In the Fall of 2012, I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers.
I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it. It was “writing with light.” I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, and upon. And so it was that I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol on a Thanksgiving afternoon, eventually sitting below a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I don’t know how long I sat there, just thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying us (the way he does when he forgets to be a grumpy old man) with Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of today’s holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving had something to do with my moment of transcendence looking up at the shimmering leaves, but that would not have been true. Even after living in America for over twenty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. It amuses me still that some of my American friends are surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland. Christmas is the holiday that warms us, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I may even have found the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
It’s not taking time to rain today in Phoenix – I might as well be looking out at the playing field that stretched between our house on the Dublin Road and Lough Neagh. It is – according to the 11 Levels of Irish Rain “REALLY lashing . . . hammering down.”
On such a day, I can expect inexplicable pangs of homesickness, that old, unchanging feeling that I know will pass, the way it has done countless times since I first came to America. It is as real a feeling as it was when I first experienced it twenty five odd years ago, reminding me of what Stephen King says – that homesickness can be far from vague, but “a terribly keen blade.” Perhaps this lump-in-my-throat melancholy and migration belong together, and Social Media – while allowing me to notify friends and family via Facebook or Skype in real time about the uncharacteristic storm on a September afternoon in Phoenix – makes it worse, reminding me that indeed I am not there at the kitchen table with my mother to discuss the weather and what not to wear. Don’t get me wrong. Social media plays a critical role in my life, but it has not replaced the need for a real social network in a real, physical space, which is why on those days when I need a bit of craic, I will seek out a pint and a plate of chips in an “authentic” Irish pub.
It’s easy to find such a spot in places where the Irish Diaspora is well represented, in the major ports of entry – Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York. (Honest to God, every time I visit New York city, I meet someone who knows someone I know back home). But Phoenix, Arizona, although the sixth largest metropolitan area in the USA, is a different story altogether. Phoenix – synonymous with sprawl – is big and too wide, its residents spread far out into the sunset. Its Irish come together for the big parade on St. Patrick’s Day or events at the Irish Cultural Center, but it requires getting into their cars and driving. There’s no such thing as walking down to the pub for a pint. Well, there is, but not if you want to feel as though you’re back home on a Friday night.
At Tim Finnegan’s pub they celebrate such things as the half-way mark to St. Paddy’s Day – did you ever think such a thing would be celebrated? I love Finnegan’s with its bright red door and the old shop signs for Woodbine cigarettes and Lyon’s tea. More than that, they serve up a curry chip if you’re in the mood. The owner, Tom Montgomery, assured me that I would love the curry sauce (he was right), and he reminded me that, after all, his father is from Quilty, County Clare, and the recipe for the bread and butter pudding is his grandmother’s – she was from County Mayo.
Thus, Tim Finnegan’s pub is the perfect place for a Phoenix Sister Cities fundraiser, with traditional music in the background, pints, craic, and emigrants like myself who have been here a while and others who just arrived last week. The Phoenix Sister Cities Commission (PSCC) was established in 1972 and now supports 10 sister city relationships: Calgary, Canada; Catania, Italy; Chengdu, China; Grenoble, France; Hermosillo, Mexico; Himeji, Japan; Prague, Czech Republic; Ramat-Gan, Israel;Taipei, Taiwan; and Ennis, Ireland.
To help young Phoenicians appreciate the cultures of their sister cities, and to prepare them take their place within an increasingly global community, PSCC sponsors a Youth Ambassador Exchange Program. Highly competitive, the program selects ambassadors to the ten Phoenix Sister Cities for three weeks in the summer, during which they will experience the city and its culture in ways unavailable to a typical tourist. This past July, Phoenix Youth Ambassadors, Emma Mertens and Estefania Lopez, spent three weeks in Ennis, where they were hosted by the Hogan and Bradley families.
At Finnegan’s, I sat down with Emma’s parents, John and Kim Mertens, to talk about the experience. “I’ll do it, “ Emma had said, “If I can go to Ireland.” Not from an Irish-American family, Emma’s experience of Ireland was limited to a crash course on County Clare prior to her trip and manning a booth at the St. Patrick’s Day Faire in Phoenix. She didn’t want to jinx her hopes of visiting the Cliffs of Moher, so she didn’t let on to the committee that she was an avid Harry Potter fan, who wanted to see real rain and feel the cold. As it turned out, Ireland obliged – barely.
