international women’s day: for my grandmother

07 Thursday Mar 2024

Posted by 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, after living in the United States for the better part of 30 years, I become a citizen of the United States. As I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution 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 six years old, but I remember her clearly. Perhaps because hers was my first experience with death; perhaps 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, eager to embrace the boundless opportunities before them, but a relentless stream of letters from home, guilt-spiced reminders of familial obligation, pulled them the long way back to rural Derry in 1932, with their American-born children – four sons and a daughter. She isn’t smiling in the picture that would be placed in the family passport and stamped as she boarded the boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean again, to return 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 as unwelcoming for my grandmother and her American children, and she had no option other than to  abandon forever the glittering possibilities on the other side of the ocean.

Defeated, with an air of resignation that hung around 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. I know it would too. But the right time to leave eluded them.  

In the early 1960s, my mother frequently took me “up home” to visit my grandparents. We took the 110 bus from Antrim to the Hillhead, across from Barney Devlin’s forge. 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 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.

Buoyed by little bluebells and foxgloves winking at me from the grassy edges of the road and the rustic rhythms of the turf-cutters, I kept going. There was comfort in the certainty that I would soon be in my grandmother’s arms, breathing in time to her heartsome sighs as she carried buckets of water from the pump in the yard and then, with me in tow, delivering bottles of milky tea to the men bailing hay or digging potatoes in the fields beyond. 

Over 55 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 here in Mexico – the old washstand identical to one she took back on the boat all the way from America to Ireland;  a Masons stoneware baking bowl; cut flowers in a vase;  unnecessary winter coats in my closet that remind me of the good brown coat she always wore on special outings. Others are stashed in the storehouse of my memories – 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 or dolly mixtures. 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.  I played outside while she baked lemon meringue tarts. She 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 mile-high meringue, thinking nobody would notice. Invariably, temptation won, and I devoured it, rendering those 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.

mygranny

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 leave my home country, to emigrate. In the late 1980s, as Northern Ireland raged, I left. Young and wild, I packed a backpack and left. Just like that.

But I have looked back. Often.  I still do. Having spent more than half my life in Arizona and the last four years in Mexico, I still face unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a visceral longing for “home” and the rhythm of it; sometimes for the very things that sent me away in the first place.

And then those moments pass. I find a way home again. This must be the place. 

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.

match point ~ seeking romance & mr. right

13 Tuesday Feb 2024

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora, Feminism, Love, Meg Ryan, Milestones, Nora Ephron, Online dating, Relationships, Rob Reiner, Social Media, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail

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“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?

Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died – the day before our anniversary 24 years later – the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online.  Online was made for me, all my friends said. It would be fun, they said, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I’d been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they said, I  could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about my job or the kind of man who might be the right kind of man for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could filter out the men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was in a little black dress, but they cared about the Oxford comma and when to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’  I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.

Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. I can relate to this, knowing that there are committed to the memories of more than a handful of waiters, “Yvonne specials,” dishes not on menus across Arizona and here in Mexico – avocado toast without the toast kind of thing. “On the side” is as big a thing for me as it was for Sally.

While Sally is probably best remembered for that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, I liked her best in one scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become whoever it is I’m supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.

When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride, dear reader, to tell you that I carried in my wallet for perhaps a decade, a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring the many hairdos of Meg Ryan. It was the mother lode  For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the shroud of Turin  and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.

Remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20? It was the deadline for letting yourself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.”

I’m gonna be 70 . . . one day. Soon enough. I’m not counting the years. Not really. But maybe it’s time to take stock of the things I have almost accepted about myself. I’ll call them ‘alternative facts.” I know you know what I mean.  Most of them are trivial. In no particular order: I still don’t have sensible hair, and until six years ago, spent a fortune coloring and highlighting and trying to tame it.  I’m mildly preoccupied with fonts and signage. If I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering. Comic Sans on letters from school and worksheets forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the “E” light comes on.  I don’t like Les Miserables – I don’t. I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version.  I prefer Elvis to The Beatles. That’s the 1968 sitting-down Comeback Special Elvis in black leather. Google it.  Although it subjects me to lots of criticism from some Facebook friends every Christmas, I love Love Actually. I actually do.  I don’t like opera.  I prefer Bach and Handel to Beethoven and Mozart; and, a harpsichord to a piano.  I don’t like ballet, although I once took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas, because all the other mothers were doing it. To give Mozart his due, I do love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. You know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:

To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Rock me Amadeus.

