The 74-year old man in black still sounds like the Robert Plant in your memory … the one who never failed to hit the paint-peeling high notes on a Led Zeppelin classic, the one who belongs up there on a Mount Rushmore of rock and roll frontmen.
A sold-out crowd at the University of Arizona’s Centennial Hall is on its feet by the end of a revamped ‘Rock and Roll, and then a kind of hush as Plant leans into “Please Read The Letter.” It’s a slow-burn of a song that hints at infidelity and mistakes that can’t be fixed. It’s also a song about the way we used to set words down on a page. With intention. It’s a song about making sure that what must be said is said —and heard. Goodbye. I’m sorry. I miss you. Thank you.
Written by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in 1997, the song transports me back to a time before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets, a time when letters helped close the distance between us. Requiring a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us, letters forced us to slow down even as the world around us spun at increasing velocity.
I miss them and all that Simon Garfield says we’ve lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.” I miss walking out to a red brick mailbox, to find a red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail –Par Avion. I marveled at the journey of such a fragile thing, imagining all the hands it passed through on its way to me from a red pillar box in a rainy Northern Ireland village all the way over the Atlantic Ocean and on to the Arizona desert. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely-there fragrance of her soap.
Against the beat of a steady snare drum, Robert Plant takes me back. With exquisite harmonies and an unexpected fiddle solo from Alison Krauss, I find myself sitting down to read a letter …
While sorting through papers one evening, de-cluttering and discarding, I found folded in four between a hand-made card and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor, a letter from a former student. I’m embarrassed to admit I do not remember the woman who took the time to explain in writing her decision to withdraw from my Introduction to World Literature class, nor do I recall how I received her letter. Had she turned it in with an assignment? I don’t know. I don’t even know her full name. I’m guessing that in her effort to explain herself on just one side of the note-book paper, she had to tightly position her signature—Carol F.— in the bottom right corner – diminutive and different from the great loops of flowing cursive that had preceded it.
I never saw Carol F. again. Almost a quarter of a century later, I want her to know I read the letter and that I appreciate it.
9.17.1999
Dear Ms. W.
I wanted to write you a note to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your class. You are a delight and a terrific teacher. We have just learned that my mom has cancer, and it is in the brain, lung, and bones. We don’t have much time, and I need every minute I have to be with her. I remember you saying that your mom is your best friend – it is the same with me – and I hardly know how I can get through life without her.
I wanted you to know also, that because her eyesight has been going – and she has always been an avid reader (and all the zillions of stories she read to us . . . do you know of the poem, “You may have riches and gold – but I had a mother that read to me . . . “?) She has been so frustrated not being able to read, so I have been reading to her. I read her “My Oedipus Complex,” and oh, how we giggled – I told her that I wish she could have heard you read it, with that slight, but wonderful Irish accent! So I was especially glad to have O’Connor’s other story – “First Confession” that you handed out. We call them his ‘little boy stories’ – and they have brought her smiles. The Oedpius Complex was especially wonderful, because my father was a pilot in the Army, and was in Korea and WWII so – she with 3 boys (and 2 girls) could certain relate to ‘Daddy’ coming home and the competition for her attention.
Isn’t it strange – I bet you don’t think about the ways you touch other lives – but you have added something beautiful to ours, when we most needed it. I will in time retake this course – so I will be looking for YOUR class.
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
I won’t be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides during Teacher Appreciation Week this year. We should honor our teachers and their craft. They’re exhausted – and after three school years navigating multiple challenges and crises wrought by COVID – under-appreciated. Millions of them learned to teach from their homes, to harness the power of whatever technology was available to them to maintain a connection with their students, many of whom they didn’t see for months, many of whom dropped out. Teachers improvised – with phone calls and postcards and hand-written letters to the families without access to home computers and the online Zoom classrooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch grid.
Good teachers know that the most important subject in a school is their students. They understand that all students enter the classroom – online or off – with the same basic needs – to feel safe, to learn, to matter. Some children, especially those struggling during the pandemic with hunger or poverty or an unsafe home, will remember the schools and teachers who went above and beyond to make sure they made it through. As Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity.
