The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits – still – among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.
Once upon a time, at 8 o’clock every night, my late husband would ask, “Well? Are we ready for Tony and the boys?” and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we had seen before more, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of James Gandolfini. I still tune in to the odd episode on Netflix, where his Tony Soprano is larger than life, fighting about money with Edie Falco’s Carmela, and I tell myself he didn’t really die in Rome six summers ago.
Six. Summers. Ago.
Before the creation of Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini was already playing the part. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,
the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.
Brilliantly.
I had seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance, his performance crackling with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end is quintessential Quentin Tarantino. I can only peek out through my fingers. Still, even though I know Tony’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I have been – and continue to be – charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness – duped, like many of his victims, I suppose, by a vulnerability that makes him relatable and likable. Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. But not James Gandolfini, with us for the briefest sojourn, and dead at 51.
Today would have been his 58th birthday, and thinking about him and what what he left behind for his baby daughter, pokes a hole in a well-hidden stash of thoughts about my own mortality. My daughter does not read this blog often. A young woman and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later. When I am gone, she will open the jar. It is a beautiful strategy, isn’t it? A way to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, and it reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview, illustrated in this animated film by Christoph Niemann. It is the purest expression of mortality I have ever heard, Sendak’s impassioned entreaty:
Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Hearing Maurice Sendak tell the interviewer,
Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you . . .
is especially poignant knowing he died just over a year before James Gandolfini left us. I think Maurice Sendak would have missed the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best and most heartsome performance may well have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max who, after his mother sends him to bed without any dinner, sails off to a fantasy island inhabited by the wild things. In the movie version, Max runs away from home, running down menacing city streets until he reaches a waterfront where a boat is waiting to take him far away to the land where the wild things roam. At first, these ferocious creatures try to scare him away, but Max remains unfazed, fearless – the wildest of them all, apparently. Emboldened and now in charge, he is pronounced king of this kingdom and orders his new subjects to ‘let the wild rumpus start!’ But when he tires of the moonlit shenanigans, he invokes his mother and sends them to bed without dinner.
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all
As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as those that flutter across the faces of Tony Soprano or any of the ‘wild things’ he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the very embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination.
I suspect every child knows where the wild things are. Over fifty years ago, I remember my mother telling me not to let my imagination run away with me when I fretted over the dark, or death, or disappointments, big and small. And, fueled by these wild things, I sailed off by myself many times. Just like Max, I always found my way back home – some journeys were longer than others.
Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for no longer wanting to be king, Carol chases him, lunging at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Undaunted, Max refuses to stay and eventually returns home to a happy ending, with dinner waiting and still hot.
Thus, the heartbreaking farewell as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore – keening – howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.
It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she had kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her purse, her small breasts about which she wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she regaled us with stories of the indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not up for discussion. For Ephron, cancer was not copy, as her son explains in the HBO documentary about her life:
I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” he says. “That the things you want to keep are not copy. That the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything is copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the means to control the story was to make it not exist.
In the middle of my life, it occurs to me that maybe I have always understood the need to control and contain. As much as I have revealed of myself in this virtual space, I know for sure what is not copy. For me, breast cancer was copy. It still is. Some of the business of widowhood is copy too. But I know what is not. I know what to keep and what to discard. I know how to control it and how to control myself – most of the time. I know how to be private. I know how to keep what is precious, private. I know how to – as Meryl Streep says of Ephron – ‘achieve a private act.‘ I also know how to avoid an ending, and I’m very good at the long game. I know what Nora Ephron’s son knows – that closure is over-rated. I can’t consider the concept without recalling the first time I realized how much it mattered to other people, following a school principal’s evaluation of a lesson I’d taught. In her report, she indicated, with some disappointment, that I had provided “no closure” for my students. I didn’t bother arguing with her, because I knew I would be back in my classroom the next day and the next to continue – not to close – with my students. It is the continuing that matters along with what I wore along the way.
Continuance – it has a nice ring to it.
