P.S. Thank you, Seamus

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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996


Eleven years since you left us, your poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch the heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to thank you in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I say something about the rain too and, before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .

. . .  for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blueberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola rushing under the bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of  things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie

In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only your words worked  – certain and sure.

But when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would have been capable of producing the words that might assuage the country’s sorrow over your passing.  I remember somebody saying that your death left a breach in the language itself.

Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

Today,  I am pulled back again to “The Underground.”  It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that once —when you were asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

You never looked back.

When I heard that your final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld:

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”

No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed –  simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you told us once before,  “it is important to be reassured.”

Thanks, Seamus.  I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.

Omagh. On a sunny afternoon.

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“It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Last month, after almost 26 years, the British government opened the first hearing of an independent statutory inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing that claimed 29 lives and injured hundreds in the County Tyrone market town on 15 August 1998. 

If justice comes, it won’t be swift. The first hearing is mainly  procedural. No witnesses will be called or evidence heard until next year.  Bereaved and traumatized families and survivors must wait, as they have done for almost three decades.

They are in my thoughts as I look out on the morning from my parents house in Northern Ireland. I think it is the first time I have been back here on this date since the summer of 1998. 

A brand new mother that year, I had come home with my baby girl. Between my father, my brother, and a handful of relatives who could keep a secret – and this is no small feat in rural County Derry – we had planned a “This is Your Life” style surprise to celebrate my mother’s sixtieth birthday.  It was delicious. We had all swallowed the same secret, and my all-knowing mother was completely in the dark.

The Troubles had tainted previous visits home, but this time was different. We really believed it was over, that there would be no bombings, no shootings, no army checkpoints. There was something symbolic, magical even, in returning home with a baby in my arms to a brand new optimism fueled by The Good Friday Agreement signed only four months before.

It had been different four years before. That trip had coincided with Ireland’s qualifying for the World Cup. The country was ecstatic – factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. My brother and I had considered going to the pub to watch the first-round match, but daddy convinced us to stay home, have a few tins of Harp, maybe a half ‘un of Whiskey and watch from the comfort of the living room. So we stayed at home and watched on telly – in joyous disbelief –  as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. When the lads in green scored a goal, we roared with pride even as we were afraid to look, not unlike Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series.

The second half of the match was well underway when two men, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub, The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men gathered around the bar watching Ireland beat Italy. They killed six of them. According to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was in his eighties, someone’s grandfather, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup.

It chills me still to think of Barney Green struck down with such savagery in the very moment as that jubilant Irish squad burst out of an American football stadium, awash in green, buoyed by the chanting of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by the hideous dispatch from a country pub back home. Surely that would be the last time we would hear of such horror. No. It would not. Omagh was just up the road.


For many Northern Ireland families, mine included, the youngest generation had known only a country in conflict. But in 1998, my daughter would witness a new country. The people – including my parents who had voted for the first time in their lives – wanted peace and said ‘yes’ to the question  “Do you support the Agreement reached at the multi-party talks on Northern Ireland and set out in Command Paper 3883?” It was a resounding yes from the people, in anticipation of the brand new day Northern Ireland deserved.

When my mother’s 60th birthday arrived that year, I telephoned in the morning with love and good wishes and a promise that I would arrange a trip back home soon. Yes, she had received the flowers I’d sent, and she was looking forward to going out for dinner with daddy that evening. On their way to a favorite restaurant, he took a detour for a quick visit with my Aunt Sadie, where they were greeted with delighted shrieks of “Surprise!” from the well-hidden gathering of family and friends whose cars were parked on another lane, far out of sight. One of my cousins assumed the role of This is Your Life host, Eamonn Andrews, complete with a big red book and related the story of my mother’s life to all assembled.  When she reached the part about my mother becoming a grandmother for the first time just eight months earlier, she suggested calling me so I could at least be part of the celebration by phone. Naturally, I was unavailable, given that two days earlier, I had flown in to Belfast with Sophie, and had been holed up at my Aunt Sadie’s house enjoying secret visits with my dad and my brother, the three of us delighting in the fact that my mother was oblivious to all the subterfuge.