He can never tell where his influence stops.
Come away with me to the classroom with your favorite teacher’s name on the door. You know the one. Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your drawing in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish a book report because your mother was in the hospital, and who you overheard one day tell a student during detention, “You will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love. Never.” Or maybe it was the history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind drifts to the fields of the Antebellum South every time you use a cotton ball.
Each of us should have this extraordinary teacher.
For me, it was Mr. Jones, my English teacher. A teenager when I first encountered him, I knew nothing about pedagogy, but because of him, I learned what great teaching looked like. It looked like Mr. Jones in his classroom every day at Antrim Grammar School. Then a young man at the beginning of his career, he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but more importantly, he was accessible. The best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of Richard Church’s Over the Bridge or the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart:
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
For emphasis, he would add “Great stuff!”
Every time.
Mr. Jones created a classroom that was a place of hope during often hopeless and harrowing days in 1970s Northern Ireland. The daughter of working-class parents who pushed me to do well in school, I was the first in the extended family to pass the 11+ exam that gained me a spot at Antrim Grammar, the posh school, where the headmaster and teachers showed up to morning assembly in Hogwarts-style black gowns. Insecure and unsure of my place there, I loved how Mr. Jones took us away from all that, indulging with good humor, our wrong answers and red herrings and the questions we were never afraid to ask. I remember one day I raised my hand to ask what “pre-Raphaelite” meant, and I jotted down the definition in the margin of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. A few minutes later, I raised my hand to ask if I could go to the toilet, and when I returned to the classroom, Mr. Jones asked – but not unkindly – if I had looked in the mirror to consider if perhaps I too had pre-Raphaelite features like the coquettish Eustacia Vye. Of course I had looked in the mirror. I also remember the day I said out loud that I was surprised one of the women in the novel had turned out to be “that type of woman,” and Mr. Jones, glasses balanced on his head, looked right at me and said, “Yvonne, there is no type. Remember that.” I have never forgotten it.
In these seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones revealed to us a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. He even let me borrow his records. But then back to business, he would painstakingly guide us through the required reading for O-level and A-level English exams, the routines and rituals of his classroom elevating an ordinary space into a place of possibility. Every. Single. Day.
Conversely, I also encountered teachers who didn’t seem to like children very much – the strident PE teacher who watched as we showered and questioned the validity of notes our mothers had written to excuse us from swimming because we were menstruating. She even asked for evidence. There were teachers who used sarcasm and big words as they undermined working class parents who lacked a formal education but more than made up for it with hard work and a desire to know the things to do and say that would help ensure their children a place at university, a competitive edge in a world foreign to them. Parents like mine.
When I think back to my parents observing their university-bound daughter, I am reminded of something Seamus Heaney once told Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
From this vantage point, my mother – my first teacher – took pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our textbooks. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table, late one September evening after our first day back at school. One at a time, she places each of our new books carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown parcel paper. With a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.
One September, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look easy. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected me to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up while he berated me in front of everyone, told me I was useless, and that he didn’t want to hear another word about my mother in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and almost 50 years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face.
I never forgave him.
In the classroom across the hall, however, and because of Mr. Jones, I mattered, and I knew that I mattered. This might explain why I became a teacher and remained a teacher for so many years, driven I suppose by the hope that kids in my classroom might feel they mattered too.
By the time I had spent more than a decade as a teacher, Mr. Jones had moved on to s new teaching post at Friends School in Lisburn. It makes me smile to consider the possibility that, on the same day, Mr. Jones and I might have been introducing our respective students on either side of the Atlantic, to Robert Frost’s Birches.
