A story for International Education Day

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A photo of Seamus Heaney on his graduation day is making the rounds on social media this morning, marking International Education Day with a reminder that our poet devoted much of his life to teaching. I also spent most of my professional life teaching – and learning. Like Heaney, I’m a product of Queen’s. And, like Heaney, I was what we now call a first generation” college student, the first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school.  Although university was  less than twenty miles away in Belfast, it was still away, a phenomenon Seamus Heaney explains to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.”

For Heaney, a university education in Belfast, was a world away from the Broagh in rural South Derry, necessitating a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from the city to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him as I can my young self – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word, weighing its impact before uttering it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, “sure you know all them things.

There were other tricky steps to learn, moving through Northern Ireland’s various dances, but once learned, they are indelible, as Tony Parker describes in his 1994 book May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast. Based on his interviews with the people who live there, he makes the unsettling but astute observation that many of us born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, right from the start, a person’s background in order to proceed in the conversation and in the longer relationship, without saying the “the wrong word.” We know that our last names or the names of our schools, or perhaps the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” are also clues we use to help establish who we think we are.

“Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the conflict,” or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”

In a secondary school in the outskirts of North Belfast, I cut my pedagogical teeth. A student teacher who didn’t know any better, in the parlance, “a blow-in” from Antrim, I took a black taxi to school every morning. Before black taxis shuttled tourists around, showing them the sights of “The Troubles.” On my first day in  in Rathcoole, then the largest housing estate in Western Europe and a loyalist stronghold, I held my own. On the second, I faltered when a first form pupil, showing off for his mates, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Catholic. He told me he could guess “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, but there was and still is some ambiguity around my first name.

At the time, if I’m honest, an honest answer may not have been the right one. There I stood, chalk in hand, knowing where I was but not entirely sure who I was. And, that’s what I told him. Thus we began a kind of partnership, knowing we had some control over went on within those walls, but not so much beyond them.

At the same time, before Home Economics was standard fare on the Northern Ireland curriculum, the school day included Domestic Science. Other than Physical Education, which I had skillfully avoided as a student with a note from my mother saying I “had cramps.” it was my least favorite subject.  It involved the planning and cooking of meals which usually failed –  in spite of quick tips on every page of the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook – baking, and, God help me, knitting.  There was time set aside for sewing, during which I learned how to finish the edges of something, presumably a blanket, with blanket stitch. I even learned a kind of embroidery, stitching all six letters of my name in green thread on a red gingham apron, all the while wishing I had been christened something shorter. “Eve” perhaps.

The Hamlyn All Colour CookBook which almost 50 years later, is still with me, leaning against a slick volume of recipes by Julia Child and Jaques Pepin. My Hamlyn, ‘Old Faithful,’ is of little practical use in my Mexican kitchen, in spite of its guide to metrication and the peppy opener by Mary Berry. Yes, that Mary Berry. A dust-collecting memento of my schoolgirl days, with ingredients and words that make more sense back home – like aubergines and Morelio cherres. Not necessarily my home mind you, but the kinds of homes where Frank Bryant’s student, “Rita” fancied herself serving the right wine to accompany hor d’oeuvres that involved aspic jelly crystals, radishes fashioned into roses, and a garnish of watercress or parsley.  Neither Piquant Herring Salad nor Sole Véronique have yet to make an appearance in my life, but, to be fair, other dishes regularly did. There was Mandarin Gâteau and Iced Coffee Sponge, and Victoria sandwich, slices of which showed up regularly in Tupperware parties hosted by mothers like mine – unashamed celebrations of plastic and its place in our kitchen cupboards. The first time I wanted to impress a boy with my fair to middling cooking skills, I turned to the “Continental Favourites” section for a Spaghetti Bolognese recipe. Years later, when I was asked to make cupcakes for my daughter’s class, I turned to #282, by any other name, a “wee buns” recipe. The boy is long gone, and my daughter’s all grown up, but the recipe is indelible in mind. I can’t bring myself to part with this relic from my Domestic Science class in 1970s Northern Ireland.

