I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos.
The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sat there for years among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.
Once upon a time, at the same time every night, my late husband would come into my office and ask me with a wink “Well? Are you ready for Tony and the boys?” Yes. I was. I was always ready. He’d pour me a glass of something red, and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of James Gandolfini.
Watching again all these years later, in Mexico, courtesy of Netflix and an unreliable internet connection, Tony Soprano persists. He is still larger than life, still flirting with Dr. Melfi, still fighting about money with Carmela, and I’m still telling myself that James Gandolfini didn’t really die in Rome eight summers ago.
Eight. Summers. Ago.
Tony Soprano had been around forever. Years before David Chase created him James Gandolfini was already playing the part of a wise guy. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,
… the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.
Brilliantly.
An avid movie fan, I had also seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance, his performance crackling with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end is quintessential Quentin Tarantino. I can only watch by peeking out through my fingers. Although I know Tony Soprano’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I continue to be charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness. Duped, I suppose, by a kind of vulnerability that makes him relatable and likable. On the TV screen Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. But not James Gandolfini, with us for the briefest sojourn, and dead at 51.
This past Saturday would have been his 60th birthday. Thinking about him and what he left behind for his daughter, pokes a hole in a well-hidden stash of thoughts about my own mortality and what I’ll leave behind for mine.
She tells me she avoids reading my writing. A grown woman now and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later–– in a digital jam-jar. When I am gone, she will open it. It is a beautiful stratagem, a way to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, and it reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview. Perhaps the purest expression of mortality I have ever encountered, I watched it on a September Sunday with my daughter and her dad – who, just like James Gandolfini – would be gone in an instant.
He wouldn’t have to miss us.
Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you … Live your life, live your life, live your life.
I think Maurice Sendak would have missed James Gandolfini––the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best––and what my mother would describe as his most heartsome performance–– may well have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max who, after his mother sends him to bed without any dinner, sails off to a fantasy island inhabited by the wild things.
As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as those that flutter across the faces of Tony Soprano and all the ‘wild things’ he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination.
In the movie version, Max leaves home, running down menacing city streets until he reaches a waterfront where a waiting boat takes him far away to the land where the wild things roam. At first, the ferocious creatures try to scare him away, but Max remains unfazed. Fearless now, he is the wildest of them all. Emboldened and in charge, he is pronounced king of this kingdom and orders his new subjects to ‘let the wild rumpus start!’ But when he tires of their moonlit shenanigans, he invokes his mother and sends them all to bed without dinner.
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all
Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for no longer wanting to be king, Carol chases him, lunging at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Undaunted, Max refuses to stay, eventually returning home to a happy ending, where dinner is waiting and still hot. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell, as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.
Far away from my own childhood and from my child, I suspect we all know where the wild things are. Over fifty years later, I can still hear my mother’s voice telling me not to let my imagination run away with me as I fretted over the dark, or disappointments, big and small. Fueled by those wild things, I sailed off by myself many times. I always found my way back home––some journeys were longer than others.
Time after time, I have stood on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, 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 often easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about my beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland, the wee country that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter and things that need to be said out loud; and, about magic and loss.
A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland in the dark ages before the invention of products for curly hair. Born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have an artsy daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and a compulsion to write our way out of trouble.
On one of the anniversaries of 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, then just four years old, were safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, unaware of the reports tumbling out of New York city. We were 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 transatlantic talks 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? Maybe. Growing up where we did, when we did, confounded by the bombs and bullets, the sheer brutality and barbarism on both sides – but – we were also resigned to it, clinging to ordinary rituals and routines, that we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. Off we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
One such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. Just starting out, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. As my mother used to say, the world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and my once cherished writing ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt – and I was writing again, the way I had done in that old diary. I kept it private at first, afraid that hitting “publish” would land me in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.
But 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 and the women who have it all and those who don’t. 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 those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.
Her first homework assignment was ostensibly simple – 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 promised 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.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend came along, with a plastic envelope to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a scrap of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.
Making our way up the little 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 thunderous roar of airplanes above reminiscent of the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.