Years later, curious about where his career had taken him, and hoping to connect with him so I could say thank you, I searched online, where I found in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter a tribute to my favorite teacher, now middle-aged and retired
Mr Terry Jones, Senior Teacher, joined the staff at Friends’ from Antrim Grammar School as Head of the English Department in 1996. At the heart of his teaching was an abiding love of literature, an endless enthusiasm for books and reading, that enriched and enlivened all in his classroom over the years. At the heart of his work in school were kindness, warmth and good sense – qualities that drew the best from pupils and fostered the good relationships so important in our community. A man with many interests, those good relationships extended throughout the staff at Friends’ and Terry Jones was a most highly valued colleague and friend. Calm and steadfast in upholding what is really important in education, Terry Jones made an immense contribution and his example will be a pattern for those who worked with him here in years to come. There is no doubt that retirement will be busy and fulfilling and Terry Jones has our thanks and very best wishes for the future.
At the heart of his work were kindness, warmth, and good sense – the likes of which we saw from teachers everywhere during COVID-19. Perhaps it took a pandemic for us to notice that good teachers are essential.
I stayed at home with my daughter the year after she was born. It was the best year of my life, with Sophie attached to me in one of those baby carriers without which I would have been unprepared for motherhood. That’s what the salesperson in Babies R Us said.
Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. I was usually bare-faced unlike Dolly Parton, who is always in full-make up, “ambulance, tornado, and earthquake ready” – and who is always – always – ready with the right words at the right time.
Some days, I showered. Most days, I resembled the child I once was, the one who had to be reminded more than once to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play; the child who made wishes on dandelions and chains out of buttercups and daisies. I loved playing with my very own and very real baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with the softest toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her dad off at work, she was all mine. Drunk on new baby smell, I danced in the afternoons around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road.” Over 25 years later, I can still smell it.
In those first months of her life, I spent interminable hours looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. I examined every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents. I often paused to ponder how it was that two imperfect people had made perfection. She would stared back, cooing like a little bird, babbling and gurgling before discovering the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, Sophie bounced with joy and curiosity. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered. I still do, albeit virtually and to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the minute she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me to do this, reminding me there would be plenty of times as an adult when Sophiewould have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. My mother was right.
If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting in some sort of emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency – like the night I spent in the ICU following eight hours of surgery while my daughter wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep.
I hate cancer.
When it was time for me to return to work after that year at home with her, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that came immediately before and continuing some time after I placed her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where all the other mothers appeared not to have jobs outside the home. Every morning, they loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstocks, drinking coffee from mugs filled at home. This was in that time before a Starbucks occupied every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I imagine I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. An assistant principal at the time, I was trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother” who could do it all and have it all and “lean in” blah, blah, blah. I’ll tell you. I’ve had my fill of leaning in.
Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. I made this a much bigger deal than it was, eventually discovering that if I didn’t put the blouses in the tumble dryer, they survived. Realizing there must be a lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry, I took a lasting umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans.
For all the years I lived in sunny Arizona – where any Northern Ireland mother will tell you there’s “great drying” most every day – I never understood why I owned a dryer. Where I grew up, everybody hung the washing out on the line and then ran like hell to rescue it when the rain invariably began. The first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board.
I remember I once asked my late husband about the logic of owning a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me like I had two heads. He loved that machine so much that he used it to dry all clothes, regardless of fabric. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, and he used it for all my favorite clothes too. I’m not sure I know today what this setting means. It doesn’t press anything permanently, but it has done a bang-up job of reducing some of my skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. To be fair, when I was pretending to be a grown-up with a real job that required more than pajamas, he didn’t do my laundry. I did. All my clothes were safe. I was too.
My safe clothes and my sensible job held no clout with Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed her my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie attempted to placate me with repeated reassurances that Sophie would be fine as soon as I left. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it at least three times, Bonnie showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation. I wrestled with the reality that Bonnie had other children to attend to. She would not be spending hours like Madonna – mother of Jesus, not Lourdes – at my perfect child or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when Sophie did something for the first time. Anything.
I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or blew bubbles or cracked a nut in the classroom nutcracker. Not your typical developmental milestones, but Bonnie’s boss deemed them important. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that she had experienced another genuis-level achievement like that time she spoke her first word – daddy – or when she clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of our hands and stood straight like a little warrior to an ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
If I’m honest – all these years later – I could have and maybe I should have stayed at home for another year. And another.
