mother telling me not to let my imagination run away with me when I fretted about the dark, or death, or disappointments big and small. Fueled by these wild things, I sailed off by myself many times, but always found my way back home. Just like Max.
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all
Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for not being king, for wanting to leave, Carol chases him, lunges at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Carol loves him so, but Max must go. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.
Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
This year, out of over 30,000 applicants, only 50 were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunatley, Irish weather was as you would expect with clouds and rain keeping the light out.
From the outside, my house glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. A little house, it is no different than any other year, except the two women inside it are different, each of us adjusted and adjusting to a life and to living without the constancy of a man for whom our happiness was his heart’s only desire. Each of us wondering what’s next for us – what will begin and what will end.
I remember reading something about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – her turning point. When I close my eyes to recollect my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me?With cancer?
Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless. In conspiratorial whispers, she informed my husband of all the details I would forget. It reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words. Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I think it might.
I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and invited friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to a Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.
And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Such relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.
For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer happened, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy – the kind delivered by an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always.
I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world. “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she would jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?
But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time – life was sweet. I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”
When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s assessment of life, that it is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”
It is just like that. And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel. Forward. And I am ready for it.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.
Terri Hooley has decided to close down the Good Vibrations record shop on June 13th. This one’s for him – again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, 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 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 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 knew what I’d 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 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 wept 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 about 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, almost forty 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 – 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” 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 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 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 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 right 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 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 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 – Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. 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. Making a mix tape was 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’d 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.
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.
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.
The only non-book on my bookshelves is the 
Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for not being king, for wanting to leave, Carol chases him, lunges at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Carol loves him so, but Max must go. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of 
