moving memories from New York to Phoenix
10 Tuesday Sep 2013
Category Archives: Themes of childhood
Belated Birthday Greetings to an American Girl . . .
24 Saturday Aug 2013
Tags
AARP Magazine, Arizona, Arpaio, civil liberties, Dolores Huerta, Immigration March, Joe Arpaio, Linda Ronstadt, Mexican Americans, Parkinson's Disease, Simple Dreams, Stone Poneys, Tent City, The Eagles
The radio reminded me that it was Linda Ronstadt’s 73rd birthday yesterday. Driving back from Tucson, her hometown, and listening to the DJ tell us that in these parts she is now better known for covering traditional mariachi songs and political appearances as a political activist, I rewind the tapes in my head and there she is on The Old Grey Whistle Test belting out “When Will I be Loved?” This is very long ago. I’m 16 and bored and wishing I was in America, wishing I was just like Linda Ronstadt. She was my girl crush.
Today, Linda Ronstadt can’t sing like that. She can’t sing at all.
I first found out that she had Parkinson’s disease in an interview with AARP magazine,
No one can sing with Parkinson’s disease. No matter how hard you try.
In her memoir, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, Ronstadt writes that “people sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.” This was why Linda Ronstadt sang.
Past tense.
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer. I had crazy dreams of hanging out with Whispering Bob on The Old Grey Whistle Test. I really did. I was 12 years old and living in Antrim, Northern Ireland, when Linda Ronstadt released the Prisoner in Disguise album. By the time I moved out to go to college in Belfast, I knew by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. When her voice rang out from Downtown Radio, I sang along, deluding myself that I was within her range. She covered the best of everything – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – and she exposed me to the musicians who would score the soundtrack of my life. I think I bought all Little Feat’s albums because she covered their songs, and I only liked the Eagles because they were her backing vocalists. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. And even though they worked for her, she lacked confidence.
I got tougher being on the road with the Eagles. I walked differently, I became more foulmouthed. I swore so much I sounded like a truck driver. But that’s the way it was. I was the only girl on the road so the boys always kind of took charge. They were working for me, and yet it always seemed like I was working for them.
Listening to her records, I would never have imagined the woman behind that heartsome voice could know vulnerability or inadequacy. I should know better. Moving through the world to the beat of a different drum is not always easy. And, before the Silence Breakers were featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2017, helping galvanize the #MeToo movement, Linda Ronstadt had already spoken out, sharing the story of what happened when one of the producers on the Johnny Cash show called her to share notes about her performance. When he offered to come to her hotel room, she turned him down, but then relented, believing he just loved her work and wanted to help her.
I should have followed my first instinct . . . because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing.
When she threatened to call security, “he said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South).”
No one would believe her. Of course no one would believe her. #MeToo
I loved everything I knew about her. Mostly her voice. It was all-American, and I wanted to be an American girl. I imitated her accent (the way everyone not from America can sing in an American accent), singing along as she covered, with gusto, Neil Young’s Love is a Rose, Little Feat’s “Roll um Easy,” or – what would eventually become a kind of anthem for my own life, Different Drum. Linda Ronstadt was the reason for my big hoop earrings, the perm I didn’t need, the shirts tied at the waist, off the shoulder peasant blouses, and the odd flower in my hair. I wanted to be her, to stride onstage in a mini-skirt with a tambourine and belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, leaving the Eagles gobsmacked. Or maybe it would be Lowell George’s “Willin” on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the song that still plays in my head every time I see truck drivers pulling into the weigh station this side of the California border:
When I traded Northern Ireland for America and settled in Arizona, I remember feeling a tiny thrill that I had landed in the state where Linda Ronstadt lived, but I never got to see her perform. After suffering those early symptoms of Parkinson’s, she performed her final concert in 2009. Still, our paths almost crossed. And, it had nothing to do with music but everything to do with America.
On the morning of January 16, 2010, more than twenty thousand of us gathered in Phoenix to march from Falcon Park to Sheriff Joe Arpaio‘s Tent City. We were there, in peace, to raise our voices against the Maricopa County Sheriff Office’s immigration tactics, and the indiscriminate attacks and raids against undocumented immigrants living in Maricopa County. True to form, “America’s toughest sheriff” was unfazed and announced that, from inside his jail, officials would play music over the PA system to drown out our noise – Linda Ronstadt’s music.
People arrived from all over these United States, from as far away as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. We carried signs that bore simple messages of humanity: “We are Human” “and “Stop the Hate.”
