I always thought Robert Frost was very sensible to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it is that good fences make good neighbors:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
If walls could talk, what stories would they tell? I never pondered this more than in 1978 when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, we spent a week in Ballycastle, County Antrim, that culminated with a concert for our parents, but this July would be my first away from Northern Ireland, from one bitterly divided place to another, the latter split in two by the Berlin Wall.
I knew only a little about Nikita Khruschev’s wall. I knew it had been built two years before I was born. As I grew up, I came to understand it as a symbol for the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945. And then in the summer of 1978, I was standing in front of that symbol, its graffitied messages preaching to the choir.
I remember Stephen, one of the lads in the woodwind section, urinated on the Berlin wall, offending, as he did, some passersby who perhaps did not understand that the wall was infinitely more offensive with its barbed wire and watchtowers and its armed guards with their shoot-to-kill orders. In retrospect, I wish there had been more like him, outraged and outspoken.
We were curious and a little scared, I suspect, when we took a trip beyond the curtain and into East Berlin. We were given strict instructions not to photograph any bridges or buildings, and a young tour-guide was assigned to us. Although we were all from Northern Ireland – except the conductor and his son, who were English – most of the Catholics among us had Irish passports whereas the Protestants carried the British counterpart. This caused some delay and confusion at Checkpoint Charlie where I acquired the first stamp in my very first passport, documenting forever the borders that bear down on us, closing in on us, constricting rather than expanding our vision of what our world could be like . . .
On the other side, I remember staring out the window of an old bus at an austere city, its sad grayness a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue – Ku’damm – on the West side, where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember crying for the young woman who had served as our tour guide, understanding in full that she would not be able to join us in West Berlin, to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program. I don’t suppose a group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made much of an impact in 1978, but a decade later, Bruce Springsteenpaid a zAvisit to East Berlin, telling a crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking balleven then, that he was there to rage against the injustices built up in that wall:
I’m not here for or against any government. I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.
I like to think it was The Boss rather than Ronald Reagan who urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that walland that somewhere in that crowd, was the teenage bassoonist who had relieved himself against the Berlin Wall ten years earlier.
Watching on television when the wall came down was one of the greatest events of my personal history. I remember hoping that our young tour-guide had been reunited with family and friends in the West. Photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer documented it, believing that the fall of the Berlin Wall would end forever the notion that a wall is the answer to some of the most complex issues of our time. But from 1989 until 2013, he photographed what he described as a “renaissance of walls,” that includes the Peace Lines in my beloved Belfast, Northern Ireland, the West Bank fence that separates Israel and Palestine, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and the border between Mexico and the United States.
In fact, since the Berlin Wall came down, 28 new border walls have gone up all around the world. Ironically, these walls that are going up at such an alarming rate reflect not totalitarian regimes intent on keeping their people form seeking freedom and opportunities beyond their borders; rather, democracies such as these very United States, intent on keeping such people out.
From July until November, 2013, Wiedenhöfer’s Wall on Wall exhibition featured 36 giant panoramas of modern man-made barriers glued on the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the installation helped spark a conversation about why so many of the walls between us today are taller, longer, and stronger than any we could have imagined on that jubilant November day in 1989 when echoes of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in 1963 rang out: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Perhaps it played a part in the story I saw splashed across the front page of the Belfast Telegraph this weekend, that the walls have been coming down, thanks to negotiations that did not make the front pages. In the past two years, six of the walls have been removed, and more are slated to come down.
Peace comes dropping slow.
The walls of the “Peace Line” started going up in 1969, intended to keep apart Belfast’s two divided communities. While these walls were erected only as a temporary measure, many have been standing for over four decades. That’s the thing about a wall – once it goes up, it seems to take a very long time to come down. It becomes a part of our external and internal geography, at once keeping us apart and a part.
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.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I consider it a home away from home, a safe place to fall where I can put my feet up, have a beer, and listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers all day long if I feel like it. I don’t have to keep it clean. I don’t have to check the mail – I don’t even have to open the mail. If I don’t feel like company, I don’t have to answer the door. If I want to throw a party, I can invite people from all over the world. If I want to be alone with deep, angsty thoughts the way I did a million years ago, rambling into my diary in the wee hours, I can do that too. And, I just celebrated fifty-one years on this earth, so I’m entitled to a little corner of the blogosphere. Yes?