Chatting to me about her time in Ennis, I couldn’t help but remember what Hillary Clinton said the year before my own daughter was born, that “it takes a village to raise a happy, healthy, hopeful child” – a global village. Emma’s mother wanted her daughter to experience adolescence – if for only three weeks – in another country. Invoking Mark Twain, Kim Mertens reminds us that:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
As I listened to an increasingly animated Emma Mertens, it was clear that she had been charmed and changed by her experience in Ireland. Touching down at Shannon Airport, she was struck by the unique greenness on either side of the runway, and on the way to the Hogans, the cows on the road that forced them to slow dow. Naturally, her stay included visits to the places that attract tourists – 15th century Bunratty Castle – where, at its medieval banquet, she was the only guest to receive a fork, because she had requested a vegetarian meal; Afternoon Tea at the Dromoland Castle; an afternoon in Dublin, the heaven’s opening just long enough for her to wear her new rain jacket as she strolled past the GPO with Ailbhe filling her in on its history and the Easter Rising. There was, of course, the craic, and the way that only the Irish talk to passersby as though they are friends, invariably with a comment about the weather. Male and female, we are all “lads,” prone to exaggerations and euphemisms. A mere ‘stretch of the legs,” she discovered, was a strenuous two hour hike through the limestone hills of aptly named The Burren. The more pedestrian things have stayed with her too – we drive on the right side of the road, and we charge for plastic bags if shoppers don’t want paper, and of course the traditional music.
A student at Arizona School for the Arts where she plays French horn and sings in the all-state choir, one of her favorite memories is of a bit of trad and Ailbhe’s renditions of the songs you might hear in the pub on a Friday night.
Given my sentimental disposition that afternoon in Finnegan’s, I had to ask about homesickness. As much as she loved her time with the Hogans and her Irish counterpart, Ailbhe, there were moments when she just wanted to meet someone who would understand that a 75 degree day in Ireland, while locally described as ‘a heatwave’ doesn’t begin to come close to a hot day in the Arizona desert. So she did what I do, updating friends and family through Facebook and her blog, Emma in Ennis. Scrolling through its pages, I’m reminded of the post-marked air-mail letters that used to travel back and forth from Antrim to Arizona many summers ago.
She will be back, because there is one thing left to do – experience a hurling match and root, of course, for the Banner Boys. “They take hurling very seriously there,” she reminded me.
And what of her Ennis counterpart in the Arizona desert? Ailbhe Hogan and Elana Bradley arrived in Phoenix, along with ambassadors from the other sister cities, during the hottest time of the year. Jam-packed into their stay were opportunities to experience American traditions including an ‘early’ Halloween costume contest, trick or treating, a prom, Fourth ofJuly firecrackers and even a traditional Thanksgiving feast. They took in a baseball game and a behind the scene tour of the US Airways center, home to the Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Mercury, and AZ Rattlers. Traveling north to the Grand Canyon and to the red rocks of Sedona, Elana asked, “But where’s all the green?” Unimpressed with an Arizona Palo Verde, not looking its best, she observed, “That’s what you call a tree?”
There were opportunities for this group of global ambassadors to give back to the community as well, and they spent a morning preparing food boxes for St Mary’s Food Bank, and, of course, to promote education, they visited Arizona State University in Tempe.
They even ventured out of state, to neighboring California and the happiest place on earth – Disneyland. It is a small world after all . . .
Still, everything in America is bigger, isn’t it? Of a Circle K Thirstbuster, Elana pointed out that it was “as big as her head.” Mind you, she was grateful for that thirst-buster, given that her stay here included days as hot as116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.67 Celsius).
So what’s next for these young people? The friendships will continue, social media making it easier to do so. They are part of an impressive network that includes 1600 young people who have visited 10 cities in 10 countries, thanks to the Phoenix Sister Cities Commission.
Many of them now embarking upon their professional journeys, some of them have taken their friendships to a different level, forging the kinds of business relationships that promote international partnerships with the potential to improve cities, countries, and the lives of those who live there.
A recent Arizona Republic editorial touts the value of these connections, citing the current Vice President of China, Xi Jinping’s visit to Iowa in 1985. Like our young Ambassadors, he stayed with a local family and learned about the farming culture. During his time, he visited local farms and studied agricultural practices. Learning the value of relationships, I wonder if the young politician ever imagined he would return to Iowa as Vice President of his country, poised perhaps to lead it in the 21st century?
And I wonder what might come of the friendship between Ailbhe and Emma, and how it might blossom into a connection that will make our cities the life-affirming places they are supposed to be. As Jane Jacobs writes, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
“It’s a Long Way from Clare to Here” ~ Lyrics by Ralph McTell
“There’s four who share this room as we work hard for the craic
And sleeping late on Sundays I never get to MassIt’s a long, long way from Clare to here
It’s a long way from Clare to here
It’s a long, long way, it grows further by the day
It’s a long way from Clare to hereWhen Friday comes around Ted is only into fighting
My ma would like a letter home but I’m too tired for writingAnd the only time I feel alright is when I’m into drinking
It sort of eases the pain of it and levels out my thinkingIt almost breaks my heart when I think of Josephine
I told her I’d be coming home with my pockets full of green
I sometimes hear a fiddle play or maybe it’s a notion
I dream I see white horses dance upon that other ocean
I have been in love with Tom Petty for over 35 years. I can’t help it. I’m convinced that had Tomcat met me when I was younger and could hold a tune, he would have snagged me to be one of his “heartbreakers.” Yes, I know Stevie Nicks is the Honorary female Heartbreaker, but she had proximity on her side. The truth is that Tom Petty (as well as the miles of highway that stretch from coast to coast) is largely responsible for my emigrating from Ireland to America in the first place. Well, that along with finding work and leaving The Troubles and the rain behind.