Naturally, ma was disappointed when the phone went to voicemail, but she was quickly distracted by the doorbell ringing. Thinking it was yet another cousin or a friend with a birthday present, she opened the door, where, looking up at her from a nest of pink blankets, was her beautiful baby granddaughter. A perfectly executed surprise, planned down to the very last minute, it was one my mother would cherish always, a jewel in a box.

At about the same time, another plan was coming to fruition, a diabolical scheme, that would just a week later, rip asunder the tiny market town of Omagh in the neighboring county of Tyrone, devastating families from as near as Donegal and as far away as Madrid, Spain, and reminding us all that Northern Ireland’s Troubles were far from over.

Like most of us here, I don’t know all the details. I’m afraid of them.

It frightens me to consider the machinations of minds that could craft a plan to load a nondescript red car, plate number MDZ 5211, with 500 pounds of explosives, park it in the middle of a busy shopping area, and place two phone calls to the local television station, one to the Coleraine Samaritans, with a warning 40 minutes before the bomb inside it exploded. There was confusion as the police evacuated the shoppers – mostly mothers and children on back-to-school shopping sprees. Thinking they were moving them away from the Court House to safety, the police moved people to the bottom of Market Street, where the bomb was about to be detonated.

I wonder if they felt that familiar relief, the kind you know from past experiences of bomb-scares and hoaxes, if they felt they were out of harm’s way and just in time, believing that it would all be alright. Maybe they told themselves it was just a bomb scare, like old times, and not to be taken very seriously, but they would of course cooperate with authorities so they could get back to their Saturday afternoon shopping, seeking out bargains for backpacks and books, new uniforms and lunch-boxes, full of the promise that accompanies the start of a new school year.

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Spaniard Gonzalo Cavedo and child posing by the car carrying the bomb that killed 29 people, many of whom are in the picture, including the photographer. Mr. Cavedo and the child survived. (Source: Belfast Telegraph)

Mere seconds after this photo was taken with a camera later retrieved from the rubble, the 500 pound bomb inside the red car exploded, blowing the vehicle to bits. Like a butcher’s knife, the blast cut through the row of little shops. I recall the harrowing accounts of witnesses, unable to unsee blood flowing in the gutters and pieces of people in the street, unable to put words to the savagery, the carnage before them. Little Omagh was a killing field.

We weren’t listening to the radio that afternoon, so we didn’t hear the news. My brother, his girlfriend, and my baby girl were driving around the North Antrim coast, listening to CDs of Neil Young and Paul Brady, occasionally breaking into song as we took in the wild scenery around us. We stopped occasionally so Sophie could see up close the horses and cows peering at us over gates on sun-splashed country roads. It was a beautiful, windy Irish day, and we were happy. 

We had no reason to believe anything was wrong. Why would we? But heading home at dusk, we were stopped at a police checkpoint and told to take a detour. Instantly we knew. It had happened again. My parents were at home, stunned by the same old story on the news and they were worried sick. They had no idea where we were and paced the floor until their driveway was lit up again with the headlights of my brother’s car.

There was no peace. 

Another atrocity. Another day on the calendar for the people of Northern Ireland that would leave us wondering how we would ever recover from the maddening, wrenching anguish that visited us once again. My country is so tiny – I’ve been told it fits into one third of the state of Kansas – that I imagine everyone knew someone who knew someone maimed or killed in the largest mass murder in its history.  A relative of an Antrim barman had been killed in the Omagh bombing, and I remember wondering what I could possibly say to him by way of condolences, knowing there are no adequate words.

Like so many others, I had dared to believe that peace had come to the country I had left but still loved. I should have remembered what I know can never be forgotten from The Isle of Innisfree –  that “peace comes dropping slow.”

Nothing had changed, and everything changed at 3:10PM in Omagh when the bomb exploded, injuring over 300 and killing 29 people and unborn twins. Until Britain’s High Court ruled in 2021 that there were plausible arguments that the bombing by the Real IRA militant group could have been prevented, there has been – and little reason to believe that there would be – justice. No one has ever been convicted. 

