a rainy day kind of woman

29 Friday Sep 2023

Posted by Editor in Anahorish, Dispatches from the Diaspora, Joseph O'Connor, Memoir

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Belfast, Joseph O'Connor, Lyric Theater, Phil Lynott, photography, Seamus Heaney, The Lyric Theater, Thin Lizzy, travel, Water Mark

The other day a Facebook memory popped up to remind me that my actual memory just isn’t what it used to be. There I am in the boots i’ve owned since 1982, perched on a freeway wall with my camera focused on something in the distance. But what?

Unable to let go of this – and another thing that I’ll get to some other day when I’m in a better mood – I perused my old writings for some clue and soon found it. The year I turned 50, I had an epiphany or two: a)I would never make enough money to go to a job I hate every day and b) money really isn’t everything although I have often acted as though it is. Much to the chagrin of Suze Orman whose appearances on Oprah seared in my brain forever that because I don’t organize my money neatly in my wallet, and because I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of it is in my checking account at any given time, I’m much less likely to attract any. Money. Other things, but not money. If I must choose between making a payment for something essential like the electric bill or springing for a hard-bound signed copy of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel speech, “Crediting Poetry,” well, the man from Bellaghy is winning, which leads me back to a monsoon-y August afternoon in 2013, just two weeks before Heaney died.

Time and space collapsed when I spotted the handsome little volume perched on a shelf in an air-conditioned out-of-print fine books store next to a used car dealership on Camelback Road, a universe away from Anahorish, “where springs washed into the shiny grass.” No, I didn’t buy the signed first US edition that afternoon, but I felt so guilty for having abandoned it there, that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would return, with an explanation to the avuncular Phoenician bookseller, of the finer points of buying ‘on tick.’

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Previously, the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant money, I bought three things that would change my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and the finest Hi-Fi stereo system money could buy. I moved out of the Halls of Residence at college, and into a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street in Belfast, where I lived with four male engineering students who tolerated my girliness and threw great parties without ever damaging any of my vinyl.

At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a convenient and well-stocked off-license.

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Ridgeway Street, Belfast, N. Ireland

In the middle, these houses teemed with university students. All imaginative misfits, most of us going to our classes only when there was nothing else to do.

What sparkles in my memory of that time is one glorious evening on Ridgeway Street, when we spilled out of those houses and onto the road, pelting each other with water balloons. Meanwhile – seriously – the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was enjoying himself. Maybe he got lost on the way to wherever he was supposed to be staying after the Lizzy gig at The Kings Hall. I can still see him, plain as day, smoking and laughing at us as we soaked each other, on the kind of shimmering spring night that transforms Northern Ireland into a veritable tourist destination – the kind of place it is today.

Decades later and all the vinyl records bought with my lunch money and my university grant, are stowed away in the roof-space of my parent’s house in Castledawson. About 50 of them made it to Mexico with me – nobody leaves Bob Dylan’s “Bringing it all Back Home” back home. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary, the Eurail pass took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The Olympus camera? It was stolen from my first apartment in Phoenix.

There’s no reason other than life™ for why it took thirty years and a breast cancer diagnosis before I would buy another 35mm camera. Maybe it took that long for me to get ready to finally take stock and see things through different lenses.

In the Fall of 2012, my lovely friend Rhonda and I enrolled in a college photography class that required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we might otherwise miss going about our daily business. For a semester, the photography teacher sent us on scavenger hunts every Sunday to spots like the “Water Mark,” where five 14-foot aluminum horses guard a road in Scottsdale. Some folks believe it should be designated a wonder of the world, but my teacher just wanted me to notice it, to pay attention to those splendid horses that evoke the Wild West but also prevent flooding during our Monsoon season. At such times, water gushes from the horse’s mouths, and it is an awesome sight. And that, my friends, is what was in the lens of my camera as I stood on the other side of the freeway.

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Now I know those wild horses belong in the Arizona desert where the rains are rare, but I prefer to think of them along the Annadale Embankment, watching over us at the end of a wild Belfast night.

Footnote: The Heaney Lecture is now where it belongs – on a shelf in my house between Door into the Dark and Stepping Stones . As for Phil? His band would disintegrate a few months after that night on Ridgeway Street, and just three years later, Phil Lynott would slip away from us. He would have been 74 years old this year. How we loved him! As Joseph O’Connor explains, Phil was “the first Irish person ever to bound onto a stadium stage in leather trousers and bawl to the gods: “Are you OUT there?” He was our first rock star, gone too soon, and on a rainy night in Phoenix, some three decades later, I can still hear his coyote call . . .