Mind you, the best part about this virtual world might be when, every once in a while, it collides with the real one. Magically, these known strangers are in real time, sitting across the table from me in a snug at The Crown Bar in Belfast or in a hotel bar in Washington DC or in a restaurant in my Phoenix neighborhood. Surreal and real, it is as if we have known each other a lifetime, our worlds at once expanding and narrowing right in front of us. Maybe Muriel Rukeyser was on to something when she pondered:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
I have never met Renn, who writes at The Big C and Me, but I have grown to know her since shortly after my breast cancer diagnosis in 2011. I found her the way I found many women diagnosed with cancer, through commenting on her writing about this ridiculous disease that alters a life in innumerable and immeasurable ways, bringing with it fear and pain and the very worst – along with the very best – in people.
So we navigate our way through the context and complexity of cancer country, encountering an ever-widening gulf between ourselves and others who may not or cannot understand the politics, the business, the norms of this new, strange culture. Cancer country – a strange land where within confidences shared between kindred spirits in hospital waiting rooms and in the advocacy for change that ripples through the words of women in a virtual world, I am at once a part, and more apart from the people who know me best.
When Ken died five months ago, it was to this space I retreated, this timeless space, peopled with some of the kindest women I may never meet, yet to whom I am forever bound. In mid-November, there were days when I could not speak. To anyone. It was as if I had swallowed the sharpest stone, and it remained lodged in my center. This is what grief feels like – so the experts say – and it can be a tenacious bastard.
In those early days, it was easier to wrestle with words on a computer screen – publicly – knowing that out of all the millions of words available to me, I would never find even one to adequately express neither my sorrow for my daughter who loved him so much nor my gratitude to my best friend who found his dead body – or – my utter unsuitability for “widowhood.” How was I ever going to figure out the rules of engagement in a life reshaped by the death of the one man who knew me better than anyone else, the man who told me twenty-something years ago that he was too old for me, (at the time, he was younger than I am today), the man who never let me leave the house without telling me I was some kind of wonderful, the man who would be the father of my only child? I’m learning, and here’s what I know. There. Are. No. Rules. There is only the remembering. And in remembering, there is grace. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died this Thursday past, said that:
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
Naturally, this wouldn’t occur to me until I had no choice other than to remember! True, I am not crying every day, “grieving” for Ken every moment. In fact, sometimes I’m angry that he died before he taught Sophie how to drive or before I had a chance to say sorry for saying a hurtful thing or before I watched “No Country for Old Men” with him, so I could tell him that, yes, even though Cormac McCarthy annoys me with all his existentialist despair, it was a very good movie. I’m listening to my jeans tumble around in the dryer, and it occurs to me that the laundry and the remote and the music on the playlist is all up to me, now. Mundane bits and pieces, I know. The stuff of every day that doesn’t matter. At the same time, none of the bad stuff matters either. It just doesn’t. Spilt milk. Water under the bridge. All gone. Only the good remains. Now I know what Gabriel Garcia Marquez was talking about in Love in the Time of Cholera
. . . the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Because it is the remembering that matters, I choose to remember all that was wild and spontaneous and foolish and joyous when we were wild and spontaneous and foolish and joyous. It’s easy. Much easier than remembering the things we’d sooner forget. It’s right in front of me, all wrapped up in our daughter’s clear-eyed compassion, her irreverent sense of humor, and the way she walks out into the world every day. Her world. I love that.
Remembering.
When cancer came to call, it reminded me of my early days as an immigrant in the United States, making room for new customs and new words, words that had the power to transport me directly into and far away from apprehension. Fear and uncertainty moved in and – for too long – showed no sign of leaving, like the couple of friends who might show up on your doorstep and overstay their welcome. You know who they are – the unexpected visitors who infuriate us, missing all the dropped hints, seemingly unaware of the not-so-subtle signs that it really is time to be going. Wearily polite, we resign ourselves to the fact that, at the end of the day, it is the nobler thing to just wait for them to leave rather than ask them to go.
The fast and furious flurry of euphemisms that follow a cancer diagnosis or the death of of a spouse are gradually replaced by something more closely resembling the routine of someone forced into a kind of exile. For a time, I felt as though I had been banished to a new country that required me to be bolder and braver than ever before. The irony is not lost on me as an immigrant in America, a part of the Irish Diaspora scattered all over the globe. But like Rip Van Winkle, I am no longer as sure of what awaits when I wander down once-familiar roads.
But who wants to spend a happy hour talking about fear and uncertainty? Nobody. I don’t. So we don’t. It’s awkward. I don’t look afraid and uncertain. (But then you aren’t there in the morning when no-one but me is looking in the mirror).
fear and uncertainty and waiting for “benign.”