Leading us in that march, among others, was heroic United Farm Workers union leader and activist for the rights of farm workers and women, Dolores Huerta, who made an impassioned plea for the removal of officials like Sheriff Arpaio, and as she spoke to the growing yet quietening crowd. As she spoke, I noticed a group of students from Brophy Prep, a local Catholic boy’s school. Bent in prayer, in support of their immigrant peers, they lifted my heart.
And by her side, was Linda Ronstadt. She led us all the way to Tent City, urging everyone to be peaceful. And we were.
I’m here because I’m an Arizonan. I was born in Arizona. My father was born in Arizona. My grandmother was born in Arizona. I love Arizona, and Sheriff Arpaio is bad for Arizona. He’s making Arizona look bad because he’s profiling and he’s applying the law in an uneven and unjust way, and that weakens the law for all of us.
Almost a decade later, our immigration policies still in shambles, and Ronstadt is still an ally for the most vulnerable immigrants among us, encouraging her fans to join her in supporting the work of No More Deaths – No Más Muertes an advocacy group committed to ending the deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the desert near the USA-Mexico border. As temperatures soar above 100 degrees on these hottest days of the year, Ronstadt asks that we give generously to help provide food, water, and aid to migrants facing the most treacherous of desert conditions. An avid supporter of all humanitarian aid activists along the US-Mexico border and a member of Green Valley Samaritans, she knows and understands the brutal conditions of the desert and the plight of migrants who try to cross it. She also knows what America should do to help them.
Earlier this year, she wrote:
“I can think of no more compelling crisis than that now facing the borderlands and my view is this: Every individual has the right to receive and the right to give humanitarian aid, in order to prevent suffering and death – no matter what one’s legal status. To criminalize human kindness is a dangerous precedent.”
Speaking truth to power – as she has always done. Thank you, Linda Ronstadt. For all of it.
In peace, love, and solidarity – un abrazo fuerte.
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omagh – this is our life
15 Thursday Aug 2013
Tags
"Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto", 1994 World Cup, 2004 World Series, bombings, Boston Red Sox, Giants Stadium, Good Friday Agreement, Ireland, John Hewitt, New Jersey, North Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland, Omagh, REAL IRA
In the summer of 1998, I took my new baby daughter home to Northern Ireland, my lovely, tragic Northern Ireland. It was my mother’s sixtieth birthday, and between my father, my brother, and a handful of relatives who could keep a secret (an impressive trait in rural County Derry) we planned a “This is Your Life” style surprise. It was delicious, knowing we had all swallowed the same secret, and that my all-knowing mother was completely in the dark.
The Troubles had tainted previous visits home, but this time was going to be different – no bombs, no shootings, no petrol bombs, no more girls tarred and feathered for falling in love with a boy from the other side. I found something symbolic, magical even, in returning home with a new baby girl in my arms to a new optimism fueled by The Good Friday Agreement.
It had been different four years before. That trip had coincided with Ireland’s qualifying for the World Cup. The country was ecstatic, with factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. We had thought of going to the pub to watch the first-round match, but my father convinced us to stay home, have a few drinks, and watch from the comfort of the living room. So we stayed in and watched – in joyous disbelief – as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. When the lads in green scored a goal, we roared with pride even as we were afraid to look, not unlike Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series.
The second half of the match was well underway when two men, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub, The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men gathered around the bar watching Ireland beat Italy. They killed six of them. According to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was in his eighties, someone’s grandfather, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup.
Chilling even now to think of Barney Green struck down with such savagery in the very moment as that jubilant Irish squad burst out of an American football stadium, awash in green, buoyed by the chanting of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by the hideous dispatch from a country pub back home.
Another atrocity. Another anniversary for the people of Northern Ireland that would leave us wondering again how we would ever recover from the madness that once more brought wrenching anguish to so many. My country is so tiny – I’ve been told it fits into one third of the state of Kansas – I imagine everyone knew someone who knew someone maimed or killed in the largest mass murder in its history. I knew Aidan Rush, a barman at the local pub in my hometown. A relative of his had been killed in the Omagh bombing. I remember wondering what I could possibly say to him by way of condolence, knowing there are no adequate words.
I felt sad and foolish, and I felt cheated, having dared to believe that peace had come to the country I had left but still loved. I should have remembered what Yeats wrote in The Isle of Innisfree, that “peace comes dropping slow.”