But there is the replenishing joy of the songs themselves, that carnival of outlaws, renegades and chancers, tumbling through the sunbursts of his rhymes. From the lonesome cowboy’s prairie to the louche streets of Soho, from the mythic Celtic battlefields over to Dino’s bar and grill, his restless creativity roamed. You could stock a damn good jukebox with only his work, so vivid the eye for detail and so capacious its reach . . . The songs will abide. That’s the only consolation. But it’s a real one. Even in the darkest night, you can always hear the king’s call.

Far from Ridgeway Street and the wild horses in Scottsdale.

once in a blue sky

11 Monday Sep 2023

Posted by Editor in 9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood

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9.11, American Airlines Flight 77, Billy Collins, Healing Field, Irish DIASPORA, Juliana Valentine McCourt, September 11 2001

The sky above my house in Mexico is blue this morning, the kind of blue sky that hung above the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Cloudless, infinite—and in the parlance of aviation—a “severe clear” sky. Intensely blue with seemingly unlimited visibility and air so pure, it can blind a pilot. With the previous day’s storms blown away from New York city, it was the quintessential Severe Clear morning – a perfect morning for the ordinary travel that would take thousands of people to business meetings and conferences and end-of-summer vacations.

A little girl only a few months older than mine was on board United Airlines Flight 175. Just four years old and a nature-lover, little Juliana Valentine McCourt, and her mother, an Irish immigrant from Cork, were on their way to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth. They were close.

Close. Like my daughter and me on our numerous trips from Phoenix to Newark, Newark to Belfast, and back again. Close. Even when rendered illogical and unreasonable, she by adolescent hormones, me by the effects of cancer treatment, we were – and remain – close, like peas in a pod.

We have the same piano hands. We love Sephora and dark chocolate-covered almonds, mashed potatoes, the smell of books, Derry Girls and the little dogs that love us. We are ‘friends’ on Facebook and Instagram, where I have promised not to gush too much in ways that embarrass her. We binge-watch Netflix originals – me on The Bear or Yellowstone, she on re-runs of Law and Order, and most recently, Breaking Bad, which she tells me holds up really well after all these years. She’s in Arizona, I’m in Mexico, and we love each other madly, bound forever by knowing that we once filled the heart of the man who died when we were far away from him and home one November a decade ago.

We’re not pessimistic; we just know the other shoe can drop at any time. We’re ready for it, but sometimes we tell ourselves that that kind of thing is the kind of thing that only happens to someone else.

I watched on TV when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Juliana and her mother and everyone on board died instantly. In Washington, D.C., sisters Dana and Zoe Falkenberg, died too when terrorists hijacked their plane and crashed it into the Pentagon. Just 3 and 8, they had boarded American Airlines Flight 77 with their parents and their favorite stuffed animals to begin the long journey to a new life in Australia. Also on their flight, three exceptional 6th grade students, traveling with their teachers to the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary on a special trip awarded by National Geographic.

Surveillance footage from Dulles airport would subsequently reveal that little Dana Falkenberg was carrying an Elmo teddy bear – a lasting reminder of the hijackers’ littlest victims.

“Every one of the victims who died on September 11^th was the most important person on earth to somebody.”

–President George W. Bush, 12/11/01

Until that too-bright morning, I suppose I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as an immigrant who had traded Northern Ireland for the United States. Foolishly, I had too quickly dropped my guard, forgetting anything can and does happen. I had almost stopped reassuring myself that the sound of a car backfiring on the freeway was not a gunshot; that a clap of Monsoon thunder in the mountains was not a bomb timed to go off in the heart of a village on the busiest day of the year; and that a shopping bag left behind on the bus was not packed with explosives.

Twenty years ago, my daughter and I first visited The Healing Field, a 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, heart achingly beautiful, each of its 2,996 flags a reminder of a life taken. Wordless, undone by the sheer enormity of the memorial and her diminished stature within it as she walked deep into a field of red, white and blue, I forced myself to look up and away, to recollect the way we had been that September morning when I dropped her off at pre-school. To remember the blueness of the sky …

In a blink of an eye, Sophie is out of sight, deep in the Healing field, where row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart enable us to stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened. From somewhere, a mournful “Taps” pierces the air and then Amazing Grace.

Out of sight.

Under that expanse of desert sky, I knew my daughter was not lost. I also knew that such a thought is the one that scares me most.