In 1985, I was part of what they call the “brain drain” that took about 20,000 of us away from Northern Ireland. By all accounts that number hasn’t changed much – I was a bit sad to read in The Belfast Telegraph just this past week that in August 2014 that 67% of people do not see a future in Northern Ireland. Why?
Myself, I remember just knowing that an education meant immigration, that I would leave for America and probably never return. Older and wiser, I understand better now what it says about a little country when all its talent is expended on faraway places like America or Australia, bringing to mind what Eamon De Valera said to the Dail in 1934:
No longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export.
Sobering, especially in light of all that has happened on the emerald isle in the past seventy years – and when you’re one of those children in the thick of it, young and well-educated, unemployed and broke, fed up with politics and parades, flags and fighting, grey skies and rain, America is awfully appealing – the idea of it, anyway – which leads me back to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Come on now, is there anything more American than driving down a highway with the top down and the radio up and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin‘” blaring from the radio? Just ask Tom Cruise how his Jerry MaGuire is feeling as he sings along. (Naturally, he had me at “free”. . .)
My husband never quite got over being flat-out flummoxed by my relationship with “the road.” I had no sense of direction and frequently took the long and wrong way home, not really noticing because I was always singing along with the radio. Silently noting my stellar capacity for getting lost – and notwithstanding the fact that I was then still a novice driving on the American side of the road – my man intervened as best he could, with the gift of a silver pocket compass. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that I was never one for “orienteering” or map-reading or paying attention to directions. I was more of a free-spirited “let’s-just-see-where-the-road-takes-us” kind of gal. Mind you, with that attitude, I got lost all the time, and eventually, devil-may-care on the open road gave way to blind panic. I would fret over whether to turn left or right, then commit to turning right only to look back over my shoulder and realize I should have turned left. Then I would call home to report that I was lost. Again. You can imagine the inconvenience BC – Before Cellphones – calling collect from pay phones outside convenience stores.
Invariably, he’d ask me if the sun was behind me or in front of me, somehow believing that if he helped me establish North, I would know where I was. That never worked. So for our first Christmas together, he gave me the lovely silver compass which – until I gave it to Sophie for her first birthday without him last year – had remained untouched in the blue velvet-lined box it came in. I always thought it was too much like a piece of jewelry to be practical and, anyway, I didn’t really need it to help me find my way home. I relied on him to do that for almost twenty-five years and on Tom Petty to keep me company.
It’s not that Tom Petty is in the same category as Camilla Parker Bowles (remember how Princess Diana told Martin Bashir that there were three people in her marriage to Princess Charles?), but he has definitely been along for the ride. Ken liked Tom as well and took me to every concert he ever gave in Phoenix. He always made sure we had plenty of Tom on the playlist for our road-trips to California, and earlier this Spring, I’m sure he was looking down at me and laughing when the Hypnotic Eye tour dates were announced with not a single show planned for Phoenix, because he would know that I would convince my best friend to drive to San Diego to see the opening gig – something I would not have been able to convince him to do.
A mere five hours away, a road trip to San Diego would require no planning. As long as we had tickets, what else was there to worry about? Buying tickets was a snap for me as a member of the Highway Companions Club. Judge away. Let it be noted that I was also a card-carrying member of the David Cassidy/Partridge Fan Club once upon a time. Head held high . . .
Yes. We only needed tickets, gasoline, a place to stay, at least three outfits, and an assurance to each other that we would be back to Phoenix the morning after to see our girls off to school – my daughter’s first as a high school Senior, and Amanda’s little girl’s very first as a pre-schooler.
We made great time, rolling in to San Diego around 5PM on a Saturday afternoon. Being sensible, we checked out the concert venue so we wouldn’t get lost on our way the next evening, and then began calling a few hotels. How hard could it be to find a room on a Saturday night in San Diego? After being laughed at by The Sheraton, The Holiday Inn, Best Western, The Hilton, and a Motel 6, we decided to call hotels.com, and after being transferred to a call center, presumably in a place far away from America, a nice lady on the other end of the line informed us that she had just the room we needed, not too far away from us, albeit in another country.