For many Northern Ireland families, mine included, the youngest generation knew only a country in conflict. But in 1998, my daughter would witness a new country, a country at peace. The people had voted for it in anticipation of a new era for Northern Ireland. A brand new day. That year, when my mother’s sixtieth birthday arrived, I telephoned in the morning with love and good wishes and a promise that we would arrange a trip home soon. Yes, she had received the flowers I’d sent, and she was looking forward to going out for dinner with my father that evening. On their way, he took a bit of a detour for a quick visit with my Aunt Sadie, where delighted shrieks of “Surprise!”exploded from the well-hidden gathering of family and friends whose cars were parked on another lane, far out of sight. One of my cousins even assumed the role of This is Your Life host, Eamonn Andrews, complete with a big red book, and related the story of my mother’s life to all assembled.
When she reached the part about my mother becoming a grandmother for the first time just eight months earlier, she suggested calling me so that I could at least be part of the celebration by phone. Naturally, I was unavailable, given that two days earlier, I had flown in to Belfast with Sophie, and had been holed up at my Aunt Sadie’s house enjoying secret visits with my dad and my brother, the three of us laughing that my mother – who usually knows everything – was oblivious to all the subterfuge. She was disappointed that I wasn’t home, but was quickly distracted by the doorbell ringing. Thinking it was yet another cousin or a friend with a birthday present, she opened the door to find looking up at her from a nest of pink blankets, her beautiful baby granddaughter. It was a perfectly executed surprise, planned down to the very last minute, and one my mother would cherish always, as a jewel in a box.
Unbeknownst to us and to most ordinary people in Northern Ireland, another plan was coming to fruition, a diabolical scheme that would, one week later, rip asunder the tiny market town of Omagh in the neighboring county of Tyrone, devastating families from as near as Donegal and as far away as Madrid, Spain, and reminding us all that Northern Ireland’s Troubles were far from over.
I don’t know all the details. I’m afraid of them.
It frightens me to consider the machinations of minds that could craft a plan to load a nondescript red car, plate number MDZ 5211, with 500 pounds of explosives, park it in the middle of a busy shopping area, and place two phone calls to the local television station, one to the Coleraine Samaritans, with a warning 40 minutes before the bomb inside it exploded. There was confusion as the police evacuated the shoppers – mostly mothers and children on back-to-school shopping sprees. Thinking they were moving them away from the Court House to safety, the police moved people to the bottom of Market Street, where the bomb was about to be detonated.
I wonder if they felt that familiar relief, the kind you know from past experiences of bomb-scares and hoaxes, if they felt they were out of harm’s way and just in time, believing that it would all be alright. Maybe they told themselves it was just a bomb scare, like old times, not to be taken very seriously but still they would cooperate with the authorities so they could get back to their Saturday afternoon shopping, seeking out bargains for backpacks and books, new uniforms and lunch-boxes, full of the promise that accompanies the start of a new school year.
I cannot write about it without weeping.
Spaniard Gonzalo Cavedo and child posing by the car carrying the bomb that killed 29 people, many of whom are in the picture, including the photographer. Mr. Cavedo and the child survived. (Source: Belfast Telegraph)
Mere seconds after this photo was taken with a camera later retrieved from the rubble, the 500 pound bomb inside the red car exploded, blowing the vehicle to bits. Like a butcher’s knife, the blast cut through the row of little shops. I recall the harrowing accounts of witnesses, forever altered, who saw blood flowing in the gutters and pieces of people in the street, describing the savagery, the carnage before them as a war zone, a killing field.
At the same time, my brother, his girlfriend, and my baby girl were driving around the North Antrim coast, listening to Neil Young and Paul Brady CDs, occasionally breaking into song as we took in wild scenery around us. We stopped to show Sophie the horses and cows that peered over gates along the country roads. It was a beautiful, windy Irish day, and we were happy.
We were not listening to the radio that afternoon, so we didn’t hear the news. We had no reason to believe anything was wrong, until, heading home at dusk, we were stopped at a police checkpoint, where we were told to take a detour. And we knew. It had happened again. My parents knew too. Worse, they were worried sick. Something horrific had happened, and they had no idea where we were. Worried, they paced the floor until their driveway was lit up again with the headlights of my brother’s car.
There was no peace. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed in that blast that killed 29 people and unborn twins. And there would be no justice. No one has been convicted. Why?
The Omagh list of dead “reads like a microcosm of Troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60:40 Catholic:Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive.”