Colorful tulle butterflies are attached to the flagpoles in the Healing Field. Stuffed bears sit on the grass. Yellow ribbons wrapped around those flagpoles encircling the field represent the valor of those “first responders,” those sworn to protect and serve those within. Ribbons, blue as that September morning sky are wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. And, on the grass, for all the veterans who perished that day, pair after pair of combat boots.

On the anniversary of September 11th 2001, from New York to Arizona, and in cities across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper.

We say their names.

Juliana Valentine McCourt.

She would have graduated from college by now, trips to Disneyland perhaps less appealing than thoughts of a new car or a promotion. Such a trajectory is only in my imagination. For Juliana, there was no Disneyland, no first day of school, no soft place to fall.

For a moment or more on September 11, we remember those lost, our flags flying at half-mast, footage of the World Trade Center’s final moments replayed on television retrospectives. Keyboard warriors wax conspiratorial about what they think “really” happened at the Pentagon. Politicians pay their respects after which some of them will resume election campaign trails that are not always respectful. Family members of 9/11 victims will gather on the Memorial plaza in New York to read aloud the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks and in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Others will plan personal observances.

9.11 is history.

My daughter recently told me that in her final year of high school not one of her teachers remembered 9-11 out loud. Ostensibly, it was no different than the day before, no different than September 10, 2001, when Ruth McCourt was packing for a trip to Disneyland with her daughter, Juliana.

Someone will say her name—all the names.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

“The Names” is in dedication to all the victims of September 11 and their survivors.

The Names – Billy Collins

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.

by Billy Collins, June 24, 2005

worn out

04 Monday Sep 2023

Posted by Editor in Awesome Women, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Fashion, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Nora Ephron, Soundtracks of our Lives, Theater

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Carly Simon, clothes, Delia Ephron, Facebook, Ilene Beckerman, Love Loss & What I Wore, Meryl Streep, mother daughter, Nora, nora ephron, Tom Hanks, When Harry Met Sally

Retrieving the dry-clean only blouse from the dryer, I’m reminded of the day I found it in an unlikely little boutique in Guadalajara. I had been looking for one just like it for about 40. This has a lot to do with Nora Ephron.

Some years ago, I went to see Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the Ephron sisters’ stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. It’s about five women I’d never met but I already knew them. You probably do too. Like them, I can peer into my closet and hang on the clothes, shoes ,and handbags bulging from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially my boots and my coats. While not all of them came along to Mexico, they are all still “with me.”

There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by a man who probably had it in him to be great, were it not for the misogyny that made him a small and unapologetic asshole who finally got what he deserved. While being fired isn’t the best way to start a day, it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him.

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. Or Linda Ronstadt. Or the late Christine McVie—pre-Fleetwood Mac— when she was still with Chicken Shack. There are the boots I wore the first time we took Sophie to see the snow and make angels in it; the classic Frye boots that I couldn’t pass up because they were both on sale and at a consignment store; the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots that have been re-soled twice and that I couldn’t remove at the end of a long day without my husband helping me. I read somewhere that Madonna had a pair of those. Madonna also had people. And, there are several pairs of black boots that vary only in length. There is no rationale for any of the boots, given the narrow window of opportunity for boot-wearing in Phoenix where I lived for over 30 years, bathed in relentless sunshine.

Nor can I explain the coats, most of them bought in Belfast and carried back to one of the hottest places in North America, presumably to wear as a statement about how the heat can’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf and coat, and maybe a turtleneck underneath. I even had a pair of leather fake fur-lined gloves. To be fair, these were purchased in anticipation of a winter work trip to Santa Fe with my best friend, where we shivered so hard, we had to buy woolly hats at The Gap. She also had to buy a back-up pair of boots, cheap and purple because #Prince. In our hats and gloves, we were perfectly accessorized to walk to the theater to see a new movie. Featuring lots of turtlenecks and body-shaming lines, Love Actually hasn’t aged well. Even Richard Curtis has acknowledged that his film is ‘out of date’ – too white and heteronormative. Still, I watch it every Christmas the way I watch The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving.

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My favorite coat is my Christmas coat. I bought it at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast and subsequently wore it for 20 Christmas mornings when I posed against the backdrop of a holiday tree created from pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue. I love that coat. In it, I feel like I’m related to Santa.

Along with the boots, and a Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag— found on Ebay and which remained closed in the closet because the brass clasp was broken— are burgundy loafers, complete with pennies stuffed in the slot. I bought them in 1989, maybe because they reminded me of the brogues I used to wear for Irish dancing, or maybe because I was influenced by the collegiate style of an American girl on her first day of fifth grade outfitted in khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.