The Hamlyn was the first school textbook my mother didn’t have to back with brown parcel paper, because it came with its very own dust-jacket.  For my stay-at-home-mother at the time – the ‘housewife’ to whom Mary Berry is writing in her introduction –  “backing books” was one of her favorite jobs. By the first day of school every September, she had rolls of paper set aside for this special task.

Our teachers were fussy about the way our books were backed. There was an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. She started by placing each book carefully in the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and then with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she had it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. One September, when my mother was ill and in Belfast’s Royal Victoria hospital, I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many tasks, my mother had made it look easy, but unlike my mother, I had not learned by watching. I couldn’t make the brown paper curl neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up. I went to school, my book un-backed. For this, I was subjected to a sarcastic tirade from a teacher who knew but didn’t care that my mother was in the hospital. At 60 years old, I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face.

**********

The dust jacket of my Hamlyn is relatively intact, bearing only a few tears and the odd smear left behind by buttery adolescent fingers. I can clearly recall how my mother pored over its photographs when it was brand new,  delighted to find so many cakes and sweets she already knew how to make without as much as a precise measurement, let alone a “method” like the one we had to painstakingly copy into our Domestic Science notebooks – in fountain pen. She had set aside one day a week for Baking Day. I loved it. Every Friday, by the time daddy came home from work, all the square Tupperware containers and biscuit tins left over from Christmas were lined with greaseproof paper and filled to their brims with irresistible confections –  caramel fingers, melting moments, fudge cakes, shortbread, and butterfly buns.  And every Sunday after dinner, we could choose from an apple or a rhubarb tart, Pavlova, Trifle, a Victoria Sponge, or a Swiss Roll.  I am surprised we still have our own teeth.

Although she had copied down many of these recipes, which I stuck inside a book for future reference, ma never took much notice of them. She took only one precaution while baking and that was to warn in advance my dad, my brother, and me not to slam the backdoor. Especially if there was a fruitcake baking “Don’t you bang the door or the fruit cake will collapse in the oven!”  I have resisted the urge to fact-check this. If Irish mammies say it, it must be true.

I once called her for her boiled cake recipe – a version of Irish Barmbrack which she used to make every Halloween. I remember for luck – or because her mother had done it too – she’d bake a sixpence or a thruppenny bit inside.  With pen and paper at the ready, our transatlantic phone conversation went as follows:
My mother: Och, Yvonne, sure you know yourself, you just put your ingredients in, boil them, and then let them cool.
Me: But what are the ingredients?
My mother: Long sigh.
Me: I’m writing this down.
My mother: OK. Just add your egg and your flour, put in your margarine, sugar, and a cup or two of black tea, all your cherries, raisins, and sultanas. Be you careful when you bring it to the boil. Let it cool and then throw in two or three eggs. Stir it all up and pour it in your loaf tin. Throw it in the oven and that’s your boiled cake. Now for a fruit cake, you just cream your butter and sugar in the mixer until they are nice and fluffy. Put in your eggs and your flour and all your fruit. Stir it all up and throw it in the oven. It will take longer to cook than the boiled cake. Use a slower oven.

I reminded my granddaughter not to bang the kitchen door, but I was none the wiser other than to tell you if this were a fruit cake/Barmbrack throw-down with Bobby Flay my mother would have won hands-down. I also know my Domestic Science teacher would have dismissed ma’s “method” as highly unsatisfactory without a list of ingredients and numbered directions that included the weighing of things copied into notebooks by girls – only girls – in the classrooms of segregated schools. 

For those of you still paying attention, 93 percent of Northern Ireland’s children still attend segregated schools that overwhelmingly educate children from only a Catholic or a Protestant background.  It wasn’t until I was a college student in Belfast that the fight for integrated education was just beginning.