There were letters and paper flowers, tiny stuffed bears on the grass below six flagpoles and candles aglow on a bright morning. I have been cleaved in two by such objects before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson I 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.”
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; and as a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, visitors fall silent and still. Bagpipes. 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 the sky airline pilots described as “severe clear” that September morning are tied 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.
I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he had come to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.
I attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole.
I said his name. Igor.
A LETTER TO IGOR
September 15 2002
Dear Igor Zuckerman
Please excuse me if I haven’t quite got your name right. It’s been running around in my head for the past few days, haunting me almost, but I’m not quite sure if it’s Zuckerman or Ziberman. Or maybe it’s Zuckleman. I do remember though, quite clearly, that your surname began with a Z.
Apart from that I know nothing at all about you; except that you lost your life a year ago, on September 11 2001. You see yours was the very last name on the list of almost 3,000 people who died with you on that beautiful sunny morning to be read out at the memorial service on Wednesday. I didn’t hear all of the names, but of those I did catch, yours has particularly affected me; probably because it took over two and a half hours to get to you. Two and a half hours of dead people. Two and a half hours before your friends and family heard someone they probably didn’t know confirm to the world that you were gone.
I’ve been wondering how you died, Igor. I know it sounds morbid, but since I heard your name, the last name, I’ve become somewhat obsessed by your death. Were you in one of the towers, or on a plane or at the Pentagon? If you were in a tower, which one was it? What floor were you on? Why were you there? Were you a businessman, a janitor, a tourist, a fireman? Did you go there every day, or was there a special reason for your visit that morning? Did you know what was happening? Did you realize that you weren’t going to get out, or were you confident that you would? Did you manage, like hundreds of others, to make contact with your loved ones? Did your death come in a lift, on the stairwell, by your desk? Or did you jump?
Perhaps you were a passenger on one of the planes. That bothers me even more, Igor. Everyone has their own personal horror of that day – a moment, a memory, a story, a name, an image that will haunt them forever and flash before them for years to come when they think about that date. 9:11, a date which started off as a normal day and ended as one the world will never forget, embedded forever in history. My demon, the one that still visits me every time I see a jumbo jet soaring high above in a clear blue sky, is the image of the planes crashing into the towers. As a nervous flyer, the thought of the innocent people on all four of the planes involved in the attacks will distress me for the rest of my life. And, as a mother, the fact that there were children on board some of the flights has made me howl with rage.
But I’ve also been thinking about your life, Igor. What age were you? Where did you come from? Where did you live? Did you have a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a dog? Were you a father? A brother? An uncle? What were your passions? Your favorite film? Your favorite food? Was there a book you re-read time and time again? Were you a sportsman, Igor, or an artist; or both? Did you like to cook? Sing? Dance? Run? Were you smiling on your way to wherever you were going that morning, happy to be doing whatever you were doing? Did you look up at the deep blue sky and feel glad to be alive on such a beautiful autumn day?
And your family, Igor. Your family. I’ve been thinking about them too. Did they walk the streets of Manhattan for days with your photograph? Did they get to bury your body? How long did they have to wait before they knew you were never coming home? And how are they now; one shockingly short but painfully long year on?
I’ve been wondering 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.
Some people here have been cross at the exposure of 9:11 and many didn’t want to be reminded about it last week when most of the world mourned the first anniversary. ‘What about our dead?’ they shouted. ‘What about us?’ But they’re so wrapped up in their own self pity that they’re missing the point: the dead of 9:11 are our dead. This wasn’t just an attack on the USA; it wasn’t only meant to harm Americans, rock the US administration, threaten the land of the free. It was a message to the world. It was meant to hurt us all. It was the most obvious and orchestrated single act of terrorism the human race has ever witnessed; because that is exactly what happened – the world witnessed it, with bewildered and disbelieving horror.