The Omagh list of deadreads like a microcosm of Troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60:40 Catholic:Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive.”

May we never forget them or the thousands of families still seeking justice and information about what happened to their loved ones during The Troubles. May we stand with them and protect their path to the truth, to justice, and to peace.

Bear in mind these dead.

Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” by John Hewitt

So I say only: Bear in mind

Those men and lads killed in the streets;

But do not differentiate between

Those deliberately gunned down

And those caught by unaddressed bullets:

Such distinctions are not relevant . . .

Bear in mind the skipping child hit

By the anonymous ricochet . . .

And the garrulous neighbours at the bar

When the bomb exploded near them;

The gesticulating deaf-mute stilled

by the soldier’s rifle in the town square

And the policeman dismembered by the booby trap

in the car . . .

Patriotism has to do with keeping

the country in good heart, the community

ordered by justice and mercy;

these will enlist loyalty and courage often,

and sacrifice, sometimes even martyrdom.

Bear these eventualities in mind also;

they will concern you forever:

but, at this moment, bear in mind these dead.

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James Barker (12) from Buncrana

Fernando Blasco Baselga(12) from Madrid

Geraldine Breslin (43) from Omagh

Deborah Anne Cartwright (20) from Omagh

Gareth Conway (18) from Carrickmore

Breda Devine (20 months) from Donemana

Oran Doherty (8) from Buncrana

Aidan Gallagher (21) from Omagh

Esther Gibson (36) from Beragh

Mary Grimes (65) from Beragh

Olive Hawkes (60) from Omagh

Julia Hughes (21) Omagh

Brenda Logue (17) from Omagh

Anne McCombe (45) from Omagh

Brian McCrory(54) from Omagh

Samantha McFarland (17) Omagh

Seán McGrath (61) from Omagh

Sean McLaughlin (12) from Buncrana

Jolene Marlow (17) Omagh

Avril Monaghan (30) from Augher

Maura Monaghan (18 months) from Augher

Alan Radford (16) Omagh

Rocio Abad Ramos (23) from Madrid

Elizabeth Rush (57) Omagh

Veda Short (46) from Omagh

Philomena Skelton (39) from Durmquin

Frederick White (60) from Omagh

Bryan White (26) from Omagh

Lorraine Wilson (15) Omagh

if my books could talk to you …

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Scrolling through social media earlier, I spotted an update that on this day 40 years ago, Bob Dylan played at Slane Castle in Ireland. I was there. I don’t remember all the details — it’s been 40 years — but I remember UB40 and Santana and Van Morrison played too and that Bono joined Dylan on “Blowing in the Wind” and improvised the lyrics. Seriously. Nostalgic and forgetting who went with me, I updated my Facebook status with this information adding that I still have my ticket stub which prompted a friend to comment “My god – you still have your ticket stub??? How much stuff did you move to Mexico with you??”

I’m not sure how to quantify the amount of stuff I brought with me, but I can tell you it includes all my favorite books, one of which is my stub book crammed with set-lists and concert tickets.

Book-wrapt

Having said that, my collection of books is smaller than ever, pared down when I knew I would be moving to Mexico over four years ago. I remember sitting on my living room floor in Phoenix, asking every single book, “Are you important enough to move to a new country with me?” with a follow-up question to myself, “How many books do I really need?” What is the magic number? I suppose I need enough to feel “book-wrapt,” a term coined by Reid Byers, author of The Private Library: Being a More Or Less Compendious Disquisition on the History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom to describe the way a well-stocked personal library should make us feel:

Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend … It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.

So how many?

Byers maintains that 500 books ensures that a room will “begin to feel like a library.” On the other hand, the library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam although “very highly valued, it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.” I’m not sure how my book collection measures up. I’m not even sure I would even call it a library, but it definitely feels like part of whatever home means. I love my books. I love how they look, and the stories behind how they came to be permanent fixtures in my life.