Without answers, we can only bear witness. Can we ever bear our pain and that of others in a way that brings about peace and understanding? Is Northern Ireland forever destined to use remembrance as the ultimate divider? Will the families of the bereaved ever see justice?
No answers. Only this:
“Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” by John Hewitt
So I say only: Bear in mind
Those men and lads killed in the streets;
But do not differentiate between
Those deliberately gunned down
And those caught by unaddressed bullets:
Such distinctions are not relevant . . .
Bear in mind the skipping child hit
By the anonymous ricochet . . .
And the garrulous neighbours at the bar
When the bomb exploded near them;
The gesticulating deaf-mute stilled
by the soldier’s rifle in the town square
And the policeman dismembered by the booby trap
in the car . . .
Patriotism has to do with keeping
the country in good heart, the community
ordered by justice and mercy;
these will enlist loyalty and courage often,
and sacrifice, sometimes even martyrdom.
Bear these eventualities in mind also;
they will concern you forever:
but, at this moment, bear in mind these dead.
James Barker (12) from Buncrana
Fernando Blasco Baselga(12) from Madrid
Geraldine Breslin (43) from Omagh
Deborah Anne Cartwright (20) from Omagh
Gareth Conway (18) from Carrickmore
Breda Devine (20 months) from Donemana
Oran Doherty (8) from Buncrana
Aidan Gallagher (21) from Omagh
Esther Gibson (36) from Beragh
Mary Grimes (65) from Beragh
Olive Hawkes (60) from Omagh
Julia Hughes (21) Omagh
Brenda Logue (17) from Omagh
Anne McCombe (45) from Omagh
Brian McCrory(54) from Omagh
Samantha McFarland (17) Omagh
Seán McGrath (61) from Omagh
Sean McLaughlin (12) from Buncrana
Jolene Marlow (17) Omagh
Avril Monaghan (30) from Augher
Maura Monaghan (18 months) from Augher
Alan Radford (16) Omagh
Rocio Abad Ramos (23) from Madrid
Elizabeth Rush (57) Omagh
Veda Short (46) from Omagh
Philomena Skelton (39) from Durmquin
Frederick White (60) from Omagh
Bryan White (26) from Omagh
Lorraine Wilson (15) Omagh
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Please don’t call me a cancer survivor . . .
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Tags
Advocacy, cognitive fog, identity, infusion, metastatic breast cancer, Nancy's Point, national cancer survivors day, sentinel node, staging, Times of India, Van Morrison
“He not being busy born, is busy dying.”
it is the first Sunday in June, a day set aside to celebrate cancer survivorship. Did you know this “treasured worldwide celebration of life” has been on the calendar for twenty-six years? I wonder would I have been any the wiser had I not been diagnosed myself. So who is a survivor, and who do I think I am? At best, I am ambivalent.
According to the National Cancer Survivors Day website:
… a ‘survivor’ as anyone living with a history of cancer – from the moment of diagnosis through the remainder of life. National Cancer Survivors Day affords your community an opportunity to demonstrate that it has an active, productive cancer survivor population.
Was I surviving before I discovered the lump myself? Is that how we would describe my living – my life – before it was officially declared “surviving?” Is that the label we would ascribe to it, after pronouncing as cancer, the disease that flourished, undetected for as long as a decade, defying three mammograms, hiding in tissue no one had bothered to advise me was dense? Or is there another word for my pre-diagnosis living? A better word? Had I been a more active and productive member of the population before diagnosis and after surgery or during treatment? Is there something about the Arimidex I take every night at nine o’clock that makes me a survivor, or am I just an obedient patient?
On this day last year, I took an interminable trek through the internet, searching for the right word, and encountered a jarring Times of India headline: “National Cancer Survivors’ Day: Gutsy fighters took on cancer, and won.” Took on? Took on Cancer? Won? Those who have been killed by cancer, are they “less gutsy” than the rest of us? Those with metastatic breast cancer, what of them? As a country, we do a great job ignoring them altogether. Is it because they are losers in this breast cancer lottery? Is that what we would call them? Would we?
Of all the words that no longer connote for me what they once did, “survivor” is the one that leaves me entirely flummoxed. As I have mused previously, the diagnosis has forever changed certain words for me – “staging” I no longer immediately associate with the theater; “fog” I am more apt to attach to a state of cognitive loss than Van Morrison’s misty morning fog or the cloud that can obscure parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; and, “cure” is no longer the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you,” rather a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon. “Mets” no longer the other New York baseball team, but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research in this country, only 2% of it is directed to metastatic breast cancer.
