I suppose if you live long enough, almost nine decades, all is eventually forgiven. At least that’s what the obituaries for Rev. Ian Paisley suggest. Like many of us, I was raised to observe the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” credo, to speak no ill of the dead, but in the days since Ian Paisley’s passing, I have grown increasingly vexed over the glowing online obituaries, the over-the-top eulogizing of a man, who from the year of my birth until the year I left Northern Ireland, railed against the Catholic church, spewing hate and bigotry – brilliantly – and inciting countless followers to violence.
I did not know Ian Paisley as a father and a husband. I know nothing of the way he conducted his private life. I empathize with his grieving family and friends – he was an old man and in poor health when he died. As well, I feel compelled to comment on his public life which splashed noisily onto mine and the lives of so many ordinary people living in Northern Ireland, people who wanted peace some forty years before the fragile state of it in place today, people who were denied it in large part because of Paisley’s immovability, his fire and brimstone ferocity, his rabble-rousing. Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, writes that for decades:
Ian Paisley was seen as part of an intractable and unending problem in the North of Ireland. But in the end, he made a powerful and determined contribution to resolving that problem and pointing to a new way forward based on dialogue, respect, partnership and reconciliation.
Unlike McGuinness, I am not a politician. I am a teacher who began her career in a Belfast classroom, where students revered Paisley and openly despised Catholics. Where did that hatred come from? Much of it was fueled by the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. In that classroom, I had a daily opportunity to observe what happens to a country when the hearts of its young harden, and I cannot forgive Ian Paisley for his part in that. I read recently that the best age to learn a new language is 11-13, early adolescence. Thus, it saddens me to consider the opportunities squandered by Paisley and his ilk. When he was at the height of his power, he had so many chances to to teach the language of peace and understanding, but he chose not to, and he stood by that choice for too many years of turmoil and bloodshed.
I know of course that my opinion of Ian Paisley probably doesn’t matter much. I know that in spite of being told to do the decent thing and to say nothing against a man who cannot defend himself in death, I feel a profound sense of obligation to speak publicly about the impact of his thundering, virulent attacks on Catholicism, liberalism, the Civil Rights movement, mixed marriage, and homosexuality, because he played a starring role in the destruction of dreams of peace and unity for so many of us. Along with the black and white images of The Troubles that flicker still in my memory – the banging of the bin-lids, the soldiers on street corners, the bombed out shops and the panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes, I can hear Ian Paisley roaring from our television set, his violent rhetoric scaring the little girl I once was.
There is no doubt, as the obituaries reveal, that Paisley, the “Big Man from Ballymena” (who called himself a child of God) was a masterful politician. More than most, he knew how to work a room, how to whip a crowd into a frenzy, how to frighten his followers into believing that their cultural heritage, their very way of life was at risk, and, he knew how to step back, absolved of any responsibility for what they might do. He was instrumental in bringing Northern Ireland to a standstill – “a constitutional stoppage” – through the Ulster Workers’ Strike (UWS) of 1974.
Forty years on, and on the other side of the world, I cannot write about the UWS without writing about what happened on May 24, 1974 at The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena, the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look.
The Wayside Halt will forever linger in a corner of my consciousness, refining my sense of who I am. My father told me not too long ago that on that May evening in 1974, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because dad was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined. Before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican,Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.
Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.
Ian Paisley – man of God – did not attend their funerals. Intransigent and unyielding, it would take another quarter of a century of bloodshed – a lifetime – before he would accept the Good Friday agreement and share power with his former Nationalist enemies as First Minister in the new devolved government.
Too late for the Byrne brothers and their families.
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 wondered if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and we wanted to be farther away still, to escape, to “teenage kicks all through the night.”
Now this may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie that was playing on my flight back home, except that Terri Hooley opened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after “the day the music died” in Ireland, and as I watched 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’d play it on the record player for everyone in the shop to hear. And when he did, you would never have known 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 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 think I maybe even understood – if only for a moment – what Joe Strummer of The Clash meant:
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 Northern Ireland lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing would have been to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends 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 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. So 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 something terrible 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 didn’t think anything of it until they were ordered out of their vehicle and told to 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).
While the band members waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of their 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 air. Des McAlea suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. He recalls the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, I can recall the shock and revulsion – 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?
What happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else. 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.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers said his band was “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” Terri Hooley may have been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were scared. There were some who thought that the musical life of Northern Ireland was over. Performers from the UK mainland were afraid to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, it 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 remember being shaken to my very core – again – by the inhumanity of 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 of whom were 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.
And 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 him. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owing a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in taking either side of the sectarian divide; he wanted young people to have another option, another kind of country where a young person would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. And 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 – “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a much 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 just one. After all, 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.
We had three TV channels from which to choose in the 1970s, 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 the liner notes and 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 to listen to music on vinyl. 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 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 did his research (imagine, in the days before the Internet!) and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable that had 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. I loved 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 line was 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” go around and 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 your 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.) And 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 wrote in “Ode to a Mix Tape”
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 last November was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by the very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland – back to Phoenix.
Before we were married, when I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, my husband bought me another hi-fi. 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 the turntable. 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. He 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. I would have liked just one more spin.
Maybe, like vinyl, the handwritten letter will make a comeback as well. I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by phonecalls, text messages, Skype, and e-mails that are simply not the same. How I miss opening my mailbox to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a certain 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.
Meaning: A practical joke. Also a concealed and possibly lethal trap.
Noun: A thing designed to catch the unwary, in particular
Verb: Place a booby trap in or on (an object or area): “the area was booby-trapped.”
Synonyms: snare, trick into doing something
“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November . . .” the rhyme reminds me, as it has done countless times before, that October has thirty-one days, and it is just around the corner. Thirty one days to make us all impossibly more aware of breast cancer. Thirty one days of purchasing pink and running towards towards “the cure” (two words trademarked by the Susan G. Komen Foundation just in case you’re thinking of hosting a similar event “for the cure). The White House will undoubtedly turn pink again and the cashiers at the grocery store will ask me for a dollar towards breast cancer. And when November 1st eventually arrives, the pink ribbons will be unpinned from lapels, the grocery stores will turn from pink to the colors of Thanksgiving. I will breathe a sign of relief, but I will, of course, still have breast cancer.
I am an unwilling conscript to this battle against breast cancer. I don’t want to be a fighter or a survivor or a pink warrior. I’d prefer living without having to hold my breath every so often, wondering as I did some forty years ago in Marks and Spencers on Belfast’s Royal Avenue, if the bomb scare is just that. A scare. A hoax. In my world today, the suspicious devices come in the form of tumors and test results, in waiting and worrying, in scheduling more time to spend in waiting rooms. And they come in pink ribbons and half-truths about mammograms and early detection. The whole sorry business saps my energy. I have things to do. Mundane things, but they matter nonetheless – laundry and shopping. I like my clothes clean and the refrigerator stocked. But in October, I avoid the dry-cleaners, but I cannot avoid the grocery store and its shelves of pink merchandise.
For eleven months of the year, reconnaissance missions to the dry-cleaners or the grocery store pass without incident. No camouflage is necessary and only minimal intelligence required. In October, it is impossible to pass through the Safeway checkout line without being hijacked by a cashier whose job it is to ask me to donate a dollar for breast cancer. If I say yes, she will bellow into the intercom, “I just got a donation for Breast Cancer. Can I get a Woo Hoo?” And, as they scan coupons and fill bags, paper or plastic, with other people’s groceries, a chorus of cashiers and bag-boys will, as automatons, respond, “Woo Hoo!” and I will flee. I will feel only slightly guilty that I asked how much of my dollar would support breast cancer research, knowing that my question rendered her uncomfortable. But I will be more concerned that she has not been told how to answer my question except with a receipt and a “Have a nice day!” The young woman at the cash register is caught in the same trap with me – woo-hoo!
There are other grocery stores, less pink-ified, but they are few and far between. Even speciality stores are dressed out in pink, in an almost festive observance of breast cancer awareness month. I suppose you could call it a breast fest. Bizarrely, this brings to mind Loyalist areas in the Northern Ireland of my childhood. In anticipation of “marching” season, Union Jacks and flags bearing a red hand hung out from bedroom windows of council houses, proclaiming allegiance to the Crown. Red, white, and blue bunting stretched from house to house, and pavement curbs were roughly painted in homage to British rule. Slogans spray-painted on otherwise scrubbed gable walls, echoed an imperative “Belfast Says No” that hung above the city’s hall in the 1980s and in our faces. It was unavoidable even for those of us who wanted to remain anonymous, ordinary people for whom the moral imperative was peace. Boldly marking territory in no uncertain terms, those banners and badges were divisive, as incendiary as the booby-trapped cars that lay in wait for the part-time police officer who, in a hurry to get home for a birthday celebration, failed to check under his car before turning the key in the ignition.