There were no boys in Domestic Science, nor were there any girls in Woodwork, Metalwork, or the exotic-sounding Technical Studies.  There were, however, some grown ups who had noted the fundamental unfairness of this situation and pledged to remedy it. They had some clout too, because along came The Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order of 1976  making unlawful the inequality of access for boys and girls to all areas of the curriculum. Landmark legislation, this enabled boys and girls, in the same classroom, to partake of Craft, Design, and Technology, although it would be another 14 years before a National Curriculum would be implemented. 

Along with these efforts to make Domestic Science and Technical Studies curricula more gender-neutral, was the work that continues in 2024 to confront the fact that schools in Northern Ireland were segregating Protestant and Catholic children.  Since 1974, All Children Together (ACT) had been imploring churches and government to take the initiative in educating children together. In 1981, a small group of Belfast parents dared to change the course of history, to force the issue, to confront aloud what happens to the heart of a country and the identity of its children when they are educated in segregated schools. Ordinary Catholics and Protestants, we already knew what happened. It was time for change, to demand an answer to questions such as this, asked in 1957 by  Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lester Bowles Pearson:

How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?

As I learned in Rathcoole, there are few better places to learn about one another than in the classroom.

In 1981, Lagan College became the first integrated secondary school in Northern Ireland to offer such a space for boys and girls, Catholics and Protestants. Named for the river that runs through Belfast, Lagan College, under armed guard, opened its doors to 28 children. It is different today. According to the school’s website, as of September 2022 here are 1455 pupils on the Lisnabreeny site with more than 200 staff.

A 21st century school, its curriculum includes Home Economics. All students follow a course in the subject, the central focus of which “… is the consideration of the home and family in relation to the development of the individual and society. During the three years, they will address the areas of Diet and Health, Family Life and Choice and Management of Resources. A wide range of practical cookery is built into each unit of work, so that pupils can develop a range of important skills.”

That sounds more important and doable than the Domestic Science of my youth, which leads me back to where I started, to the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book and to Northern Ireland – a place apart of which I will forever be a part.

a red letter day

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I’m sure he exists, but I have never seen the mailman where I live in Mexico. Regardless, I still peek into the letterbox every day, the way I used to all those years I lived in Arizona when there was likely to be an envelope marked By Air MailPar Avion waiting for me in the mailbox in front of our house. My Mexican mail amounts to an electricity bill (without an envelope let alone a stamp) delivered once every two months by someone I have never seen. There’s the occasional business card from someone who wants to wash my car, sell my house, or extend my eyelashes. And once a year, after Christmas, I’ll find in the mailbox the brown envelope I’ve been waiting for. There it was yesterday morning, with its tell-tale Air Mail stickers and a silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II on a postage stamp and its perfect timing. Inside it was the Northern Ireland calendar for the coming year. And, my heart did a little happy dance . . .

The Northern Ireland 2024 appointment calendar features a dozen beautiful photographs of places I never really appreciated when I was growing up there – Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, “Game of Thrones” filming locations on the Antrim coast, or the Mountains of Mourne sweeping, as only they do, down to the sea. My mother has sent a NI calendar every year to our relatives in America or Australia, and ever since I became one of those far away relatives in the late 1980s when I emigrated to the USA and then moved to Mexico four years ago, I too have been the recipient of a Northern Ireland calendar. No matter what else is happening in the world that might affect the mail, my calendar has arrived unscathed every single year and almost always before January 1.

Before Facebook, email, WhatsApp, and whatever else you’re having, my mother and I exchanged hundreds of letters and greeting cards and packages. For over a decade after I left Northern Ireland, I knew to expect, at least once a week, a red, white, and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope. Marked By Air Mail and Par Avion with a postage stamp bearing the image of a member of the Royal Family or some other famous person, for instance the drummer of the other Queen. Ma’s letter was always crammed with all the news she could squeeze onto one page – who had died, how much it had been raining, what daddy was planting in the garden, and how distance is no good. The water is wide.