So I write about it instead. Sometimes I make myself laugh out loud. I really do. Other times, I think I might break my own heart. How’s that for truth-telling? So when Renn asked me if I would join her in a world-wide Blog Tour to answer four simple questions about why and how we write, I accepted her invitation. Gladly. And honored to do so, because I am in the company of women who have lifted me up with their words – and without fail – since November 2011. Marie at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer, from Dublin and currently on sabbatical in Australia, Jan in lovely Northern California, Catherine in Canada, Philippa The Feisty Blue Gecko in Myanmar, and Audrey in Scotland – I am forever in your debt.
At the risk of sounding coy and cryptic, I can’t really tell you too much about what I’m working on. You might judge me. After all, it’s only been five months since Ken died. I don’t know when I stopped measuring the time in days – it would be 160 – but that is probably a good thing. I can even hear the clocks ticking again, and with that comes a realization that as cliched as it is, life is too short, and it is for living. There’s a sense of urgency now with fences to mend, and in spite of the conventional wisdom, there are some bridges to burn; there are walls to erect and barriers to tear down; stories to tell and secrets to reveal; loose ends to tie up and elephants in the living room that can no longer be ignored. There are places to go. There is a book to write. And, I am writing it. Finally, I have committed to it – out loud – as a creative project and grateful to have found an artistic collaborator with the time management and organization skills I lack.
Until the book is finished, you’ll find me here occasionally and also at IrishCentral.com where I am a contributing writer (albeit infrequently), sharing opinions that may not be popular, but that’s what keeps the conversation going. I also contribute to The Antrim Guardian – my hometown newspaper – as long as Liam, the nice editor, sends “a wee reminder” about the deadline every two weeks.
Q2: How does my work differ from others in its genre?
I’m not sure I would put my writing in a genre. Unless there is a genre for “you-cannot-make-this-shit-up-no-you-really-can’t” category, which some smart ass just informed me is creative non-fiction. I’ll take it. I suppose what makes it different is that, invariably, no matter what I’m writing about, there’s always a link to Northern Ireland. Usually, it involves the Troubles or Seamus Heaney or my mother’s wisdom, and always it confirms what Edna O’Brien calls those “themes of childhood” from which we never escape. I surprise even myself, when I begin a paragraph in the Arizona desert and finish it on the train from Dublin up to Sandyrow or on Cyprus or Fitzroy Avenues in Belfast. With Van Morrison. All the stories I tell here are completely true. Also true, is that not all the stories are complete. Is an omission a lie? Maybe. There are just some truths I cannot tell yet. Time and place matter, when it comes to truth-telling. And the right words. You know we just don’t have enough of those.
Q.3: Why do I write what I do?
Seriously, this blog was never supposed to be about me. Fueled by good intentions and my personal experience, it was supposed to be singularly about breast cancer, a place to advocate for others affected by the disease, where I would stay on top of the topic of cancer. I had presumed I might be instrumental in forcing a change in the national conversation about it by chronicling the injustices and indignities that simmer in its culture, if only half as well as so many women who have pulled me up more times than they will ever know. How they write! Boldly, audaciously, and tenaciously, some daily, they stay on point even when they claim to have run out of words – the Accidental Amazon, Nancy and her Point, the Pink Underbelly, Marie and the global cast of women whose blogs she rounds up every Friday at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer, and the women and men who show up every Monday at 9pm ET at the #BCSM, Tweetchat, “ the intersection of breast cancer and all things social media,” where truths are conveyed at lightning speed in 140 characters or less.
I had hoped to catch the right words about breast cancer and save them in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid, ready to release them whenever they were needed. But I am not up for the task that requires a commitment as mammoth as the hulking oppressor that is breast cancer itself.
As I said earlier, I used to write that it was breast cancer that had banished me to a strange land, thereby demanding a new level of boldness and bravery; that it had forced me into a kind of exile. That was true, but so too – and more important to me now – is this matter of my self as a voluntary exile in a global community that is smaller and more accessible now to those who left Mother Ireland as well as those who stayed. It is a blog about being homeor maybe finding home. And there’s no place like home – its books and music, its warm fire, the sound of it settling, belonging in it . . .
Maybe I’m not unlike the woman Dublin poet, Paula Meehan, describes
I am a blind woman finding her way home by a map of a tune.
When the song that is in me is the song I hear from the world
I’ll be home. It’s not written down and I don’t remember the words.
I know when I hear it, I’ll have made it myself. I’ll be home.
Q4. How does my writing process work?