Perhaps it is over-wrought to compare breast cancer awareness campaigns to shows of loyalist strength that often culminated in sectarian violence and murder. The parallels are real to me. The bunting that zig-zags across the skies of the Shankill Road is not much different from the arch of balloons that float above the “KomenPhoenix” finish Line in downtown Phoenix. I did not participate, much to the chagrin of acquaintances who know I have breast cancer. Why wasn’t I part of Komen’s “circle of promise?” they asked. Couldn’t I tap into the power of positive thinking? Why do I have to be so negative about breast cancer? Come on! Can’t you ferret out a silver lining? Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?
“Imagine a life without breast cancer!” the Susan G. Komen Foundation urges.Alright. I imagine it every morning when I wake up or when I push to the back of my mind the possibility that the twinge in my hip is a harbinger of recurrence. I imagined it during an unguarded moment in Bed, Bath and Beyond, the sole item on my agenda, a new duvet cover. I had barely crossed the threshold, when I was told to Fight like a Girl:
Even the tic tacs on display were pink, as was the pasta and the over-priced machine used to make it. I did my due diligence and visited the The Pasta Shoppe website, where I learned that 10% of proceeds from the sale of fun-shaped pasta will go directly to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
Susan G. Komen was only 36 years old when she was killed by metastatic breast cancer In the blink of an eye, just three years, it ravaged her body. The organization subsequently established by her sister, however, has failed to appropriately address the kind of cancer that killed her. Instead, the Komen foundation has relentlessly emphasized early detection and awareness. Sealed it with a pink ribbon, it is just not good enough. Not for me. Not for my daughter. Nor yours.
What would Susan G. Komen say about our progress, or Rachel Carson, who fifty years ago, warned us about pesticides and their link to cancer. Breast cancer killed her too. She would have something to say, I know, about last year’s limited edition pink ribbon tic tacs. While I do not know how much of the tic tac proceeds went towards breast cancer research, I know they contain corn gluten, which is cause for concern. For Susan and for Rachel, for you and for me, Breast Cancer Action urges us to ask these Critical Questions Before You Buy Pink:
Does any money from this purchase go to support breast cancer programs? How much?
What organization will get the money? What will they do with the funds, and how do these programs turn the tide of the breast cancer epidemic?
Is there a “cap” on the amount the company will donate? Has this maximum donation already been met? Can you tell?
Does this purchase put you or someone you love at risk for exposure to toxins linked to breast cancer? What is the company doing to ensure that its products are not contributing to the breast cancer epidemic?
Breast cancer can no longer be covered up with pink ribbon purchases that manipulate us into feeling good about ourselves. It is an epidemic but it has been trivialized, glamorized, feminized. In October, it is more about the boobies and less about the disease. The slogans and the pink wristbands, the trappings of breast cancer become fashion accessories. For thirty-one days, we are told “to save the tatas” and reminded to “feel the boobies.” Baby-talk, sugar and spice and all things nice, the stuff of fairy-tales. Even the President of the United States will sport a pink breast cancer awareness bracelet.
I may be way off the mark, but somehow I cannot imagine our nation in the grip of a “Feel my Balls” campaign. Can you? In 2013, America is still confounded by sex and gender; thus, guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, ring hollow. Somewhere within the ‘Spaghetti Junction’ of stories that spin to advance political agendas and generate massive profits, lies the truth about the way things are and how they appear to be. A glamorous pink ribbon wrapped around an Estee Lauder model seems more socially palatable than a bald and fragile, vomiting cancer patient in the throes of yet another grueling, poisonous chemotherapy treatment. And then there are the men with breast cancer. What about them? What about the families of over 2,000 men who died from breast cancer in 2012?
Confronting the chilling reality of breast cancer is non-negotiable. It is time to ask the questions that will quell the rising tide and to demand answers, to hold accountable those in power to mandate mandate meaningful action, beyond the breasts and into research of the cancer that kills.
It was a decade ago when BBC News reported that then United States Attorney General, John Ashcroft, asked the United States Department of Justice to shell out $8,000 for drapes to cover up the exposed right breast of The Spirit of Justice statue. The offending art-deco figure was often photographed behind him while he spoke to the media. Was it too life-like? Too real? Too much woman for him? Would a pink ribbon in front of the White House have been more acceptable? Regrettably, I think it might.