Like each of the five women in Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Nora and Delia Ephron‘s stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name, I can peer into my wardrobe and hang on the clothes and shoes and handbags and boots that bulge from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially the boots. For those dwelling in cooler climes, there is perhaps a 20-day window for honest boot-wearing in Phoenix, Arizona. Seriously. The sunshine is relentless, the heat is “dry,” and I can offer no justification for my growing collection of boots other than still wanting to be more like my idea of a young Carly Simon or Linda Ronstadt. My favorite brown leather boots have a beautiful patina, best worn with the attitude I squeezed into them the morning I was fired by a man who might possibly have been great were it not for the misogyny that diminshed him. While it was not the best way to start a day, but how it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him. Forever.
Then there are the boots of patchwork leather my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter to see the snow, to fall with glee into the sparkling powder, creating her first snow-angel; there are six pairs of black boots that vary only in length even though someone, most likely me, pointed out that each is a distinct shade of black and – this is important – timeless. There are the classic Frye boots that I simply could not pass up because they were on sale and at a consignment store; and, the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots purchased from a UK catalog at full over-priced price. They have been reheeled and resoled twice, and they require additional assistance and effort to remove from my tired feet at the end of a long day. I haven’t worn them as much since Ken died, because I know when the time comes to remove them that I will remember exactly how he used to say, “Goddammit baby. Goddammit.” And then I will tell myself there must have been a mistake, that maybe my daughter’s daddy is not really dead.
The collection of coats defies explanation, several of them purchased in Ireland and carried back – in an extra suitcase – to the desert southwest where there is rarely the need for a sweater let alone a coat. I suppose coat-wearing allows me to make a statement about how Phoenix won’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf, coat, and even a turtleneck underneath. I have other “signature” coats, one of which I will never wear in public unless Tom Petty were to return and ask me to be one of his Heartbreakers. It is more art than coat and belongs only on someone on stage in front of 50,000 fans holding up lighters.
During the Christmas holidays, I always wear the long red coat I bought at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast. I love the lining that nobody can see – white with tiny red hearts. And I don’t care if it is 80 degrees outside; that coat is a stunner. Against the backdrop of a holiday tree made of a triangle of pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue at the Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, it makes me feel a bit like Santa. Or Red Riding Hood.
Along with the boots, and the Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag – which I bought on Ebay and have not been able to open for several years because the brass clasp is broken – hiding in a corner of the closet, are burgundy leather penny loafers, with a penny in each. I haven’t worn them since 1989. I don’t remember why I bought them and don’t know why they are still in my house, but I think it might be because they are reminiscent of the brogues I once wore to school or the tap shoes I wore for Irish dancing. Or maybe I was influenced by the collegiate style of a fifth-grade American girl wearing khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.
Given where I am today, with nothing to wear to a thing I don’t want to go to later – having already flung on the bed seven summery skirts that are too snug at the waist because of a diet that has deteriorated in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like Meryl Streep‘s married character getting ready for a clandestine rendezvous in the city with de Niro’s character, also married (but to someone else) in a favorite movie of mine, Falling in Love. For me, in the end, something blue wins; it always does.Even Meryl settles on a blue print blouse. In my case, it will be the blue dress I am wearing in many of the profile pictures on my online spaces. If I run into any of my social media contacts today, they will think I have nothing else to wear. And, they will be right.
Resurrected in her son’s documentary, Ephron is among us once again. Vibrant, funny, and in control. I imagine her striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after her death. In my mind, she is authoritative – and perhaps perceived as mean – as she provides direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I prefer to think of her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner, charmingly resurrected and rewritten by Ephron and her sister, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Although by many accounts, a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Nora Ephron was a romantic at heart, so it would have been poetic had real life handed her the happy ending like those she crafted in those fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” The happy ending would not have been real, and my guess is that Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.
Her contribution to the movies is but a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are such a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated to this country around the time When Harry met Sallywas released. Granted, it is not the most memorable part of the movie, but there is one scene that always makes me laugh and snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up now and again to remind me just how little time there is to become who I am supposed to be. As I have learned, life happens in the twinkling of an eye, and it is for the living. I have learned that too.