I continue to marvel at the journey of the fragile airmail letter; all the inspections it passed and the numerous hands it passed through on its way from a red pillar box in a rainy village in Northern Ireland and over the Atlantic Ocean and on to a desert city in Arizona, where a nice man in a little US mail truck would retrieve it from his big Santa sack and drop it in my red brick mail box.

Along with the airmail envelope/letter, there were other letters too, written on lined pale blue notebook pages my mother had numbered and folded with clippings from The Belfast Telegraph, recipes, packages of flower seeds, death notices. My parents – and I know they are not alone in this particular practice – always turned to “the deaths” before reading anything else in the newspaper. I used to roll my eyes over what I thought was depressing and very Irish behavior, but now that I’m older than my parents were when I was a teenager, I view it differently. It’s pure acknowledgement that someone used to be here. Someone left a mark, blazed a trail, touched a heart – someone will be missed.


Those pages of my mother’s exquisite blue handwriting bore ink-smudges and creases, occasionally a tea-stained ring of her cup; and, I’m convinced, a barely-there scent of Fairly Liquid dish-soap.

Letter-writing was as prominent in our lives as the Sunday roast. With so many of the extended family away in America or Australia and no such thing as cheap phone plans – or cheap phones for that matter, there weren’t just letters, there were birthday and Christmas cards, St Patrick’s Day cards, sympathy cards, parcels (the Christmas box) and scenic postcards. Of the latter, nobody seemed to mind that along with “wish you here,” the writer often put it all out there on a postcard for the postman and anyone else to read if they encountered it on its journey. Oversharing was never an issue and certainly not the phenomenon it became after 2008 when Webster’s New World Dictionary made it their ‘New Word of the Year.’

Maybe it’s because we overshare the way social media allows us to, that we don’t see a need to share at all in handwritten letters or postcards or Christmas cards. I find it odd, given that we’re supposed to be more connected than ever, especially after a pandemic that kept us so far apart. Sitting here in Mexico, I can tell you with stunning accuracy what my friend is having for dinner in Belfast tonight. The last time I sent her a Christmas card was 1991. We haven’t talked in years, but we’re “connected” – just like everybody else on the digital super duper highway – which I think means we’re probably not connected at all.

When my lovely friend Rhonda visited me in real life (IRL) this past year, she gave me an envelope emblazoned in black marker: “Ma. (For Christmas).” I hid it so I wouldn’t be tempted to open it until Christmas, and subsequently couldn’t find it until today. When I read the hand-written wishes on the card inside from my daughter, well, you know the rest. My heart did a little happy dance. She could have just texted me the way she does almost every day, but she sat down and sent me a proper Christmas card. And with it came the realization that this is the first Christmas where I have not received a single Christmas card in the mail. Not one. There have been lots of online greetings – virtual Christmas hugs and Santa hat emojis exchanged on Facebook and in texts and elsewhere. What happened to the Christmas Card tradition in my life? Where is the person I used to be?

For decades, that person had a leather address book that was consulted on a day in early December set aside for writing cards to everyone I knew – friends, neighbors, extended family members, colleagues, the insurance man. I made sure to consult the post office for the final dates for posting cards and parcels for delivery in time for Christmas – to and from the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia. My mother always double-checked the last day to mail packages to her far-flung relatives in America and Australia – and it is no fiction that those packages were indeed of the brown paper variety and tied up with string (butcher string). I also remember – and I think I got this from my mother – I used to put a little check mark next to the name of the person who hadn’t sent a card the year before. I sent one regardless, because … it’s Christmas, and to invoke Love Actually, “if you can’t say it at Christmas, eh?” Still, it would cross my mind that maybe they had been sick or somebody had died and the newspaper forgot to include the death notice or maybe they just decided to join the growing number of people who aren’t “doing” Christmas cards anymore.