I resent the aging process and the way it keeps sneaking up on me at the most inopportune times.  I remember reading without any assistance the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle as well as whatever’s crawling along the bottom of the screen on CNN. I now have a dozen pairs of cheap reading glasses, none of which are at hand when I need them. My hearing’s good. I think. If it isn’t, I’ll attribute that to 50 odd years of concert-going rather than aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1987, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and almost always an app for that, I’m more confident about going places today.  If I have been somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara –  I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Google maps or Siri and friends who unfailingly “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they’re already waiting.

Other truths are more difficult to accept. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be more trusting and more patient, to accept that some things are out of my control, to go with the flow, blah, blah, blah. But just as I was wrapping my head around those notions, my husband died. He took with him the way life used to be, the certainty of it. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door.

But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? I’m sure even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way she was characterized in her son’s documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.”

It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés and divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.

So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built my online dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. My best friend was right. This was Resume Writing 101. She reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I’m also good at the long game.

Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.

About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Reluctantly, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not?

I took a chance.

I. Took. A. Chance.

#ITookAChance

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all the protocols. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.

Box checked.

He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. Doesn’t everyone?  And, no religion too.

No deal-breakers.

He had my attention.

Disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be about four feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he’d built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day.

If I sound cynical, let me tell you that during my time in the land of online dating, I encountered  more than a few men who claimed to live in the Arizona desert, where they also enjoyed moonlit walks every night. On the beach. Seriously.  Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name, and anticipated the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’

It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at around 5 at a well-lit bar.  Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know I still have clothes from 1981 in my closet.  It was also a good hair day, Topher having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights (in case a moonlit walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss online or off, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes.

The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was promising.

Onward.

He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies.  Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.

f92e8c13ff83eafde46edfabf95e1b74Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all – I was also smitten.

That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and joked that we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip.  And, this is important – Mr. Forward was a good tipper

Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.

A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match  or subsequently updating our relationship as  ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.  Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.

As for the rest of the story?  Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:

‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.

P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it.

Happy Valentine’s Day lovebirds.

No photo description available.

And you can tell everybody, this is our song …

26 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by in Act Two, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin

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Part of the magic of art is that we stitch meaning into everything we see and hear, whether artists leave us a needle and thread or not.

Robin Hilton NPR All Songs Considered

I know there’s some science involved, that a song can make us cry because of the way it was composed. John Sloboda, professor of music psychology at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, once told NPR  that the very notes within songs can make us weep. He attributes our tears to a kind of grace note, a musical ornament – the “appoggiatura,” from the Italian word “to lean.” As an example, Adele’s ‘Someone Like You” is full of them. Sloboda explains “Generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected. The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy. It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.” A more famous version is the opening word of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” an appoggiatura of G3 to F3 over the chord of F major.

Musical theory aside, when I first started singing with my partner here in Mexico, it was as a duo. This was a convenient arrangement during that time when COVID social distancing measures were in place -no dancing, couples sitting with a chair between them at tables 6ft apart, in face masks with a bottle of hand sanitizer at the ready. You remember that time. Introspective. Quiet. Uncertain.

Because we were unable to make the music we would have made with a full band behind us – and also because we were cloistered at home for months, we sang together. Unplugged. No band. No backing tracks. Just the two of us, carefully selecting songs that told stories and touched our hearts and included those appoggiaturas, those little upsets that might make us cry . We’d make each song our own, finding our own harmonies on deep cuts from the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, and Townes van Zandt. Lyrics first. For us, it’s about the lyrics. Always.

As restaurants and venues slowly reopened, we ventured out – just the two of us – with our voices and an acoustic guitar, sometimes providing little more than musical wallpaper in restaurants trying their best to stay solvent, but sometimes connecting with people through lyrics crafted by master story-tellers. Every once in a while during a set – and this is still true – I’d notice someone singing along with their eyes closed, the lyrics transporting them to a place only they know. And, I’d realize we were singing ‘their’ song. That requires a reverence.