It doesn’t. If it worked, I would do it every day. With ease. Writing is neither quick nor easy for me. Often, so elusive are the ideas and then the words to attach to them, that I may as well be divining for water. For the better part of the last month, I just haven’t written anything. I have actually plagiarized myself. (I’m doing it right now). When an idea worth exploring comes my way, I hesitate to commit it to the blank screen in front of me, because its potential might be diminished by an ill-chosen word or a clumsy sentence. My reluctance amuses me, knowing I will begin to revise this very post, rework its sentences, reshape it, remove imprecise words, perhaps entirely rewrite it, shortly after I press “publish.” Because the first draft is never any good, a veritable struggle, perhaps this response should be entitled, “How does my rewriting process work?”
Until I encountered a 1977 interview she gave for the Paris Review, I presumed writing came easily to iconic writer, Joan Didion. It simply never occurred to me that she might struggle with the technicalities of getting started:
“DIDION
What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
INTERVIEWER
The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.
DIDION
Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.”
But putting words on paper we must. You’re only stuck with that first draft if you don’t do anything with it. Writing and rewriting is where we find creativity, unbound by time, a fusion of labor and craft. As Lewis Hyde posits in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World:
Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus–these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.
Writing is invention: revision and reinvention too. While it is not what I do for a living, it is essential to my life. Revising paragraphs is time well spent, savored not necessarily scheduled, daily. Time spent very early in the morning or late at night, weighing words from a first draft, deleting them or rearranging them, helps illuminate for me who and how I am, what lies in front of me, what holds me back, what’s hidden beneath the surface.
I discovered writer, Anne Lamott, a few years before my daughter was born, some time before the internet, and long before I bumped into blogging. I’m reminded this evening of advice she gave in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,“We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid.
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
With that, I’ll pass the baton on to two bloggers I met in the real world. I am biased. They are both from Belfast, in my lovely, tragic Northern Ireland. The first, Fiona McLaughlin, writes at Me, Mine, and Other Bits . . . Trundling Along and lives in Belfast which she rightly describes as “a cold, grey sort of place where we look for the splashes of color.” Fiona is a splash of color herself. Here we are at a restaurant in Belfast (after several G & Ts over the course of an afternoon with Lesley Richardson who just completed this very activity on her fabulous blog Standing Naked at a Bus Stop.
Bloggers in Belfast: Yvonne, Lesley, Fiona
Next, let me introduce you to Liz Barron, The Blarney Crone, self-described as “Irish, idiosyncratic, and in your face.” Liz hails from Belfast and now lives in Washington DC. When she and her sister took a trip to Arizona last year, she left a comment here on my blog – as you do – suggesting we meet up. Of course we did. Within seconds, the three of us had fallen into the rhythm of home – the colloquialisms and the craic not at all out of place in the desert southwest.
Until September 11th 2001, I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as a woman who had traded in Northern Irelandfor America. Foolishly, I had too quickly dropped my guard, almost forgetting anything can happen. I grew complacent and smug, confident that – unlike her mother – my American daughter would never have to look twice at an unattended shopping bag that had been simply forgotten by someone in a hurry. She would never find herself standing stock-still, arms over her head waiting to be searched before proceeding through airport security. She would never wonder, while poring over international headlines, how a complete stranger could hate her because of her nationality. She would never find out on Facebook that two bombs exploded at the finish-line of the iconic Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 140. Little Martin Richard, the eight year old boy killed in the blast had just hugged his father who moments earlier crossed the finish line. Anything can happen – it always does.
Even though it is a big American city, I always think of Boston as a small town, buzzing with excitement when the Red Sox are at Home as they were during the 2013 Marathon. It was a warm day, dry and bright, the promise of victory hanging in the air. Before those two bombs exploded at the finish line, with the kind of chilling choreography eerily reminiscent of explosions that time and again shook my Northern Ireland to its core, Boston was celebrating with winners already across the finish line, and Red Sox Nationjubilant with the walk-off win.
I imagine some people in the crowd guessed or hoped those blasts were just celebratory fireworks, the way we convince ourselves it’s only a car backfiring on the freeway and not a gunshot, or it’s just a clap of Monsoon thunder, not a bomb going off on the railway line. But then there was a plume of grey smoke, the unmistakable stench of it, the scream of sirens, the blood on Boylston Street, and the sickening, renewed fear of being under attack, once again in the aftermath of those two planes crashing with such force into the heart of a city, on another clear day that had been full of possibilities, the Manhattan skyline sparklingin the sunshine.
