In his 2010 TED talk, Photos That Changed the World, co-founder of Getty, Jonathan Klein, maintains that a picture can make the world a better place. With clear-eyed compassion, he proves his point, presenting a series of images many of us know well, images from which we can neither look away nor back.
In her book, The Rise, Sarah Lewis refers to this power, this “aesthetic force” as the thing that will force us into action, perhaps even to justice:
. . . it leaves us changed — stunned, dazzled, knocked out. It can quicken the pulse, make us gape, even gasp with astonishment. Its importance is its animating trait — not what it is, but what it does to those who behold it in all its forms. Its seeming lightness can make us forget that it has weight, force enough to bring about a self-correction, the acknowledgment of failure at the heart of justice — the moment when we reconcile our past with our intended future selves. Few experiences get us to this place more powerfully . . . than the emotive power of aesthetic force.
The images are iconic – Princess Diana holding a baby infected with HIV/AIDS; a little girl, naked and terrified, burned by Napalm in Vietnam; a young woman, arms outstretched and wailing over the body of a slain student at Kent State University. Faced with such pictures, what must we do? We cannot look away. We cannot retreat to the place we knew before seeing that image.
Klein also recognizes that there are images sometimes deemed too upsetting for us to see them, images from the front-line, from natural disasters; images that expose with harrowing candor, man’s inhumanity to man. The image on the front page of The Irish Examiner, The Independent and other newspapers today is that of a tiny boy identified as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi. In his little red T-shirt and shorts, he is lying face-down on the water’s edge at a beach in Turkey. Drowned. Washed up with his mother and brother.
Like human litter.
Desperate to escape the war in their homeland, Syrian refugees are fleeing by the tens of thousands. The little boy is one of 12 refugees who drowned in one of two boats bound for the Greek island of Kos. He is one of 2,500 people, according to UNHR who have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean in 2015. Is that enough dead people to bring us to do what is right and just and humane? is the sight of a dead toddler on the beach enough? What is the point of documenting the death toll l if we do nothing about it?
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off,
~ Paul Brodeur
From afar, we can look at the pictures and read the stories of entire families drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. We can listen – or tune out – as those in power debate and discuss where people belong or if they belong anywhere. They are unrelenting, quibbling over definitions of words like ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant,’ or where to draw the line that somehow separates “genuine” from its opposite in matters of ‘asylum.’ Amid this noise, they might distance themselves, but will they look away, unchanged, from the little boy in the bright red T-shirt, dead in the sand on a Turkish beach?
This earth belonged to him as it belongs to us. It is the only home we will ever know, and its possibilities diminish when our hearts harden about our place in it, about the people with whom we share it, and about the mark we leave upon it. We know better, we know, as poet Damian Gorman says, “Life is not always possible where you start out . . . ” It is time to do better.
LET PEOPLE COME
by Damian Gorman
If life, decent life, is not possible where you are, you have the right to move anywhere where you might find it – anywhere in the world – including the house attached to my house, in my part of the world.
And it’s not even a right. It’s in you, this particular urge. Like the stretch that’s inside bones; like the workings of the heart and lungs.
And I know that life should be possible where you start out. Yes it should be, and that’s a big issue that we should speak, and do other things about. But life is not always possible where you start out. And, rather than welcome people fleeing from unbearable want, we erect walls and ask people to stand in the gated gaps of them to say – on our behalf – ‘You have no business here.’
And what is the result?
The result is a dreadful soup of humanity in an abandoned truck on the Austro-Hungarian border; an awful stew which might contain 20 people or 50 people. But actually 71 people.
The result is bodies littering the waters of the Mediterranean like the discarded wrappings of things.
And still the walls go up. And still we employ people to say for us, ‘You have no business here, in this place, among us.’
Well my point – my only point – is this: that there is no clear-cut, no necessarily-big distance between saying to desperate people ‘You have no business here, among us’ and ‘You have no business here, in this world.’
LET PEOPLE COME.
Agus ta failte romhaibh,
And you are welcome.