Breast cancer is ugly, and it hurts. Awareness campaigns hurt too, especially when they focus on the same old stories of early detection and treatment regimens that have been prescribed for decades – some combination of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy. Especially when such campaigns focus on everything other than what must be done to figure out what causes breast cancer in the first place, how to prevent it, how to stop it from metastasizing. What I wish I had known before running all those races and believing that the mammogram was the perfect test is what METAvivor President, CJ (Dian) Coreliussen-James warns:
“People do not realize that metastatic breast cancer is widespread and deadly, and that it strikes on whim and takes 41,000 American lives every year. Survivors think they are safe because they are 5 years out … or were diagnosed early … or were told they are ‘cured,’ but MBC plays by its own rules.People diagnosed at stage 0 as well as 30-year survivors can and do metastasize. You feel great one day and the next day learn you have MBC. Your life can change that fast.
So what will you do this October? How will you navigate the sophisticated booby-traps all around you? Be vigilant. Don’t fall for it just because of the nice pink ribbon. Ask questions.
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with the ‘real’ one. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney mattered so much; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that made me; about breast cancer, its pain, its politics, and the shiver of fear it brings when it moves in; and, about clearing a path to things that matter most and things that need to be said.
I got lost in the blogosphere one evening last July and somehow landed at Lesley Richardson’s blog, where within minutes, I was completely at home, howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving our teenage years in Northern Ireland long before curly-hair products had been invented. Both of us born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with the curls, each of us has a cat, a husband, a 15 year old daughter, a love for Heaney and Belfast, and a need to write (Lesley does it for a living). And then there’s the cancer. Always the cancer. Before posting to her blog, An Unconventional Death, which should win Best Blog Post in the Blog Awards Ireland 2013 competition, Lesley emailed me and asked me not to read it, afraid that perhaps her searing account of her beloved dad’s death would upset or offend me, given my own diagnosis. I was so moved by her sensitivity to my situation, but of course I read it. And, it broke my heart. Everyone should read it and vote for it because it is unvarnished truth-telling.
Last year, on September 11th, Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls were then just four years old, safe in their pre-schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. When the news tumbled out of New York city, Lesley and I were stopped in our tracks, heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and talk of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
“Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.” Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? I don’t know. Growing up where we did, when we did, we were often confounded by the bombs and bullets, the brutality and barbarism on both sides, but at the same time, somehow – and sadly – resigned to it. We held tight to the ordinary rituals, the ones we thought we could control, and we tried not to be afraid that “it” might happen to us. We never fully gave into the fear as we went to our schools and our shops or out to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
One such routine, for me, was writing in a diary. I did it every day. Unprompted, I could fill page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. Along with now embarrassing angst-filled poetry, bits of social commentary, newspaper clippings, dried red leaves from maples that lined country roads upstate New York on my first trip to America, concert tickets, letters never sent, and things I wished I’d said at the time, there was always plenty of evidence of a life being lived well in spite of the troubles that swirled around us and within us.
A young woman, just starting out on my own, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to to set words down on a page. The world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and writing in my diary, my once cherished ritual, gave way to more prosaic tasks and daily responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Then, just when I thought I had my house in order, the breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard. A jolt. And I began to write again, the way I once had in my diary. For me. I kept it private at first, afraid to hit “publish.” Inexplicably, I felt like I was speaking out of turn or that I would get in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation and the sheer rage I felt towards the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists and radiologists.
As I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” Here, I could lean back rather than Lean In obediently just because all the other women are doing it. I can take stock and trade. I can light the match rather than not burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs. But that has happened only once. This is my home away from home. And so I keep writing. For myself. I suppose cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare the things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her.
Her first homework assignment was to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I knew what I had to do. I promised her I would print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
This past Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend brought a plastic bag to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and some green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything. As we made our way to the small hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the roar of airplanes above ensuring we will not forget the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers twelve years ago.
Letters and paper flowers, candles aglow in the bright morning, tiny stuffed bears on the grass at the bottom of six flagpoles – I have been cleaved in two by such things before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, and everyone falls silent and still; then bagpipes and then Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names. We remember them.
And so, I found Igor’s flag. I said his name out loud and tied Lesley’s letter to the pole and, before I walked away, I whispered “Godspeed.”
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