A minute or two spent scanning the contents of a bookshelf – mine or yours – can tell a lot about the owner’s personality, pastimes, and passions. The more interesting books have tell-tale signs of wear —dog-eared pages and marginalia – chunks of underlined text, doodles, scribbles, exclamation points, question marks, even profanities from a reader giving the author a piece of her mind. Some also might have Dewey Decimal numbers on the spine because they may belong to a library …

Marginalia matters. If not for marking up a book, we wouldn’t know that when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa, some of the inmates circulated a Shakespeare book 1975 and 1978. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from Julius Caesar that reads, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’

To this day, I read with pen in hand. Making my marks in a book makes it mine. I can revisit those margins whenever I choose, go back to my side of a conversation with the author and pause to remember that earlier version of myself, younger, curious, and perhaps more naive. One day someone may land on something I highlighted in a book and wonder WTF I was thinking.

Books allow us to be solitary and sociable at the same time. As an introvert-extrovert (at least that what I think I am), this appeals to me.

Book Arranging

Loving books is one thing, but it wasn’t until I began packing them in boxes that I took an interest in the physical space they had occupied in my bookcase. Incongruously, a paperback copy of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native had, for sixteen years, leaned up against a second-hand copy of What to Expect when You’re Expecting passed along to me when I was expecting. Maybe I kept it, thinking I might expect another baby one day and wanted to remember what to expect. For almost a decade, a copy of The Good Friday Peace Agreement (signed for me one morning In Arizona by the late Irish Taoiseach John Bruton) was sandwiched unceremoniously between Bob Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home vinyl record (carried with me from Belfast to New York in 1987), and a large illustrated Beowulf. Maybe the move to Mexico would bring some order.

Almost a century ago, Hugh Walpole would have agreed:

I believe it then to be quite simply true that books have their own very personal feeling about their place on the shelves. They like to be close to suitable companions, and I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my Jane Eyre. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning’s uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticized Jane will understand why this would never do.

Hugh Walpole, These Diversions: Reading, 1926

When it comes to arranging books on shelves, I need someone with a critical eye and zero tolerance for those books she knows I haven’t read. By ‘someone,’ I mean my mother, who brings a take-no-prisoners to this kind of task. If it hasn’t been worn in a year, or if she suspects that it’s hanging in my closet for “sentimental reasons,” (like she knit it for me or bought it for me in 1987), then it must be placed in the big black trash bag which will then go to a charitable organization or a consignment store. I have often thought about hiring a professional to organize my closet, but I’m afraid of the prospect of being one of “those people” on a reality program on The Learning Channel. I can see myself clearly, mortified in my own front yard by the contents of my closet spread out on the grass and then judged in the glare of a camera crew, by a TV audience and an energetic host as I ask each item if it gives me joy. The answer will determine if it is placed in a box labelled Keep, Toss or Donate.

Before my husband died, I had bought his favorite cologne and kept it in a drawer, unopened, for over 7 years. I never got to give it to him and I never figured out what to do with it. For all I know, the person who bought my house may have found it in the back of a drawer in the bathroom. Just one of those things.

For some reason this takes me to Field of Dreams. If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember Alicia as the wife of Burt Lancaster’s Doc “Moonlight” Graham. We find out about her in that beautiful scene in a bar in Chisholm, Minnesota, where James Earl Jones finds out from an old-timer that

… she moved to South Carolina after Doc passed. She passed a couple years later. She always wore blue. The shopkeepers in town would stock blue hats because they knew if Doc walked by, he’d buy one. When they cleaned out his office, they found boxes of blue hats that he never got around to give her. I’ll bet you didn’t know that …

Field of Dreams

Cleaning up your Bookshelves

While the literati are not coming to party at my house, I can still relate to Bella, friend of Independent columnist, John Walsh, — “your collection of books can say terrible things about you.” Unlike Bella, however, I’m unlikely to be rubbing shoulders with celebrities in the publishing world any time soon, so I’m not sure why the absence – or inclusion – of certain books on my shelves matters. For instance, there’s a blue hardcover 1984. Not the one by George Orwell – rather, it is my diary from the same year, bringing to mind Willy Russell’s Rita, brilliantly played by Julie Waters, as she shouts from the train window to Michael Caine’s Professor Frank Bryant, a line from The Importance of Being Earnest, a play I was delighted to find for just two bucks, along with 20 other brilliant comedies in a first edition Cavalcade of Comedy at the 1996 VNSA booksale in Phoenix.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train”