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
My husband always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant that he wouldn’t have to miss me. A private man, he also insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do or say; maybe he thought it would be easier if he just disappeared into nothingness without ceremony. He would have been wrong.
Like a catechism, I know what to do and say. It is part of the culture that formed me, and I am bound to it. Friends from back home agree that it is sewn tidily in our DNA – we know to mark the time of death, to stop the clocks and cover the mirrors, to draw down the blinds and close the curtains; we know what to say and do when led silently into a bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out”; we know how to pay our respects in private and in public, how to offer condolences over china cups of tea balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, when to whisper and weep or when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full.
Without these tiny rituals in the days following Ken’s death, I raged internally and selfishly. Only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the ever-widening distance between the desert southwest of these United States and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to visit a grave and bring flowers, perhaps freesias because he loved their scent. I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye. I wanted to fill the air with his favorite music. I knew he wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. And today, on the second anniversary of our poet’s death, my recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that as a final resting place, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it.
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
I don’t know what Seamus would have made of it but I think he might be pleased enough.
I think so too.
So when I returned to Bellaghy this summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross stood in the dirt. This time, I was a widow, changed and contemplative, convinced that cosmic strings keep us connected. This time, I wondered about the spiritual space in which both men might move. Where are they? Are they afraid?
In Stepping Stones,Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll that he did not fear death the way he had done as a boy.
It’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.
So when people tell me my husband is in a better place now, I can’t help but rail against them. What place could be better than here with his daughter, the girl he loved so much and so well? What place could be better than in our dining room to light eighteen candles on her birthday cake or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or in the audience to cheer her on and whistle as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma, or when she earned her first paycheck? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come? Is there a more desolate space than his empty seat at the table?
It has been one year, nine months, and fourteen days since Ken died, and my growing preoccupation is with wanting to know where he is. Where is he? Some days, it feels as though he just went missing. Where is he? It is a confounding, gnawing question. It is unrelenting, different from the madness that accompanied the early urgent grip of grief, the all-consuming quest to fix the unfixable, stop time, close distance, find the right word, and do the right thing. Doing the right thing – as Ken had requested – felt wrong.
He did not want to be buried in the ground. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes – all of them – strewn on a piece of ground in the desert, at the base of Black Mountain, where his childhood home had once stood. It represented his beginning. It was his first place.
We obliged. My parents, far from their Castledawson home, our daughter, and a close friend did as Ken asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man who had loved me? That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. I recall fixating on this detail and wondering about Ken’s soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it? Where was Ken? Where is Ken?
About a month ago, my daughter and I returned to the spot where we had spread his ashes, assuming it would be unchanged, frozen in time. Instead, “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. An empty space – for now. Heartsick, I wept for him, for my naturalist, even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one moment would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. He had grown resigned to the price of urban progress. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no grave for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on his birthday, or on the anniversaries of the day we met or the day we married, the day our girl was born, or the day of his death.
Another blow.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new headstone in place for today, the second anniversary of his death. The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second.
Ken, you are neither here nor there. You are everywhere, and that is reason enough for “keeping going.”
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And find the heart unlatched and blow it open.
So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
Best Friends: Gloria & Edgar
First there was Molly, a retired racer who loved me. We had rescued her in the Christmas of 2008, on the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, and she lifted my heart. Molly adored me, and the feeling was mutual. Elegant and affectionate, she knew how to be retired. But the separation anxiety was too much for her, and because I was unable to spend every minute of the day with her, I had to surrender her to the Greyhound Adoption Agency. Heartbroken, I promised myself – and my husband – that we would just stick to cats.
Then one early October morning a few years later, Edgar came into my life, the moment we met indelible in my memory. My daughter and I had just left the gym, and there he was, standing in the center lane of a street already busy with the rush of Monday morning traffic. Sophie spotted him first, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car. She jumped out, and flailing wildly at oncoming traffic, she successfully brought it to a momentary standstill that allowed her to scoop up the tiny Chihuahua that trembled in the widening beam of the headlights before him, name him Edgar, and announce that he would be moving in with us.