In those duo days, we always ended our set with my song. No, I didn’t write it, but it is mine. I remember one night someone asked me why we perform it, Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” the sad song that more than once made the bartender cry. There’s a deeply personal reason that I kept to myself at that moment, because I didn’t want to break open my own heart. There’s also what Emmylou Harris said in an interview she gave about her love for Gram Parsons, her partner in song, and with whom she recorded “Love Hurts,” a pivotal song for her:

There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo. That song, and our harmony, is a kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.

Emmylou Harris

Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” is the song that has been pivotal for me – and, appropriately enough, he played acoustic guitar when Emmylou covered it on her “Wrecking Ball” record. It was ‘my song,’ before I met my own partner in song and in life.

I’d been a Steve Earle fan since the 1980s when I had a vinyl record collection that I miss today. The last vinyl record I bought before coming to to American in 1987 was “Guitar Town.” I had lied to myself that I didn’t like country music, dismissing it as the music of my parent’s generation, but when somebody in Rolling Stone or Q magazine said Steve Earle was somebody to pay attention to – along with Dwight Yoakam – I did. For a while, his “Fearless Heart” was my touchstone, Steve Earle introducing it at performances with his characteristic take-no-prisoners wisdom:

You can either get through life or you can live it. If you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need … an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.

Steve Earle

But this isn’t just about my fearless heart. It’s about a “Goodbye” that I never got to say, and one day I’ll tell that story too.

Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which our listeners will stitch their own meaning too.

The first time Scott ever picked up a harmonica to play it, was shortly after we met – and it was on this song, the first song we sang together, finding harmonies as if we had never not sang together. It’s in the key of C. Naturally. If you were to ask anyone who’s ever played with us, they will tell you that C is my key. Scott knows that’s not really true, but to see me panic for just a second before he begins the signature picking, he’ll call it up in A minor.

I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing – not even harmonies – on my verse – the quiet one about Novembers and why they always make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C.”

I wrote it when I was still in treatment, before I even got to that step, the first time I got my hands on a guitar. It wasn’t a very good guitar, but I hadn’t written anything in a very long time, so it was kind of reassuring to write something and to write something that good.

Steve Earle

He also said Emmy Lou is possessive about it too, telling a Scottsdale audience before performing it with Shawn Colvin at the MIM a few years ago, that Emmylou gets mad when he performs it with someone else. He might have been joking … but I know I wished it had been Emmylou on stage with him that night.

There was a ‘meet and greet’ after the show, and I made my way towards a very warm and approachable Steve Earle. I told him that there were days when “Fearless Heart” had helped me put one foot in front of the other, that it had become a kind of mantra that I whispered before jumping into the deep end, which I realize might actually be where I belong. I know I’m not the first fangirl he’s encountered, so he indulged me and didn’t seem to mind that I was holding up the line of people waiting for him to sign their posters and ticket stubs and album covers. I also wanted to talk to him about the lovely Belfast singer, Bap Kennedy, whose record he had produced and about Belfast and about the late Seamus Heaney. Thus one of my favorite moments with a famous person: “Did you study at Queens?” he asked me. “Were you a literature major?” Yes. Yes. I was. A Music major too. “Damn! Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Do you know him? Damn. Goddamn.”

Years later, I must tell you that when I had an essay published in a literary magazine with none other than Michael Longley, my first thought was that there was the teeniest possibility that Steve Earle might read it.

I wanted to ask him more about Emmylou and “Goodbye,” but Shawn Colvin was clearly weary of me. To be fair, there were people waiting. So off I went without telling him how grateful I am for “Goodbye,” the sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – and for everyone who’s sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it. It’s a song for the work of a November in my life.

I’m grateful for the sound and the harmonies it pulls so naturally from Scott and me, even when we haven’t sung it for months, even when we’re not talking to each other over a mountain we’ve made out of a molehill, a storm in a teacup.

I can hear it in my head right now – quiet, steady, familiar – in that realm reserved for country songs and Psalms from the hymnal I recall from the church pf my childhood. I can hear that sound that only comes when I’m singing with my partner. Breath by breath … finding home in a song.

A story for International Education Day

24 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in Belfast Peace Lines, Borders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights Movement, Human Rights, Ireland, Justice, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood

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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.

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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.