When I was young, I remember rushing into our hall as soon as I heard the thud when a pile of Christmas cards fell through the letter box. Bearing postmarks from all over the world, it was a feast of international communication. There were always at least a hundred Christmas cards hanging on string draped across our living room walls. The fanciest cards had pride of place on the mantelpiece or on the phone table where everybody could see them, pick them up and read the message inside for, in the following order: “Betty, Eric, Yvonne, and Keith.” There were often duplicate cards featuring Dickensian winter scenes or perhaps the Wise Men with presents for the baby Jesus, but we still had to display both in case the sender visited and noticed his card wasn’t there. If memory serves me right, my mother also had a stash of favorite cards that she just wouldn’t part with and they would show up in different places around the house each year, like ornaments. From gaudy to sophisticated, to home-made with glitter and fake snow – there was room for all of them. There’s no room for Facebook messages and Christmassy updates on the mantelpiece.

But back to my heart’s little happy dance.

Typically, the Northern Ireland calendar requires three magnets to attach it to my refrigerator where I will see it every day. I love its photographs of places from six counties where the sun is always shining. I love the big white squares for each day of the week and all the reminders of Bank Holidays that don’t coincide with any holidays here, and Mother’s Day is on a different day too. First, I’ll mark on it the birthdays that are already committed to memory. These are ‘red letter days.’ Then I’ll think about when the insurance is due or when the oil needs changing and those will go on the calendar too. These are the opposite of red letter days, but they cannot be ignored. I will put a big circle around the date of a special event like a Bruce Springsteen concert or a trip back home and subsequently count down to these with big red X’s that fill up each square on the calendar, the way a 5th grader writes on the corner of the chalkboard how many days are left before school’s out for summer (about 150).

In spite of all the productivity apps on my phone and the online calendar attached to my work email which asks me to RSVP to Thanksgiving, Christmas, every public holiday in the US, and even my own birthday, the Northern Ireland wall calendar remains the mother of all calendars. The only calendar to equal it was the one I used to make for my parents that featured photos of my daughter, her daddy, and me. It had a different family photo to correspond to the month of the year … the three of us making snow angels for December, or watching fireworks explode in the sky over Morro Bay for July. You get the idea. But without him, the home-made family photo calendar seemed wrong, a reminder that he wasn’t here any more, so I turned instead to the beautiful Arizona Highways wall calendar. When it arrives sometime in January 2024, it will be the calendar hanging in my parent’s kitchen in rural Derry, even though Mother’s Day is on a different day in Ireland and also the USA doesn’t do Bank Holidays.

In the digital age, we’d all be forgiven for thinking the days of the paper calendar are numbered. After all, look what happened to letter-writing and Christmas cards in my family. But then again, look what happened to vinyl records. Vinyl went away and then it occurred to somebody that tangibility matters, and vinyl came back with a vengeance.

Like a handwritten letter or a paper calendar, a vinyl record is tangible and an investment of time. Before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets and online calendar notifications and beeps and alerts, there was a time when we didn’t mind investing time in letters that would help close the distance between us. Letters required a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us. Letters and Christmas Cards and postcards force us to slow down even as the world around us spins at ever-increasing velocity.

I miss all of that and all that Simon Garfield says I – and others – have lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.”

I have an idea. Maybe it’s a resolution just in time for the New Year. I’m going to set aside one day each month to mail a letter or a card to my parents and to my daughter. It will be a red letter day, and one day around this time next year, I’ll be back here to tell you all about it.

May 2024 be good to you and yours. Happy New Year.

When the sun stops …

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Dawn light began stealing
Through the cold universe to County Meath,

Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,
Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones
Millennia deep in their own unmoving

And unmoved alignment.

(from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney)

Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23 degrees south of the Equator.