In the scene, Meg Ryan’s Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. In tears, she tells Harry that she is going to be left on the shelf, a spinster, all alone at forty. Mind you, she is barely thirty, with a very cute hair cut that, at the time, I was convinced would work with naturally curly hair like mine. It didn’t. In fact, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a magazine featuring the many cute haircuts of Meg Ryan. I really did. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page, as though it were the Shroud of Turin, to politely asked them to give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found Topher at the aptly named Altered Ego salon, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times, perhaps.
And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday
Just yesterday I felt the same way. Forty was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, I suppose, Eileen Fisher. Fifty was sensible and dowdy. Sixty heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. Seventy was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. Having passed the half-century mark, I’m wondering about what I’ve done and what’s next. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, I am accepting a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor – I do not have sensible hair, and I talk too much. Others are more painful. I should be kinder and more patient. Too, I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier those folks who are nice to me only because they need something from me. Like my hair, they perform poorly when the pressure rises.
I’m gonna be 60 someday (in four years) and it is a bit like being in IKEA, one of my least favorite places on the planet. A planet itself, IKEA is too big, with all its “rooms” requiring instructions and assembly and Scandinavian words I find just as intimidating had they fallen from the lips of an errant Viking. At 56, I’m worried that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do, not necessarily the kinds of things that might turn up on a “bucket list” but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. These days, Iknowwho loves me and who loves me not.
Still, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process in general and the way it just sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. One minute, I am reading the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years than on something as wholly graceless as aging.
About six months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix. Other than the fact that it was the last concert he saw on this earth and the last time he and I would stay for an encore, I hold on to the moment I caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and Stevie Nicks still spinning in black. Mesmerizing. Just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie, at almost seventy. Rock on gold dust woman.
So many beginnings and endings, with more to go . . .
Since Sophie was little, I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, certificate, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of those ever-so-organized professional organizers on documentaries on The Learning Channel, the folks who would direct me to place everything I own on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, I have realized that it is time – theoretically – to tame the paper tiger.
Full of good intentions one day – and for about an hour – I began “organizing.” I made a few folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs, I threw away those greeting cards that were made not by her but some stranger at Hallmark, I filled a box with books to donate to the local bookstore. While flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something she had written when she was in elementary school:
I don’t know what or who inspired it. I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. I wonder what Nora Ephron would think of my little girl’s “mountain of life.” I can almost see a wry smile creep across her face as she tells that 50 year old to straighten up for Act Two, to cause some trouble, just as she urged a bunch of Wellesley graduates in her 1996 Commencement Speech – to continue.
No closure.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your life . . .
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter most and things that need to be said; and, about magic and loss.
A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland long before curly-hair products had been invented. Both of us born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have a teenage daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and we are compelled to rite. On September 11th of that year, Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls were just four years old, safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The reports tumbled out of New York city, stopping us in our tracks. We were heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and transatlantic talks of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
~ Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? I don’t know. Growing up where we did, when we did, we were confounded by the bombs and bullets, by the brutality and barbarism on both sides. But we were also resigned to it, as we clung to our ordinary rituals and routines, the ones we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. So we refused to surrender to fear and we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
For myself, one such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. A young woman, just starting out on my own, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. The world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and writing in my diary, my once cherished ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt. And I began to write again, the way I had done in that old diary. Just for me. I kept it private at first, afraid to hit “publish.” Inexplicably, I felt like I was speaking out of turn or that I would get in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.
As I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” I found that here, I could lean back rather than Lean In obediently just because all the other women were doing it. I could take stock and trade. I could light the match if I wanted to burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs. But that has happened only once. This is my home away from home, so I keep writing. For myself. I suppose cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.
Lesley’s first homework assignment in that class was ostensibly simple – to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I knew what to do. I promised to print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend brought a plastic bag to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a bit of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.
Making our way up the little hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the roar of airplanes above ensuring we will not forget the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.
Letters and paper flowers, candles aglow in the bright morning, tiny stuffed bears on the grass at the bottom of six flagpoles – I have been cleaved in two by such things before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, and everyone falls silent and still; then bagpipes and then Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names. We remember them.
I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he came to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.
I said his name and attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole. Before turning away, a whisper “Godspeed.”
