talking to strangers

28 Friday Apr 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

Tags

baseball, Damian Gorman, Derry Girls, Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, States of Play, USA politics

A month or two ago, I received an email from a stranger. A former journalist with The Financial Times who splits his time between Belfast and Baltimore, Steve McGookin, had landed on an old column I’d written for the Irish Times about my love affair with the Boston Red Sox and wondered if I might be interested in taking part in his States of Play, a project that uses baseball as a window into discussions – a series of nine Q&As – innings – with interesting folks about politics, society, and cultural connections.

Of course I said ‘yes.’ Without hesitation. After all, one of the best things about journalism as Steve points out on his website is just reaching out to random people and hoping they’ll talk to you.”

In retrospect, my only wish is that we could have had the entire conversation in the cheap seats at Fenway all the way into extra innings.

If you’re a baseball fan or if you’re just interested in the state of the nation from the perspective of an immigrant from Northern Ireland, you’ll maybe take a look, with this in mind:

At a ball game, you almost always see something you’ve never seen before. In today’s America, honestly, God only knows what we might see next.

Thanks again, Steve. Hope to see you back on the oul’ sod one day soon.

Here’s the link to my nine innings, conducted over email in the Spring of 2023 shortly before – and after – I returned to Northern Ireland to celebrate my 60th birthday which coincided with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.

Derry Girls Mural, 18 Orchard Street, Derry, Northern Ireland

poetry: works like a charm

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

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charm, cure, Faith, faith healer, folklore, Memoir, Miracles, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, World Poetry Day 2023

March 21, World Poetry Day, UNESCO recognizes again the point of poetry, celebrating it as one of our most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. The theme this year is drawn from a line of poetry by Charles Baudelaire – “Always be a poet, even in prose” – a call to observe and appreciate the power of poetry in difficult times.

In words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, the power of poetry has no match. As an intimate form of expression that opens doors to others, poetry enriches the dialogue that catalyses all human progress, and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times.

— Audrey Azoulay, Director-General.

My earliest recollection of poetry is my father’s recitation from memory of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service or Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Whenever I spot daffodils, I am immediately transported to our Dublin Road living room where my father is reciting the opening lines. Where he learned those poems, I have no idea. My father is not an academic; he did not rub shoulders with the Northern Ireland literati. My da is a maker of things. His is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. As such, he’ll make no bones about telling me that this began solely as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting, and roof-thatching.

He always whistled or he sang as he worked. With an ear for music, he could always pick out a tune on whatever instrument was within reach – “The Black Velvet Band” on a hefty piano accordian with mother of pearl keys comes to mind. He always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the – which is probably why I so easily find harmonies when I sing – not melodies – first. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, my father made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me a violin that would one day open doors for me in far away places. My father never bought an instrument for himself, and I don’t recall him ever buying a book or borrowing one from the library – somehow poetry found him.

I’ve always thought he belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. He has the “Midas touch” of the thatcher and the grasp of the diviner, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. Once, I observed, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.” He grew up – as did my mother – in Heaney country, a place where people believed in “miracles and cures and healing wells,” and where everyone knew the “folk healer,” the individual uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed them.

The folk healer meted out charms in plasters and poultices, and potions that swirled in brown bottles. It was to the healer my father turned when the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her severe bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this response from a man with formal medical training, my father ventured deep into the Derry countryside to the home of the man with “the charm.” Observant and eager to help even though he could not discern which wild herbs held the curing powers, my father accompanied him into the fields. He watched and then waited as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm – beat the juices from the herbs with a stone, then mixed it with two bottles of Guinness stout and poured it into a C&C lemonade bottle. He sent my father on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. There was no payment – other than faith.

Admittedly, I have always been skeptical of the faith healer but never of the faith at work in the transaction. In times of crisis, when all else fails, where do we turn? Wherever it is, faith is a part.

After he suffered a stroke in 2005, Seamus Heaney wrote “Miracle,” as part of his Human Chain collection. As he recalls the men who had to carry him up and down stairs immediately following his stroke, Heaney draws on the New Testament story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof into Christ’s presence:

Just then some men came, carrying a paralyzed man on a bed. They were trying to bring him in and lay him before Jesus; but finding no way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus. When he saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” – Luke 5:18-20

In a 2009 interview Heaney said as a non-believer, “Miracle” was not a spiritual poem, but rather one that marked “being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear.” I suppose every now and again we all read one that transforms us.