I think it was the remake of The Great Gatsby that initially caused me to reassess the order of my books. I had re-read it during my Post-Mastectomy Period (PMP), so Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby calling people “old sport” and all those lavish parties were still fresh in my head when the new movie came out. Over Happy Hour one Friday, my best friend and I performed our post-mortem on the film which led to a discussion of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I found myself admitting that I have never read anything by Ernest Hemingway. Never. I suppose to make me feel better, she told me she hated Charles Dickens. And then we both confessed that we hate Moby Dick. The floodgates opened. I detest Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I know. It feels almost criminal to say out loud that the longest running musical of all time leaves me cold, and downright treasonous to also admit that I think James Joyce is over-celebrated.

I have never finished his Ulysees, nor am I sure I ever really started it at its start, given the many beginnings within its pages. Of Joyce’s “Dubliners” I only like “The Dead,” a superb short story. Were it not for Brodie’s Notes, which I imagine are equivalent to the American Cliffs Notes, I don’t imagine I could have answered  a single question about E.M. Forster’s Room with a View or Howards End. I don’t like Virginia Woolf either. I might even be a little afraid of her. I think the same might be true for George Eliot, who, until I was in college, I assumed was male. Then there’s Jane Austen. Emma wore me out, and I didn’t pick up Pride and Prejudice until my PMP (see above). Even then, in the lingering haze from three days of Dilaudid coursing through my system, I just couldn’t understand what was so great about Mr. Darcy.  And, I have remained oblivious to what has been coined The Darcy Effect. There must be something wrong with me.

Since I’m telling the truth about my books as they sit there looking at me, still waiting to be properly arranged, I wonder, guiltily, if any of the fifth graders I taught over thirty years ago remember that Spring morning when I announced the next class novel, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. I passed out the books and then began reading aloud, because I was the best reader in the class and it’s important for kids to hear good reading. We soldiered through the first few pages, me reading with as much expression as I could muster, but we all knew the time wasn’t right. Remembering I was in charge, I quietly told them to close their books and put them back on the shelf for another day (which never came that year). From my bag, I pulled out my high school English textbook and read to them instead Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper” hoping that the last startling sentence would teach them all they needed to know about the tragedy of war.  None of the parents complained that I had strayed from the curriculum and abandoned an American classic for an Irish short story, but then they probably never found out, their children probably telling them “Nothing!” when asked what they did at school that day.

For her first official book report, my daughter read Under the Hawthorne Tree, a book I recall with fondness from my childhood, the story of three children trying to survive the Irish Famine. My daughter had spied it in my bookcase, part of The Belfast Telegraph’s Children’s Collection my mother had saved for her. Knowing it would resonate with her sense of justice, I grabbed the opportunity to tell her about The Great Famine, knowing she was unlikely to learn much if anything about it in an Arizona classroom. Somewhat ironically, a headline in the Belfast Telegraph, Children Turn Away From Books in Favour of Reading Electronically, made me appreciate all the more, that my daughter was and continues to read books made of paper. Thinking of Belfast and all that continues to simmer just below the surface, I wonder why nobody thought to require To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE O level English in the 1980s. Although set in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, many of us in Northern Ireland could have learned a thing or two about fairness and goodness – and about humanity – from Atticus Finch, at a time when our we needed it so much.  Instead we trudged through Richard Church’s autobiography, Over the Bridge. And it was torture.