I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie, with some magic trick up her sleeve, who would charm Sophie’s tears away. Every day, I walked away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” pretending to leave but I stayed in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, prolonging the agony, listening to Sophie cry. When the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop, I reapplied my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Off I went – to work for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt who understood the rhythm of these daily separations – and reunions – and 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 Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind—she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”
I found it on a discard table in a Borders when central Phoenix still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically—and in the shape of a little red heart— 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 our secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased the morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and all the other teachers throughout the years. There were lots of them. I was never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was Sophie’s first teacher, that I knew her best. By the time she was in 2nd grade, Sophie had become a tourist in Arizona’s 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. We never stopped looking. I’m not sure the superhero teacher ever showed up, and Sophie’s formal education is now over with her post-graduate program completed.
One summer morning, I watched from my car as she strode onto a community college campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. As tall as me but braver, I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. She did. She never lets me down.
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.
Sometimes, in an unguarded moment – me in Mexico, Sophie in Arizona – between emails and Zoom meetings, home improvement projects and grocery store runs, things that matter and things that don’t, we’ll each wonder what the other is doing and pick up the phone.
She’s only a phone call away, a couple of hours on a plane, and although I miss her terribly, I can’t help but smile 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 tiny red heart leverly hidden on each page.
Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scatted around my home – and hers – are little reminders in stone and glass and fabric that the love actually is all around – something we have known long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in. If you’re looking for love, you can always 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.
In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for a clothesline strung across the backyard. Reminiscent of the rhythms of rural County Derry, it is a place peopled with the kind of characters that fill Seamus Heaney’s poems – men like my father, makers of things.
The other day, the stonemason working on the wall around our house, asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall?
It’s one of my favorite pictures – her T-shirt reminding me the way she always does, “good things will come.” It is my darling girl’s birthday, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places once again this year, we’ll have to make do with text messages and embarrassing photos on Facebook instead of a celebration here in Mexico. I’m going to wake up missing her and remembering that it’s really hard to 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, and I’m pretty sure it will always be – 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 the kind of “parenting” Nora Ephron warned us about, 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 I felt like walking out to the mailbox – unlike Dolly Parton who checks the mail in full makeup and heels and while we’re on the subject absolutely should be Time’s Person of the Year 2021 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 masks, social distancing, and, well, science. 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, she 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. On long-distance telephone calls, my mother urged me to do so by reminding me the way only an Irish mammy can, to mark her words 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 spent in the ICU following over 8 hours 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 Sophie to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – especially mine – that preceded and continued for some time after the moment I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in khaki shorts from the Gap and Birkenstock sandals, gossiping over coffee in mugs 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 Ryman, 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 remain. I had returned to a career in public education, trying to impress on someone – myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”
Sophie was unimpressed by all of this 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. Therefore, I took umbrage against the dryer, and to this day rarely feed it anything other than towels and jeans and my boyfriend’s T-shirts.
I never really understood the concept of a dryer for people who live in sunny places. 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. We didn’t. And, this is odd. Not just because the sun shines 300 days a year there, but also because I’m from Northern Ireland, where “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, where 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.
Airing all this laundry has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in places like Phoenix? I once asked my late husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. He wasn’t very good at it – the drying of things. He either didn’t read them or had an aversion to directions 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 either 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, as earlier noted, I am on the verge.
In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie was nonplussed. 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, she showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. I know – of course I know – that it 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 subsequently documenting 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 big deal in the 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 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 – and for daddy, “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 because it was hot (because it was Phoenix) and 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 watching from my car as she strode onto the community college campus one summer 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.
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, between emails and Zoom 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 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. Before you pounce on me with all the reasons why it’s a terrible movie and I’m therefore un-evolved for loving it, I don’t care. I agree with the fictional PM – 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.
Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically—and in the shape of a little red heart— 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.
The other day, the stonemason working on the wall around our house, asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall?