Today, I am over 60, still with nothing to wear to a gig, having already flung on the bed seven skirts that just aren’t “Americana” enough. I should be wearing something more Gillian Welch but unless I add badass boots, I could be dangerously closer to Nellie Olson in Little House on the Prairie.

Rushing to get ready, I find myself remembering Meryl Streep‘s married character in that scene where she’s wondering what to wear to a clandestine New York city rendezvous with Robert de Niro’s character (and married to someone else), in one of my favorite movies, Falling in Love. I watch it every year, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. You’ll have to watch to understand why.

In the end, something blue wins – doesn’t it always? Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse, the one I found on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Meryl Streep might feel when she decided on it for her secret date with Robert de Niro.

I may not remember what you said to me, but I will never forget how your words made me feel or what I was wearing when you said them to me. I’ll remember what you were wearing too.

Watching Love, Loss, and What I Wore I laughed and sighed, and even cried a little as I recognized my mother, my daughter, most of the women I know —including most of all the women I’ve been – in the stories that flew from the stage that night. There were tales of highly sought-after and completely impractical designer handbags which increase in size and price, the older we get; the various layers of “slimming” apparel– in various shades of black; high heels and high drama: bunions and ballet flats. Flats. My best friend’s podiatrist once suggested shoes from The Walking Company as opposed to a shot of Cortisone for pain. In retaliation, she switched podiatrists and lied, saying that, of course she had been wearing the custom orthotic so could she just have the shot. Please. Shoes from The Walking Company were not – and will most likely never be happening for my friend, a petite woman who “needs” the height. She is something of an innovator who once had what we both agreed was a million dollar idea to accommodate concert-goers under 5″5″. Expand-a-fan has yet to make it big. Mark Cuban has funded lesser inventions on Shark Tank.

Within the sparkling Ephron dialogue on stage, there were also glimpses of all those things that, at some point, seemed so essential in a wardrobe as well as all those unessential and unforgivable things we may have said to other women. Including our daughters. “Are you going to go out in that?” “What did you do to your hair?”

In spite of the laughter that rippled through the audience that night, there was a yearning. Something was missing. Nora Ephron herself. It made me sad to feel her absence. No longer here to go back and forth with us through the phases we know, I miss her. From shoulder pads and big hair, to pant-suits and Brazilian blow-outs, and then, invariably and for comfort’s sake, to Eileen Fisher, which feels a bit like The End, or as one of the women mused last night – “When you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, ‘I give up.’ You might as well . . .

It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us – a cancer she had kept private from a world that already knew many of the intimate details about the backs of her elbows, her aging neck, her dry skin, her small breasts about which she wrote in A Few Words About Breasts, the contents of her purse, and hair color – her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance but the youth culture in general. Quick and daring and witty, she regaled us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer.

When I imagine her and the way I think she was, Ephron is striding across a set not unlike The Strand Bookstore in the East Village where almost all her books sold out the morning after her death. She is suggesting a direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I imagine her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner which she resurrected and rewrote with her sister, Delia, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Ryan and Hanks. Between the words of the Ephron sisters and the pair’s natural chemistry, Hollywood had a recipe for success in the romantic comedy genre.

Although a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Ephron was also a romantic. It would have been poetic had she been handed a happy ending like the kind she invented in her fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” But that ending would not have been real, and Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.

Her contribution to the movies is a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are a massive part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated from Northern Ireland to the United States about the same time as Harry met Sally.

I know it’s not the most famous part of the movie, but there’s one scene that never fails to make me laugh and snap me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up occasionally to remind me how little time there is to become myself. Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. Tearfully, she confides in Harry that she is destined to be left on the shelf, a spinster, alone at forty. At the time, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut that I remember being convinced would work with fine and naturally curly hair. It didn’t. As a side note, I carried in my wallet, for about a decade, a page from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s numerous haircuts. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless by my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Turin Shroud, and asked them to please give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found the unflappable Topher who still makes time for my hair every time I return to Phoenix, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times.

And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday

Once upon a time, 40 was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, yes, for Eileen Fisher. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, and my fifties, I’m wondering what’s next. I’ve also accepted a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor. I don’t have sensible hair, and sometimes I give too much away. Others are more painful. I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier that it’s not worth waiting for mean girls to redeem themselves.

Being over 60 is a bit like going to Home Depot. It’s just too big, and when I’m there, I have to ask for help. And, nobody in Home Depot cares what I’m wearing.

I’m worried of course that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do. Not necessarily those Bucket List things, but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. It’s gratifying and essential to know who loves me and who loves me not.