But perhaps that same world can turn it around, recycle the shock and fear and grief and anger to produce a global climate of trust, friendship, tolerance and respect. Wouldn’t it be great if, after that cataclysmic day, the world had said ‘stop’, ‘enough’, ‘no more’? If the terrorists themselves had become the terrified, frightened that their ultimate objective had failed? If people who hate had started to love and blame became forgiveness, and intolerance became compassion? Do you think that’s possible, Igor, my fantasy vision of a fairy tale future? It certainly doesn’t look like it right now. War is a frightening possibility, looming closer every day, and world peace seems further away than ever. I don’t know what our future holds, Igor, but I do know it’s different than the one that was lining up for us on the morning last September when you made your way towards your death under a bright blue sky.
I plan to visit New York for the second time next summer. On my first trip to the city, almost four years ago, my favorite place, the only ‘tourist attraction’ I went to twice, was the World Trade Centre. I had lunch in Windows on the World and it was honestly one of those rare ‘wow’ moments that stay with you forever. I vividly remember looking out at the myriad of buildings and bridges across Manhattan thinking: ‘it’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m here in New York drinking wine and having the time of my life.’ I literally felt on top of the world. There was something surreal and altogether magical about being there, and after that trip I always told friends who were visiting the city to go to Windows. It was my number one tip. When I return, I will go to Ground Zero, and pay my respects to everyone who died. And I’ll whisper your name Igor, and hope the wind will carry my blessing to you.
As her T-shirt reminds me, “good things will come.” Soon, I hope. It is my darling girl’s birthday today, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places, we’ll have to make do with Facetime. I woke up missing her the way I knew I would and remembering that I can’t remember life before her . . .
Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse.
I stayed home with Sophie for a year after she was born. It was the best year of my life, with her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for being a mother, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me.
Just the way I like it, business was slow that first year. Some days I made it out of my pajamas – only some and only if felt like walking out to the mailbox, unlike Dolly Parton, who checks the mail in full makeup and heels. Fair play to her. Other days, I also showered, but mostly, I was mostly like the imaginative little girl I had once been, the one who had to be reminded to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I still liked him before he weighed in on COVID with bad songs railing against social distancing and masks. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I inhaled, and I remember thinking about sixteen years later, that a bottle of that very fragrance would go a long way, if only to mask the Teen Spirit.
There were interminable hours spent simply looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, and wondering how it was that two imperfect people had made this one perfect thing. She didn’t mind the attention. Or she did, but this was before she had words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We used to call it hand ballet.
Mostly, my baby girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly and still do albeit from another country and much to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. My mother made it worse, urging me to do so by reminding me the way only an Irish mammy can that the day would come when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. Wouldn’t it be great if we mothers could bank all those hours of holding and comforting for such a day, like the day, I lay in the ICU following eight and a half hours of surgery while my fourteen-year-old girl wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep? This is why I hate cancer.
When the time came for me to go back to work and take her to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – mine and hers – that came immediately before and continued for some time after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in shorts from the Gap and Birkenstock sandals, gossiping over coffee in mugs they’d filled at home – this was in the days before there was a Starbucks on every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Grand Ol’ Opry, I like to believe I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. But only on the verge – where I faithfully remain. I had returned to my career in education as an assistant principal, trying to impress on someone – by someone I mean me – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”
Sophie was not impressed at all and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. In retrospect, I made this a much bigger deal than it needed to be, realizing eventually that there must be some sort of lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry. By accident, I discovered that if I didn’t put things in the tumble dryer, the dry-clean only blouses turned out just fine. So after forty odd years, I have taken umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans. I still don’t get the concept of a dryer for people who live in a desert. The clothes will dry if we just hang them on a clothesline, but nobody in our Phoenix neighborhood had a clothes line in the backyard. Bizarre, given that the sun shines most days and also that “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, having grown up in Northern Ireland. In the old country, everybody hangs clothes out on the line and then runs like hell to rescue them when the rain invariably falls. I remember the first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check from not-really-a-job as a receptionist at a local “leisure” center, was a tumble dryer from the Electricity Board.