The importance of this astronomical event to the ancient Celts is reflected in  a massive neolithic tomb in Newgrange, Ireland. In 2021, for the first time, due to COVID restrictions, anyone with internet access could enter the tomb, a place even older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids in Gaza, and observe the phenomenon. A lottery determines who will enter the chamber and experience the phenomenon as it was intended by our Stone Age ancestors, the farmers who created it about 5,200 years ago.  In its roof is a little opening aligned to the ascending sun. When that single sunbeam shoots through the roof-box at around 9AM, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the burial chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved in the ancient walls.  It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.

Newgrange appeals to sun worshippers and archeologists, ethnographers and tourists, astronomers and poets, and ordinary people like you and me. In the year before the pandemic changed everything, only 16 out of 30,000 applicants from as far away as the United States, were selected to experience the spectacle of solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunately, Irish weather provides no guarantee of sunlight, and clouds often keep the light out for those waiting for the longest night of the year to end.   But this morning, for the few who won the lottery to attend, the sun broke through the clouds and the chamber lit up briefly.  The rest of us can watch online the astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. 

It is a time when the ancients speak to us, reassuring us that no matter how dark the days, the cycle will always begin again. There’s light on the horizon.

This morning, I am far away from Newgrange, at home on the shores of Lake Chapala in Mexico. Such rituals are all around. The legacy of pre-Columbian civilizations can be viewed in a ceremony on the waterfront almost daily – La Danza de  los Voladores, the origins of which  are attributed to the Totonacapan region of Veracruz, which in 2009 boasted 38 of the 56 volador poles officially recorded in Mexico. First written about in 1612 by Franciscan chronicler, Fray Jaun de Torquemadam, the ritual is a powerful testimony to the tenacity of indigenous groups in adapting their customs and practices to the new order imposed by the Spanish and also in ensuring they live on from one generation to the next.

Far from Newgrange, on the sunny shores of Lake Chapala in Mexico, such rituals abound. The legacy of pre-Columbian civilizations can be viewed in a ceremony on the waterfront almost daily. La Danza de  los Voladores originated in the Totonacapan region of Veracruz, which in 2009 boasted 38 of the 56 remaining volador poles officially recorded in Mexico. First written about in 1612 by  Franciscan chronicler, Fray Jaun de Torquemadam, the ritual is a testimony to the tenacity of indigenous groups in adapting their customs and practices to the new order imposed by the Spanish and also in ensuring they live on from one generation to the next.

A handful of onlookers on the Ajijic malecon pause for a moment to watch, smart phones at the ready to record as the voladores, in  traditional costume, begin their solemn procession to a 30m high pole between two trees. One by one, four men climb the pole to reach its summit, where they are closer to the sun god, each of them representing the cardinal points as well as the elements.

All is quiet until a haunting melody begins as the leader, the caporal, hoists himself up to perch atop a tiny wooden platform, the tecomate. Bending, balancing, hopping from one foot to the other, he plays his flute and beats on a tiny drum, turning to face north, south, east, and west, while the pole below him sways precariously in the breeze.  No harness. No safety net. Only faith.

Then the moment we have all been waiting for – the flyers hurl themselves into the air. Headfirst, arms outstretched like wings, they allow the thin ropes tying them to the platform to unravel as they spin in ever-widening circles around the pole, streamers the color of the rainbow trailing behind them in the sky. The plaintive tune continues during their majestic descent, each man hoping to make 13 circuits – 52 representing the number of years on the Aztec calendar – imploring the gods to return the sun. Right before reaching the ground, a final flourish – a quick somersault. Legend has it that if they land on their feet, the Mayan gods will be pleased and bless us with longer days.

Mortals again, they land softly to quiet utterances of ‘bravo’ from a small group of spectators who know they just witnessed something sacred, something from another time, for all time. Legend has it that if they land on their feet, the Mayan gods will be pleased and bless us with longer days.

 

It is perhaps an act of faith that brings us together to celebrate an ancient light show in a tomb in Ireland or a sky dance above a magical town in Mexico. Together, on sacred ground, we are connected to  the past and the future.