To be scrupulously honest, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process as “a thing” and the way it sneaks up on me. One minute, I’m reading the tiny 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 airport 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.

Several months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix . Of course we didn’t know that this would be the last concert he ever attended, and I remember a fleeting moment of something like melancholy as we 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, center-stage, Stevie mesmerizing everyong just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie. 76 and still spinning in black. Rock on gold dust woman.

Black is the envy of all the other colors, right? Navy blue, brown, and gray have all taken turns at declaring themselves “the new black.” The truth is black isn’t even black. The little black dress is not the same color as the wardrobe-staple-black-blazer that I want to wear with black pants on a fat day. (Yes, I’m body shaming, but … my body, my shame.) The blacks don’t match. One is a dark-greyish black, the other a bluish-purplish black. I love black, but unless you are Stevie Nicks in an air-conditioned theater, it is not the color for a summer in Phoenix – where Stevie lives.

Phoenix is too damned hot. Along with the boiling but brief hot flashes that come free with the drugs that are supposed to keep breast cancer at bay, black would be unbearable. A 110 degree summer day also makes any form of physical exercise unappealing. When I lived there, I barely walked the length of myself after the thermometer reached 100 degrees. This could also have been be attributed to a flat-out fatigue – the only ‘f’ word that has ever offended me and which was my constant companion during years of breast cancer treatment. Maybe it was the Tamoxifen that made me write things down when my once stellar powers of recall started showing signs of weakness. I used to scoff at makers of lists. No more. Another of life’s ironies. Along with aging comes the forgetting of names, the names of people I see every single day, names I might forget on days that might be the most important of those people’s lives.

I have digressed, and may as well proceed on this tangent. If you know me, you know that along with my irrational fear of car-washes and drowning (although not at the same time), is the even greater fear of becoming a hoarder whose secret life will be the subject of an A&E documentary. No, it’s not time to call in the camera crew, but I may be a future contender given my chronic aversion to throwing things away. The house in Mexico is still home to an unpacked box full of things that matter. To me . . .

Since before my only child started school – almost thirty years ago – I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, 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 organized professional organizers on TV, who would have me place everything on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it really is time to tame the paper tiger.

Full of good intentions, I began “organizing” one day. For about an hour and with no real sense of urgency, I made folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs. I threw away greeting cards made not by her but by some stranger at Hallmark. I even filled a box with paperbacks to donate to a local bookstore. I kept all the hardcovers.

Flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something my daughter had written when she was very little.

I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. It’s a sharp decline to 50. I wonder what Nora Ephron would make of my little girl’s “mountain of life.”

We know what she thought of 60 and beyond …

“I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.

The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realised.

There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But the truth is that je regrette beaucoup. Why do people say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday. Even if you’re in great shape, you can’t chop an onion the way you used to and you can’t ride a bicycle several miles without becoming a candidate for traction. If you work, you’re surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday soon they’re going to get it.”

And that’s all I have to say about that. Except thank you, Nora.

Nora Ephron (1941 – 2012)

walking away on the last first day of school

18 Friday Aug 2023

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You

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Cecil Day Lewis, children's books, Going back to work, Irish DIASPORA, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, Separation, Themes of childhood, Walking Away

Her last first day at school – 2015

WALKING AWAY – Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

The best year of my life was the one I spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. With her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I held her in my arms as I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. In the afternoons, I spent interminable hours just looking at her.

Just. Looking. At. Her.

I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, marveling that two imperfect people had created this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, these were the days before she had a cache of words or discovered the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was right there in front of us. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to let her ‘cry it out’ at night. When I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only an Irish mammy could, that there would be plenty of nights further on down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right – of course she was right, and it has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.

When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and – in the era pre-Starbucks – sipping coffee in mugs brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and a hairdo on the verge of sensible. A school principal at the time, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – mostly me – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.

In spite of my grown-up job, I failed to impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be absolutely fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to tell me more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes – at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie 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 madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the child writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave, but I remained in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to children crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could we mothers pluck out the sound of even the tiniest whimper from our own children?

Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and the final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had wept off, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went to work for other people’s children.

Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Appelt knew this anguish of leaving a child to go back to work and relived it when her 12 year old son went 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 the book I would find one Saturday afternoon on the discard table at a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love 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.

Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. Why didn’t they understand I was sending them the very best child I have? By the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Regrets? Yes.

On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do when she was in grade school. Watching her stride to the car her dad used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.

But I pulled myself together the way we do and gave into the day, knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, it would unfold with delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.

Some days still, in an unguarded moment between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she’s doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.

And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.