I know this is fast becoming a rant, that has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in Phoenix? I once asked my late husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. Clearly, the directions were lost on him or he had an aversion to phrases like “tumble dry low,” “remove quickly from dryer,” “dry flat,” or “dry clean only.” His favorite setting was “Permanent Press,” but I don’t think he ever knew what that meant. Also, he was a man, the kind who never read manuals or labels or asked for directions. Never. To be scrupulously honest, I don’t know what “permanent press” means except it has something to do with often reducing some of my favorite skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. But back when I was pretending to be a grown-up – for a whole year at home with Sophie – he didn’t do the laundry. I did. All the clothes were safe. And so was I. This is not to suggest that I’m dangerous now, but, I am, as earlier noted, on the verge.
In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie wasn’t impressed with me. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl, and she would try to placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it three times, Bonnie showed amazing restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. I know, I know I was irrational to expect that Bonnie would spend hours staring – as Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) – at my beautiful girl and cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something for the first time. Anything. I was mad and sad that I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or cracked a nut – this was a thing in her Montessori classroom – or completed a puzzle. I would miss telling her father, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – about any time she had experienced another developmental milestone like that time she had spoken her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – for daddy – or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – who had the magic trick to distract my inconsolable daughter and make the damn crying stop. Walking away from my little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I’d pretend to leave, but instead I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on but also with the window down so I could continue to listen to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. I would wait until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and when she finally stopped, I would reapply my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and not even a glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Meanwhile, all the other mother’s children were crying. It always amazed me that out of that early morning cacophony, each of us could pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety. Mothers know the cries of their babies.
Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt. Like me, Appelt knew the anguish of leaving a child. She experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”
I found it on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times – on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read to Sophie the story of Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
How it eased those morning goodbyes with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. And there were lots of them. Never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew her best, we kept switching schools. By the time she was in 2nd grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. That one teacher never showed up.
I remember one summer she took a drawing class at a community college, and I remember watching from my car as she strode onto the campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. She was as tall as me but infinitely more brave. I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. And she did. She never lets me down. Kathi Appelt’s rhyming verse still sparkles:
So blow a kiss and wave good-bye –
my baby, don’t you cry.
This love is always with you
Like the sun is in the sky.
Thus our days began, each of us released to our respective distractions and mundanities, finding therein both delight and difficulty, the way we all do. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, things that matter and things that don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s doing, and I’ll find myself smiling as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love – a tiny red heart – so cleverly hidden on each page.
And sometimes, I wish this book had been available to my own mother, given all the goodbyes and the sweet reunions we have shared at airports on either side of the Atlantic. I love that my baby girl knew that the love was all around long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in Love Actually.
In the end, if you’re looking for love, you are sure to find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.
Happy Birthday, Sophie. It’s a privilege to be your mother.
Having worked in education for over thirty years, it is not uncommon for me to encounter – in real life or the virtual version – my former students, all grown-up, some of them married with careers and children. Surreal to find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were scribbling in composition books about who they might become. They are often incredulous to discover I am now the mother of a daughter who is over a decade older than they were when they sat in my classroom. Equally perturbed by this scenario and its implications is my daughter. It amuses me to watch my students confront the truth that I had a life outside their classroom, and my daughter acknowledge again that once upon a time I was not her mother and other people’s children took up most of my time and even considered me cool with great taste in clothes and music.
And, before that, there was another time when I was younger than she, bored and adolescent, rolling my eyes as my mother told me from behind the ironing board, “Daughter dear, the world is your oyster,” and maybe to charm me out of my ennui, she would add, “you have the heart of a lion.” Non-plussed, I probably dismissed her as someone who had no life before I came along, someone who could never have been a hopeful teenager or somebody’s BFF or the one with the great sense of style. What a fool I was. My mother was all of these . . .
She is far away today, in the place that made her, South Derry, the distance between there and here stretched taut on Mothering Sunday. A phone call or a visit on Facetime will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it will not be the same as handing her a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table or spotting a suitably showy Mother’s Day card on the mantelpiece. Even if I were there, I would still have to stay away, adhering to the rules of social distancing that are in place all over the globe to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the crisis that has only begun to unfold.