In spite of having just completed several miles on a treadmill, I had not yet had my coffee. I was neither happy nor ready for a Monday or the prospect of a Chihuahua. Rather than argue or rise to the bait, I told myself we would post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, and by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.
Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. He was shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, and Sophie was vexed that she could see his little ribs so plainly. Without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with the beautiful Molly, a new dog was probably not in the cards. Her dad and I had established an unspoken rule – we were always good at that. One cat. No more dogs. No way.
But there were tell-tale signs that the unlikely Chihuahua was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he’d ask. Repeatedly. Rhetorically. He bought dog food. He drove around the neighborhood, looking for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. Daily, he checked the newspaper and Craigslist to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took him to the Humane Society where he was informed that they didn’t take lost dogs. Still, they checked for a microchip. There wasn’t one. They estimated his age at about five years old, determined that “Edgar” hadn’t been neutered or cared for. He had bad breath and worse teeth. Malnourished and dirty, he weighed three pounds. Barely.
Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. He was like a bag of sugar, so dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He came running when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all in love with him, because, as poet Mary Oliver reminds us,
. . of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
A month later, my daughter and I were far away in Northern Ireland, leaving Edgar and the cat at home with my husband. It was dusk when we were with my parents and the blacksmith’s son in The Forge in South Derry, in Seamus Heaney country. We were there because I had given up waiting for a friend to come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. With Van out of my mind and Barney Devlin’s son regaling us with the story behind the the midnight anvil – the one with the sweeter sound – I was in my element and couldn’t wait to tell Ken about it, knowing only he knew my affection for all things Heaney. When I called him, there was no answer. The unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls continued to go straight to voice mail, transported me into a panic. A certain and unshakeable foreboding had me in a vice. It was not to be ignored.
Next, a flurry of texts between my best friend and me, in different time zones, on different continents. I was on the phone with her when she arrived at my house and looked through the bay window to see Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what she would find after she found the keys under the doormat and called my husband’s name three times over before finding his lifeless body, hoping he was just resting but knowing – as Edgar did – that he was dead.
I don’t know and will never know his final thoughts, but I must believe that when he died in our Phoenix home, my Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
Late in the first summer following Ken’s death, Sophie told me that her day begins not with sorrow over the loss of her beloved daddy but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile. He is ready – always – to help her get ready to walk out into the world. “What about Edgar?” she pondered over pancakes one morning. “What if he spends every day just waiting by the door for me to come home? Doesn’t he need a friend to keep him company?”
Yes. He does. Don’t we all?
So I did a little research. I found out that dogs like Edgar are indeed in need of friends. According to the Arizona Humane Society, dogs like him have replaced pit bulls as the most abandoned breed. From January to March of this year, 821 Chihuahuas have been surrendered or brought into the shelter for a variety of reasons. In 2013, the Arizona Humane Society and the Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, the two largest shelters in Phoenix, received 10,535 Chihuahuas and euthanized 2,100.
Knowing this, how could I not find a friend for Edgar? Off I went to the Arizona Small Dog Rescue after work one day, having spent my lunch hour perusing picture after picture of tiny dogs who needed a home, one in particular – a little black and tan Miniature Pinscher Chihuahua mix, just two years old. The volunteer told me she had come from a “hoarding situation,” that she had been caged for most of her two years, that she was “as sweet as can be, quiet, mild mannered and gets along with all dogs and people who are nice to her.”
And with that, I knew she would be coming home with me, that Edgar would have a new companion, that we would name her “Gloria” – with a nod to the most requested encore at a Van Morrison concert and, of course, Ms. Steinem – and that my 16-year old daughter’s tender heart would expand once more.
Terri Hooley has decided to close down the Good Vibrations record shop on June 13th. This one’s for him – again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .”
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie knew what I’d like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I wept for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget about all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast to Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978 – about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983 (feeling flush with my university grant check). I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle right in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. Making a mix tape was a labor of love – there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode”
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And I cannot.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the 
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