With all of this off my chest, I feel better about the books I have brought to Mexico. There’s my Choice of Poets textbook, my collections of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, the little blue book of Irish Short Stories, out-of-print Belfast Reviews, and old Rolling Stone and Life magazines.  Still, I wish Independent columnist John Walsh was here to help the way he did when called upon to edit his friend Bella’s library:

I had to re-jig it, alphabetize it, eliminate the once-trendy, excise the cheesy and ill-advised, and bring together all the books that had been lying for years in bedroom, lavabo and kitchen and behind the sofa. My function was like that of Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables, until no trace of Paulo Coelho remained.

When the literati come to party, it’s time to clean up your bookshelves – John Walsh

My Ideal Bookshelf

Walsh points out that a proper bookcase, one in a mature middle-class household, should contain only books. Reference books do not belong there; rather, their place is close to a desk, and poetry needs its own section. Now we’re on to something. Knowing that you can only eat the elephant one bite at a time, and inspired by My Ideal Bookshelf, I have arranged some of my bookshelves with a nod to the women who have helped me find my way in the world with good humor and a sense of home, and some Bob Dylan for good measure:

The Sshh … I’m reading coffee cup just happened to be sitting there when my daughter rendered, by hand, these drawings for my 50th birthday, over a decade ago.

There is of course a place in my bookspace for Seamus Heaney. Naturally. The Irish cottage was a gift to my father over 60 years ago from a Professor Coyle’s wife who lived in a house named “One Acre” on the Belfast Road. She had decided, well into her sixties which was considered ‘a big age’ back home in those days, that she would learn to drive. As a favor, my father taught her—he taught practically everyone I knew to drive. To thank him, and knowing it would appeal to his love of things found in nature, Mrs. Coyle painted the little cottage on an angular remnant of a spruce tree, the bark serving as an approximation of a thatched roof with smoke streaming from a turf fire. He passed it along to me some years ago, and it has been at home with my Heaney books ever since.

With a flourish to end his day of transforming Bella’s library into a thing of beauty, John Walsh placed on her coffee table, “with a bookmark at page 397” a copy of Seamus Heaney’s Stepping Stones, a collection of conversations with my favorite poet.

By coincidence the same book is at home with me in Mexico. On my coffee-table …

I wonder what we’ll have to say to each other today.

It ain’t over … this land was made for you and me.

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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at Phoenix's Footprint Center on March 19, 2024.When he announced he was going to tour again, I knew I’d be there, probably somewhere in the nosebleed section. As it turns out, our seats were great for the first night of his American tour in Phoenix. “Do you feel the spirit?” a happy and healthy looking 74 year old Springsteen asked when he took the stage right on time, and about 20,000 of us roared back that yes, yes we did. We felt it for the next few hours and you could see it on our faces when we emptied out onto Jefferson Street, “I’ll See you in My Dreams” ringing in our ears.

Since 1984, I have seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band a dozen times, and there isn’t a 4th of July – or a Presidential race – when I don’t think of him. When I’m asked why I came to America, I know they know from something in my response that Bruce Springsteen is a part of it. And, every Fourth of July in Phoenix,  when fireworks flash and fly across the desert sky, I found myself transported back to a twilight over Slane Castle, lit up with music and the notion of America.

I am young, and had I not been awake, I would have missed it

. . . the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

~ Seamus Heaney

My first rock ‘n’ roll concert at Slane Castle was in 1982 for The Rolling Stones “farewell tour.”  The Stones were saying goodbye. Goodbye. Warming up for them were the J. Geils Band, The Chieftains, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. As you all know, The Stones continued to say goodbye as recently as this year …

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 6.45.44 PMIn 1984,  I found myself back at Slane to see UB40, Santana, and Bob Dylan. Too, there was the sweet surprise of Van Morrison  joining Dylan on stage to sing “Tupelo Honey.” As I recall, Bono showed up as well and in front of all of us – and Bob Dylan – he improvised, making up his own lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Who does that?bob-002

And on June 1, 1985 – where my mind is this morning – America came to Ireland when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut.

The previous summer, I had been in the United States, the Born in the USA tour in full swing and was lucky to have been upstate New York at the same time as Springsteen. I saw him perform at Saratoga Springs and again in September, when a trip to Niagara Falls with an American cousin included a Springsteen show in Buffalo.