It was only when he suffered a stroke and had to be carried himself, Heaney realized how important those men were, and he invites us to realize the same, to “be mindful” of those who carried him – the human chain – the ones who knew him all along. Without the community of people around the sick man, there is no miracle.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Poet, Carol Ann Duffy, once explained in her response to the devastation of the Haiti earthquake as it unfolded on television that “we turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . when we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.”

As for Heaney, when asked about the value of poetry in turbulent times, he replied that it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

It works like a charm.

an irish mother’s day dance

19 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Tags

Keeping going, Miami Showband Massacre, Mother's Day, Seamus Heaney, Trouble Songs

Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

The other day I was in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara and paused by the impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. This was no small act, with me raised in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. I’m thinking of her this morning. It is Mother’s Day where I am from, and my mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her last year.

Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my old denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have since forgotten I am drawn back to all those times she would ease into a story I had heard a time or two before, to the lessons from behind the ironing board – the one about taking time to consider the lilies; to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by. Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead after all.

Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers – tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, mass shootings anywhere in the United States, or bombs in Belfast shops – while at the same time encouraging me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.

I recall one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our little kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including the heartthrob lead singer.

Our David Cassidy was dead.

Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, people like us believed that musicians like The Miami were immune to the horrors of political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. They represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. The band was as my dear friend, bass guitarist, Stephen Travers, recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.”

That night in 1975 left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” a tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy. As Belfast writer, Stuart Bailie, points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”

The handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men whose response was to continue shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Stephen was gravely wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.

As the man on the radio continued his report, my mother kept ironing, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was horrific – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would, but many of us would leave, and maybe that’s why Granny’s final words in Kenneth Branagh’s movie Belfast pack such a punch, “Go now – don’t look back” – words I heard my own granny say to my parents so many times when I was very small. My parents toyed with the idea of immigration – South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but in the end they stayed, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years as their American grand-daugher grew up far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.

I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now, our once massive extended family growing smaller – the last of my dad’s brothers died just a few weeks ago. My mother’s brothers all dead too. I have no more uncles. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.

From the sectarian and political, to the deeply personal, Mothers Day always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I was secure in my place; I knew my steps in the dance. On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our wee back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon just as the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.

Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

I’m thinking of all the mothers back home today, to paraphrase Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left. And for all the ones who were lost.

Thank you for staying, ma – for being home.

As between clear blue and cloud,

Between haystack and sunset sky,

Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence. I was there.

Me in place and the place in me

Happy Mothers Day.

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”

a homing bird

03 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world … Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.

~ Stephen King, “The Breathing Method”

In November 2019, I become a citizen of the United States, able to vote for the first time in my life, to move freely with both an American passport and an Irish passport and therefore feel a little more secure in places I no longer recognize. As I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, an old dream shimmered in my memory. It once belonged to my grandmother, and I wanted to reclaim it for her.

She died when I was just six years old, but I remember her clearly, perhaps because hers was my first experience with death or maybe because she was the first person to love me wholly and unconditionally. Sometimes – like this morning – when the sun splashes on the walls around the garden, I can hear her voice, gentle but urgent, coaxing her daughter – my mother – to “follow the sun.” As she had done.

In the 1920s, she and my grandfather emigrated to America, where they settled in Connecticut. They loved it, but a relentless stream of letters from back home, guilt-spiced reminders of familial obligation, pulled them back, back to rural Derry in 1932, with their American-born children – four sons and a daughter. My grandmother is not smiling in the picture that would be placed in the family passport and stamped as she boarded the boat to cross the Atlantic again, to journey back to Broagh, Castledawson, a part of the world that would one day be known to the global literati as Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney’s home place. But in 1932, it was austere and unwelcoming for my grandmother and her American children, and she had no choice but to abandon forever the glittering possibilities on the other side of the ocean.

Defeated, with an air of resignation that would remain with her always, she and my grandfather resumed the known and expected ways of the townland, and within six years, their family was complete with two more daughters, Dorothy and Elizabeth, my mother.

There was no easy money. As a matter of economic necessity and from an early age, the family was “off the grid,” resigned to hard work – to the compulsory crafts – thatching and churning, divining and digging. There was a vague awareness of education as a way out and up, but it was not enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “the pen was easier handled than the spade.” More accessible as the way up, she believed, was America – the dream of it – and she urged my parents to pursue it, knowing my father’s entrepreneurial spirit would have paid off. Somehow, the message only got through to me.