When we spoke by phone earlier today, she sounded vexed and resigned as she relayed the ways in which her ways of living have changed in recent weeks. She and my father have been warned not to go out – the village supermarket now presents a threat to them. So too does the church that has always been their refuge, and it is to that space I am drawn today, to an enduring memory of my brother and me.
It is perhaps 1975, and we are scrubbed clean and uncomfortable in our Sunday best. We join a crooked line with all the other children, and make our way to the front of the aisle of Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church, where each of us collects from a beaming Reverend Thornton a single fresh flower to give to our mother.
Fresh flowers.
My mother is wholly responsible for my appreciation – and expectation still – of flowers as apology, get-well wish, gratitude, birthday greeting, or a just-because (like the asters and tulips da used to pull from our garden and hastily wrap in newspaper as a present for my primary school teachers). Before all the shops shut down, before we were warned about the ease with which this virus can spread, I had planned again to send flowers this year along with gourmet chocolate brownies from a company in the Cotswolds. I knew the latter would remind her of a Christmas night in Phoenix, when I baked a pan of chocolate fudge brownies while she and my dad napped. More than that, the appeal of the chocolate brownie company is in its packaging. The product arrives in a brown paper package tied up with string, the kind of package that for years has traveled across the sea from my mother’s address to mine.
Since the late 1980s my mother has sent such packages – boxes filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not immediately remember, chocolate for my daughter, the obligatory three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion crisps, teabags, and something for me to wear. This last is typically something for which she paid too much, and something I never need, but she always dismisses it as “just-something-to-throw-on”. My late husband was always intrigued by the brown wrapping paper and the string, unaware – as was I – that, by all accounts, consumer demand for my mother’s type of handiwork would become mainstream. Ordinarily, I am but a few clicks away from artisanal gift-wrapping, jam-making and even the knitting of very complicated Aaran sweaters, all of which she has practiced and perfected since she was a girl – not because it was organic or trendy, but out of necessity. But this is an extraordinary time.
My mother’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson. Behind the counter, she learned, among other things, to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. In the same way she had learned to bake and sew by watching her mother, she watched proprietor, Jim Crawford, skillfully wrap parcels for the customers. Soon she was expertly packaging sweets and biscuits – Rich Tea or Arrowroot – that would deliver a taste of home to neighbors further afield, like Mrs O’Connor’s daughter across the water in England. Always efficient, Mr. Crawford had even devised a method of tying newspapers with string so news could travel easily to his relatives in America or Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, quick to remind me that all this wrapping and knot-tying was long before there was any such thing as Scotch tape, and instead she carefully poured hot sealing wax over the knotted string. There is heart and craft in such an activity, so much that I cannot bring myself to open these Mid-Ulster dispatches. They remain in a drawer in my Phoenix kitchen – preserved ordinariness, a tribute to the way things used to be, the way they might be again.
I have no idea how the ”Mothering Sunday” tradition began; it may, like a lot of things, have its origins in mythology. It is certainly a red-letter day for the greeting card companies with people like me handing over a fistful of dollars for a folded piece of card-stock emblazoned with a generic message and a stock photograph. In truth, my mother’s day card purchases may have been less about making ma’s day and more about assuaging my guilt over having put down roots so far away from home.
Thus, it is a marked day, Mothering Sunday, and I wonder about its impact on a day that also belongs to adult children without mothers and to mothers with sick children, to women who ache to be biological mothers but are unable, to mothers whose children no longer speak to them and to children whose mothers have disowned them perhaps over a grudge or because the Alzheimer’s has rendered them strangers. What of them?
My mother was the first and best woman I will ever know. As those former students remind my daughter, I remind myself again that my mother has always been the woman who would be my best friend. I just didn’t always know it.
The truth is that greeting cards and cheery bouquets mean little to this woman who has tossed and turned too many nights since November 11th 2011, when the phone rang too late to bring good news. I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on telly, so she could hear me deliver the news that broke her heart. “What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And then too soon, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone again, unable to mend my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from me.
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands, that I will stay away.
So thank you, ma. On Mother’s Day and every day. I love you.
I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos.
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.