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth and the clogged underearth, the River Styx, the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleading on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid. Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
Anything can happen. The 2013 Boston Marathon was but another stark and sobering reminder of this truth. Still, no one would have expected it. No one would have expected Newtownand the harrowing irony of the Marathon’s 26th mile marker dedicated to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting.
Looking on, from my living room on the other side of the country, I should have known that the finish line of a signature race is, for some person or people, not an unexpected place at all; rather it is “a legitimate target.” And, with over 25,000 assembled for the event, there is the potential for a tremendous loss of life. A profound sense of sadness and weariness accompanies this awareness, because it reconfirms what I know, that it is impossible to defeat terrorism. At the same time, it is impossible to live in constant fear of it, otherwise you might never go outside, as my mother often told me when I was a young girl growing up in Northern Ireland.
Usually, we were at a safe distance from “The Troubles.” Except every night when we turned on the news or the odd time our kitchen window shook because a bomb had exploded somewhere close. There was the time the car-bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel, and then years later when my brother, as a new journalist, had to interview the grandmother of three little boys murdered, burned to death on July 12, 1998. Richard, Mark and Jason, just eleven, nine, and seven years old, had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of their home. Then there was the otherwise typical Saturday night out in Belfast, when my college friend Ruth and I returned to her brother’s house, only to learn that her car had been stolen and set ablaze to serve as a barricade in another part of the city.
Years earlier, I remember watching grainy black and white images on a tiny television, the evening news, and a reporter in the street relating the events of a Sunday in 1972, when during a Civil Rights march in Derry’s Bogside, British soldiers shot into a crowd of unarmed and peaceful civilians, killing thirteen of them. Bloody Sunday. Over two decades later, as a young mother, visiting home from America, I remember the bombing of Omagh and being horrified that it could happen after what had happened in Enniskillen.
Never again? Think again.
Physically untouched by all these – yes – but changed nonetheless. Ostensibly, I survived The Troubles, but in actuality, I just managed to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The images are indelible and iconic: Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief on the streets of Derry; aging veterans of the World Wars, medals gleaming in Enniskillen; the carnage on Market Street in the heart of Omagh.
When I heard about Boston, I thought immediately of Omagh, when the Real IRA loaded a non-descript car with 500 pounds of explosives, parked it in the middle of the little market town, and detonated it when it could do most harm. Immediately, glass, masonry and metal ripped through the crowd of shoppers, mostly women and children, the sheer force killing 29 people immediately. One of them was a woman, pregnant with twins. Some of their bodies were never found. Hundreds were injured.
I will never forget the Omagh bombing. It was on a Saturday when mothers were shopping for back-to-school supplies and uniforms. Those responsible called in a warning, and with unimaginable cruelty and callousness led the police to divert the crowd not to safety but to where they would be the most vulnerable. It happened during my daughter’s first trip to Ireland. Not quite eight months old, she was the surprise for my mother’s 60th birthday party. I remember that night, holding her tight as I watched the news in my parent’s house, the accounts from witnesses forever changed and devastated by the blood that flowed in the gutters and the bits and pieces of people lying on the street. One of the volunteer nuns recalls the scene before her at Tyrone County Hospital. A war-zone. A killing field:
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. People were lying on the floor with limbs missing and there was blood all over the place. People were crying for help and looking for something to kill the pain. Other people were crying out looking for relatives. You could not really be trained for what you had seen unless you were trained in Vietnam or somewhere like that
How could Omagh happen after Enniskillen, where over twenty-five years ago at 10.43AM on Remembrance Sunday, the IRA detonated a bomb without warning, killing eleven ordinary people and injuring sixty:
How could Boston happen?
And what can we do? Like Newtown and Omagh, New York and Enniskillen, we will find, long before the answers, the highest expressions of humanity and kindess within the hearts of ordinary people who will emerge as heroes.Mr. Rogers calls them “the helpers.”
While we struggle to find the words to explain the inexplicable – again – we can remind our children – and ourselves – of the helpers and their humanity that shines through the darkest days:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
On the other side, I remember staring out the window of an old bus at an austere city, its sad grayness a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue – Ku’damm – on the West side, where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember crying for the young woman who had served as our tour guide, understanding in full that she would not be able to join us in West Berlin, to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program. I don’t suppose a group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made much of an impact in 1978, but a decade later, Bruce Springsteen paid a zAvisit to East Berlin, telling a crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking ball even then, that he was there to rage against the injustices built up in that wall:
opposing sides © Sheila Dee