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. It was the best year of my life. With her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for motherhood, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me before she was born.
Business was slow that first year. Just the way I like it. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox, unlike Dolly Parton, who apparently checks the mail in full makeup and heels. Fair play to her. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, 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. How 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 my husband off at work, our girl was all mine, and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with the sunshine and Van Morrison. Almost sixteen years later, I remember thinking a bottle of that new baby smell 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. I used to call it hand ballet.
Mostly, my baby girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly (and still do, much to her chagrin). I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. My mother made it worse, urging me to do so by reminding me that there would be plenty of times as an adult 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 time, like the night I lay in the ICU following eight hours of surgery while my fourteen-year-old girl wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep? This is why I hate cancer.
When the time came for me to return to work and take her to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – mine and hers – that came immediately before and continued for some time after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstock sandals, drinking coffee from mugs they had filled at home – this was in the days before there was a Starbucks on every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Grand Ol’ Opry, I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. But only on the verge – where I faithfully remain. I had returned to my career in education as an assistant principal, trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”
Sophie was not impressed at all and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. In retrospect, I made this a much bigger deal than it was, realizing eventually that there must be some sort of lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry. By accident, I discovered that if I didn’t put things in the tumble dryer, the dry-clean only blouses turned out just fine. So after thirty odd years, I have taken umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans. I still don’t get the concept of a dryer for people who live in a desert. The clothes will dry if we just hang them on a clothesline, but nobody in our neighborhood has a clothes line in the backyard. None of my Phoenix friends has a clothes line in the backyard. Is this not bizarre, given that the sun shines most days and the fact that “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, having grown up in Northern Ireland? In the old country, everybody hangs clothes out on the line and then runs like hell to rescue them when the rain invariably falls. Fitting, then, that the first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check from Antrim Forum, was a tumble dryer from the Electricity Board.
This is fast becoming a bit of a rant, that has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in Phoenix? I once asked my husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. Clearly, the directions were lost on him – “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, because he never read the manual or the labels on anything. To be fair, I don’t know what it means either because it doesn’t actually press anything permanently and more often than not has reduced some of my favorite skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. But back when I was pretending to be a grown-up, he didn’t do the laundry. I did. So all the clothes were safe. And so was I. This is not to suggest that I’m dangerous now, but, I am, as you know, on the verge.
In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie wasn’t impressed with me. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie would try to placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it three times, Bonnie showed amazing restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but I was mad that Bonnie would not be spending hours staring as Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something for the first time. Anything. I was mad and sad that I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that she had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was insanely jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – who had the magic trick up her sleeve that would 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 I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down so I could torture myself by listening to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying, and I would wait until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs, and she finally stopped. Then, I would reapply the makeup that I had cried away until my face matched the boring business suit and not even a glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Mind you, at the same time, 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 albeit 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 tell me as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
How it eased those goodbyes every morning when I left her 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, 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. Incidentally, we are still looking, and maybe, just maybe, when she enters her Junior year at yet another high school in the Fall, the superhero teacher will be waiting to turn her on to literature or art or history.
A few summers ago, she took a college class, and I remember watching from my car as she strode onto the campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. She was as tall as me but infinitely more brave. I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. And she did. She never lets me down. Kathi Appelt’s rhyming verse still sparkles:
So blow a kiss and wave good-bye –
my baby, don’t you cry.
This love is always with you
Like the sun is in the sky.
Thus our days began, each of us released to our respective distractions and mundanities, finding therein both delight and difficulty, the way we all do. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, things that matter and things that don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s doing at school, 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 – cleverly hidden on each page.
And sometimes, I wish this book had been available to my own mother, given all the goodbyes and the sweet reunions we have shared at airports on either side of the Atlantic. I love that my baby girl knew that the love was all around long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in one of my favorite movies, Love Actually.
In the end, if you’re looking for love, you are sure to find it at any 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.
The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits – still – among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.
There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter
am today, with nothing to wear to a thing I don’t want to go to later – having already flung on the bed seven summery skirts that are too snug at the waist because of a diet that has deteriorated in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like 
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