I knew Ireland was in for a treat, and when tickets went on sale, I also bought one for my little brother. It would be his first concert – a seminal moment in his musical education. bruceticket Imagine it. Close to 100,000 of us making a pilgrimage through the sleepy – and disapproving – village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise – as yet unfulfilled – that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated with the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Some said it was the hottest day on record in Ireland.

Everybody was young, even the weather-beaten old farmers who let us use their fields as parking lots, and when the band burst on stage with a thunderous “Born in the USA,” everybody was Irish, even Bruce. When he turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here,” the crowd erupted.

BruceSlane

Although we all basked in his pride that day, the reality was that our weather was rarely that sunny, and thousands of us would soon be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s.

Across the water, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister; farther afield, the Berlin wall was still standing; and, in Ireland, divorce was still illegal and condoms had barely become available without a prescription. But on that glorious day, in spite of the economic and political truths of Ireland, and the ever-diminishing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we believed in America.

I have always counted on Springsteen to stand up and say it loud for people like me, for immigrants seeking America. I have always known I could count on Bruce more than presidential contenders hell-bent on convincing me  that the idea of America is unraveling.

After the events of this week, I began to wonder. Is America over? It’s very foundation has certainly been challenged in lasting and troubling ways.  What do I know? I am not a politician or a rockstar. I’m just a girl with bad hair and a fearless heart and – after three decades working in public education and paying attention to politics –  a conviction that we have lost our way.

Springsteen once told a reporter that he wasn’t cut out for the traditional school system:

I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost.

Agreed. The Boss was probably on to something, but we know that Bruce Springsteen will never be an elected official. We also know he will never be a politician who would vilify immigrants or the working poor like the kind of politician who fancies himself American’s next King.

In A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy wrote that

 Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.

Over half a century later, such a policy remains elusive. Why is that? Why? We’re learning why.

In the past few weeks, while Bruce Springsteen has been touring the world in places some Americans are considering as escape destinations, education and immigration among other critical issues for the democracy are under scrutiny.

America is in new trouble, the most recent debacle occurring just days ago when the highest court in the land elevated American Presidents to monarch status. Surely the Justices see the irony in that?

Now, I haven’t read all 900 pages of Project 2025,  funded to the tune of $22M byThe Heritage Foundation think tank which has been producing similar policy documents as part of its Mandate for Leaderships series since the 1980s. With input from more than 100 conservative organizations, Project 2025’s language is showing up in Trump speeches, reflecting the following broad goals:

  • restore the family as the centerpiece of American life
  • dismantle the administrative state
  • defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders
  • secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

A closer look at the practical implementation of these ideas is more troubling:

  • Government: Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy be paced under direct presidential control (including agencies like the Department of Justice) and also calls for elimination of the Department of Education as well as the FBI which the writers cast as a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” and calls for drastic overhauls of this and other federal agencies, including elimination of the Department of Education.Immigration
  • Immigration: more funding for the wall on Trump’s US-Mexico border and more increases on fees for immigrant applications
  • The Climate: cutting federal funding for research and investment in renewable energy; calls for America’s next president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas”.
  • Education:  Project 2025 calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and targets “woke propaganda”. Also proposes eradicating a long list of terms from ALL laws and regulations that include “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, “abortion” and “reproductive rights”

Add to this, Heritage president’s Kevin Roberts statement during a podcast this week, during which he raised the prospect of political violence:

We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,”

On this day, when we mark the birth of America and the foundations of its Constitution and celebrate life, liberty, and happiness, I find myself wondering – for just a minute – if those things are intended only for the whitest and wealthiest among us. And then I pull myself together. America belongs to you and me. Remember that.

Today, my best wishes for the 4th of July are with the truth-tellers, especially those in the media who will continue to tell us what we need to know – about Project 2024, about the unbecoming behavior of Justice Alito and his wife, Justice  Clarence Thomas and his wife, about why we should question why Biden’s advanced age matters but Trump’s crimes don’t … and on and on.

The more we know, the better we’ll do. America isn’t over.