As sunlight flooded the ancient chamber in Newgrange, a livestream cohost whispered. “The long night is over. Let’s look forward now to brighter days and all good things to come.”  

We too can take a spectacular leap, voladores, arms outstretched, to welcome the new year ahead.

Happy Solstice 2023. 

a time to give thanks …

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Over forty years ago, I made three purchases that would change the trajectory of my life – an InterRail travel pass, a 35mm camera, and a hi-fi stereo system. At the time, I lived in a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street in Belfast along with four nerdy male engineering students who tolerated my girliness – but didn’t really “get” me. At the lower end, stood The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, well-stocked and convenient. In between, the row of houses teemed with university students, all of us imaginative misfits, attending class only when there was nothing else better to do. There was often something better to do. I recall one evening when we spilled out of our houses onto Ridgeway Street to pelt each other with water balloons. Watching us, the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool and somewhat bemused Phil Lynott, leaning against the door jamb of a house full of Derry girls. I have no idea why he was there, but he was in no hurry to leave.  Because this was in the days before the Internet and smart phones, before Facebook and a steady stream of random pics of food and famous people, the only photograph is the image in my mind’s eye. There he is, a few doors down from mine – a rock star – smoking a cigarette and smiling as we soaked each other on the kind of Spring evening that transforms Northern Ireland into a Game of Thrones filming location.

Decades later, most of the vinyl records bought with my university grant, are stowed away in cardboard boxes in my father’s shed Castledawson. Some, Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home, made it to Mexico. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary is the Inter-Rail pass that took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – behind the Berlin Wall, Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The 35mm camera? It was stolen from my first apartment the summer I arrived in the USA. It would be another 30 years before it was replaced when for my 50th birthday, the year after my breast cancer diagnosis – because he thought I might be ready to take stock and see things differently – my late husband gave me a 35mm Nikon.

Back in the saddle, I enrolled with a great friend in a college photography class. I loved it. It required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we might otherwise miss going about our daily business.  Like a couple of teenagers, we competed for an “A” from our photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon who was also dealing with breast cancer with neither time nor patience for pink ribbons and platitudes. I loved her. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were.  With a dead-pan dead-on sense of what mattered, she inspired me to do my homework and to never miss class. Bristling at our predictable photographs shot unacceptably straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light.” We just needed to find the light. Photography, she said, was “writing with light.”

I wanted to find that light, the thing Amyn Nasser describes as the photographer’s magic:

He has the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern, and wild.

Believing in us the way the best teachers do, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” She instructed us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . .

So it was that before sunset on Thanksgiving , I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually stopping beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.

I don’t remember how long I sat there in the shade of those trees, looking skyward and thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to a kind of gratitude.  For the day that’s in it, Thanksgiving has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence – among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico’s largest lake.

It’s about finding the light. Seeing the light. It’s about Annie Lamott’s Three Essential Prayers –  Help, Thanks, Wow:

Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit. And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.

At the end of the first year of the COVID crisis,  Rabbi Bentzy Stolik urged his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude,” to get in – all in – to the spirit of a season that nudges us to take stock, a toll of all that we should appreciate with optimism for brighter days ahead.  The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace  known ways with new routines and rituals; it inspired new reasons – reminders – to be thankful – for all we had previously taken for granted  – hugs and handshakes, hanging out and happy hour, multiple trips to the grocery store on the same day and meetings without masks; hair appointments and pedicures and parties and graduations and weddings and funerals – and our kids going off to school every day. We promised ourselves, didn’t we, that we’d never take those things for granted again. I wonder if we’ve maybe forgotten some of that, which reminds me of a lovely minute or two from “Waking Ned Devine.

vieilles-canailles-1998-14-gThe hapless Irish Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right as Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy.  Quick on his feet and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and begins:

As we look back on the life of . . .

Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.

To my friends, thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.