In the early 1960s, my mother frequently took me “up home” to visit my grandparents. We took the Route 110 bus from Antrim to the Hillhead. It always felt like a Sunday School excursion – an adventure. Walking from the bus stop to granny’s house, I remember forcing my tiny self not to be fear whatever might be hiding in the dark spaces in the canopy of beech and alder that hung over us.

A silky fragrant world there, and for the first few hundred yards, you were safe enough . . . but scuffles in old leaves made you nervous.

~ Seamus Heaney.

Scared, but buoyed by bluebells and foxgloves that winked at me from the grassy edges of the road and the rustic rhythms the turf-cutters, I kept going. There was comfort in the certainty that soon I would be in my grandmother’s arms, breathing in time to her heartsome sighs as she carried buckets of water from the pump and then, with me in tow, delivering bottles of milky tea to the men in the fields baling hay, cutting turf, digging potatoes. Over 50 years later, I can still see her, wiping her hands with one elegant motion on a flowery American apron, her hand-knit cardigan the color of buttercups, her smile big and indulgent and for me only.

How she loved me.

Little legacies are all around me – the old washstand identical to the one she took back on the boat all the way from America to Ireland; The Masons stoneware baking bowl; fresh flowers; an unnecessary winter coat in my closet that reminds me of the good brown coat she always wore on special outings. I remember the embroidered “As I lay me down to sleep” sampler that hung on the bedroom wall when I stayed at with her; ice cream sliders from McGurk’s shop, and quarter-pound white paper bags stuffed with Merry Maid caramels. Behind my mother’s back, she treated me to sugar sandwiches – great door-steps of white bread filled with creamy, country butter made crunchy with too much caster sugar.

My parents once left me with her while they took a trip to Derry with my uncle and his American wife. While I played outside, she was baking lemon meringue tarts and made the mistake of leaving three of them to cool on the windowsill. Irresistible. There I was on my tiptoes, at first just picking gingerly at the edges of the mile-high meringue topping, thinking nobody would notice. Invariably, temptation won, and I devoured every bit, rendering the tarts bald and shiny, plain yellow circles atop rings of shortcrust pastry. Granny just thought it was funny, and encouraged me to do it again the next time.

Like my grandmother, I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America – the idea of it, the promise of a sunny day – nor was I ever afraid to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk,” to emigrate. Having spent more than half my life in Arizona and the last three years in Mexico, there are still unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a visceral longing for “home” and the rhythm of it.

The moments pass. I find my way again. I am home..

Home by Paula Meehan

I am the blind woman finding her way home by a map of tune.
When the song that is in me is the song I hear from the world
I’ll be home. It’s not written down and I don’t remember the words.
I know when I hear it I’ll have made it myself. I’ll be home.

A version I heard once in Leitrim was close, a wet Tuesday night
in the Sean Relig bar. I had come for the session, I stayed
for the vision and lore. The landlord called time,
the music dried up, the grace notes were pitched to the dark.
When the jukebox blared out I’d only four senses and he left me senseless,

I’d no choice but to take to the road. On Grafton Street in November
I heard a mighty sound: a travelling man with a didgeridoo
blew me clear to Botany Bay. The tune too far back to live in
but scribed on my bones. In a past life I may have been Kangaroo,
rocked in my dreamtime, convict ships coming o’er the foam.

In the Puzzle Factory one winter I was sure I was home.
The talking in tongues, the riddles, the rhymes, struck a chord
that cut through the pharmaceutical haze. My rhythm catatonic,
I lulled myself back to the womb, my mother’s heart
beating the drum of herself and her world. I was tricked
by her undersong, just close enough to my own. I took then
to dancing; I spun like a Dervish. I swear I heard the subtle
music of the spheres. It’s no place to live, but –
out there in space, on your own, hung aloft the night.
The tune was in truth a mechanical drone;
I was a pitiful monkey jigging on cue. I came back to earth
with a land, to rain on my face, to sun in my hair. And grateful too.

The wise women say you must live in your skin, call it home,
no matter how battered or broken, misused by the world, you can heal.
This morning a letter arrived on the nine o’clock post.
The Department of Historical Reparation, and who did I blame?
The Nuns? Your Mother? The State? Tick box provided,
we’ll consider your case. I’m burning my soapbox, I’m taking
the very next train. A citizen of nowhere, nothing to my name.

I’m on my last journey. Though my lines are all wonky
they spell me a map that makes sense. Where the song that is in me
is the song I hear from the world, I’ll set down my burdens
and sleep. The spot that I lie on at last the place I’ll call home.