Even “sentinel,” which was reserved, until cancer came calling, for a lonely cormorant perched on a post in the shallow waters of sleepy Morro Bay, I now associate with the first node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor. Until one afternoon at the oncologist’s office, “infusion” had been something done to transform olive oil into a gourmet gift. But because I had turned left instead of right upon leaving, I missed the exit and instead found myself on the threshold of the infusion suite, a room I didn’t even know was there. Feeling as though I had intruded, I fled. But not before I had registered a row of faces of people sicker than I. In one microscopic moment, I made eye contact with a young bald woman and wondered if perhaps she was cold because, as I turned away, I noted a quilt on her lap. I turned away and thought of Shakespeare’s “enter fleeing” stage direction. Ashamed. Guilty.
Ironically, there was a moment last year, in response to a poignant and provocative piece of writing at Nancy’s Point, when I felt compelled to remark that somehow I was beginning to make some kind of order out of my life since cancer. Or my life with cancer. Or my surviving cancer. I wrote that I was learning to make room for it, to make sense of it no less. Well, that was a bit premature, wasn’t it? Cancer makes no sense at all.
So the headline from The Times of India troubled me. I do not feel gutsy. Nor do I feel like a winner. Nor am I comfortable with being described a survivor. What then? I am a cancer patient. I am in treatment. I am aware that my treatment, currently, does not impinge on my life to the extent that it would were the disease more advanced. If it progresses, that is.
A profound sense of guilt accompanies this awareness. Why? It confounds me and reminds me of growing up in Antrim, a small town in Northern Ireland. At a safe distance. Except the times our kitchen window shook because a bomb had exploded somewhere. Or the time when the bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel. Or coming back to her brother’s house in Belfast after a great Saturday night out with Sk’Boo playing at The Errigle Inn in Belfast, to find my friend Ruth’s car had been stolen and set ablaze as a barricade somewhere on the other side of Belfast. Or the time my brother, as a young journalist, was sent to conduct a harrowing interview with the heartbroken grandmother of three little boys who had been murdered
In May the Lord in HIs Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who lived there, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, from the start, about a person’s background, so they can proceed in the dialogue, the longer relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the way we pronounce an “H” all became clues to help establish “who we are,” and if we are to be feared. “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?” Between the turmoil in the country of my birth and cancer country, I find that myth features prominently, in particular the myth that victims have in some way, brought it upon themselves. Breast cancer? Didn’t you go for mammograms or do your monthly self-exams? Lung cancer? Oh, you must have been a smoker? Skin cancer? Didn’t you wear your sunscreen? It is a curious mix of sympathy and blame that engenders detachment.
The calendar takes on a new significance, too. The people of Northern Ireland could fill a calendar with anniversaries, those of Bloody Sunday, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Internment, the Twelfth of July. Most of us physically untouched by these, but changed nonetheless. Survived. The images are indelible. Iconic. Father Edward Daly waving a blood-stained handkerchief on a Derry street on Bloody Sunday, the carnage on Market Street in the heart of Omagh, orange sashes, bowler hats, Lambeg drums, and The Guildford Four. While I have personally passed just one “cancer anniversary”, I have already penciled in my two-year appointment in November. In the end, I suppose every day marks an anniversary of something.
On the question of language, there is no easy answer. Within terrorism, within cancer, and the respective wars waged against both, are words and phrases that sanitize and even glamorize the suffering and pain, that hide the horror and heartbreak visited upon ordinary people going about their daily lives.
I first fell upon the words of writer, Damian Gorman, some twenty years ago. I was channel-surfing in my living room in America and stopped on Channel 8 when I heard a voice from home, narrating Devices of Detachment, a “verse film” about the role of ordinary people like me during The Troubles. It has stayed with me for all these years, and resonates deeply through these ruminations on the complexities of cancer, the politics of its lexicon, its races and pink ribbons, the platitudes we use to keep the ugliness and horror of it – the mets – as far away as possible. He describes the bombs, bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” all too familiar in 1980s Northern Ireland as far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” its people used to distance themselves from the violence. Aware of it, yet so removed.
We are, all of us, very good at “detachment,” aren’t we?
“I’ve come to point the finger I’m rounding on my own The decent cagey people I count myself among We are like rows of idle hands We are like lost or mislaid plans We’re working under cover We’re making in our homes Devices of detachment As dangerous as bombs.” ~ Damian Gorman
