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

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

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

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

Ridgeway Street, Belfast, N. Ireland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Far from Ridgeway Street and the wild horses in Scottsdale.