Resigned to a night in Tijuana, Mexico, we forgot about the fact that nobody had left the light on for us and decided to concentrate instead on finding something to eat. Bona fide foodies, we were on a mission to find the little restaurant that had defeated Bobby Flay in the “Taco Throwdown.” Forget hotels.com – it is much more fun to play with the TVFoodMaps app. And soon, we were safely ensconced at a table by the window of Mama Testa Taqueria. Funny how a good margarita, guacamole, and all manner of salsa will make you forget about forgetting to book a hotel room.
After demolishing all that was laid before us, we tried one more time to find a room in America. Siri dutifully informed us that there was an “inn” nearby. Because it ended with “-shire,”Amanda thought it sounded rather respectable like a B & B in The Cotswolds. I thought it sounded, well, not like that at all. The man who answered when I called said he had “all kinds of room,” no need for a reservation, to just ‘come on down.” And even though my gut screamed, “No! No! No!” I knew Amanda had been enchanted by the idea of a B&B that ended with “-shire,” so we made our way there. Shortly after exiting the freeway, we found it – across the street from a Bail Bondsman, and nestled between a pawn shop and a “gentleman’s establishment.” Under its eaves, I noticed a transaction taking place between a man and a woman. Maybe he just needed change for the soda machine . . .
“Oh, let’s not.” I said. “How about we head north? Sort of like going to Mexico except in the opposite direction and still in America?”
When I think of the 4th of July, I think not of fireworks that flash and fly across an American night, but of those that kiss the sky over Slane Castle in County Meath Ireland, after a long day of music.
My first concert at Slane was in 1982 for The Rolling Stones “farewell tour.” Seriously. Warming up for them were the J. Geils Band, The Chieftains, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Two years later, I was back, to see UB40, Santana, and Bob Dylan and the sweet surprise of Van Morrison joining Dylan on stage to sing “Tupelo Honey.” As I recall, Bono showed up as well.
But on June 1, 1985, America came to Ireland when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. The previous summer, I was in the United States, when the Born in the USA tour was 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 also 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 was his first concert. A seminal moment in his musical education.
Imagine for a moment, 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 park on their fields. 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.
Although we basked in his pride, the reality was that our weather was rarely that sunny, and thousands of us would 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.
While I have lost count of the Springsteen concerts I’ve attended, I have always been able to count on him to stand up for people like me, for immigrants who are seeking America. Sometimes it seems as though the very idea of America is unraveling, especially in Arizona. I remember last summer, waiting to see what would happen to the Immigration Bill and a last-minute amendment that would increase border controls that included unmanned drones. Unmanned drones.
And then last week, I read in the Arizona Republic that our State Superintendent of Instruction, John Huppenthal, the person charged with overseeing the education of our children, many of whom – like mine – are the children of immigrants, wrote this in 2010 before he was elected: “We all need to stomp out balkanization. No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv stations, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.” He goes on to say that Mexican food is OK, as long as the menus are “mostly in English.” He also described as “lazy pigs” people who receive public assistance and even compared the work of Susan Sanger to acts committed by the Nazis. Mind you, this was all written anonymously, posting comments on a blog, hiding behind the username Falcon9.
Huppenthal has since “renounced and repudiated” his remarks; however, he will neither resign nor bring his re-election campaign to an end. He cried. He’s sorry. I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry he was placed in charge of the schools we send our children to every day. I’m sorry we don’t have an educator at the helm of the Arizona Department of Education – a good one – someone who takes seriously the notion of “in loco parentis,” someone driven not by hubris but by humanity.
Bruce 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.
The Boss is on to something, but we know that Bruce Springsteen will never be the Superintendent of Instruction in Arizona. For now, that position belongs to John Huppenthal, who vilified immigrant families and the working poor behind his anonymous pseudonyms.
There are 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already in these United States, trapped within a terribly broken immigration system. Of that number, many are children, here through no fault of their own, and America is the only country they have ever known. They pledge allegiance to her flag every day. They wait, their spirit intact even in the face of one devastating disappointment after another.
In A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy writes 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.” Half a century later, such a policy remains elusive.
Tomorrow, as we celebrate America’s birthday, how do we hold up our immigrant children? Not with the anonymous online ranting of someone who would be elected to run their schools, but with Bruce Springsteen’s proud and public celebration of the undaunted immigrant spirit:
I am proud to be here today as another hopeful wanderer, a son of Italy, of Ireland and of Holland and to wish God’s grace, safe passage and good fortune to those who are crossing our borders today and to give thanks to those who have come before whose journey, courage and sacrifice made me an American.
~ Bruce Springsteen, Recipient, Ellis Island Family Heritage Award,2010
as she loved her time with the Hogans and her Irish counterpart, Ailbhe, there were moments when she just wanted to meet someone who would understand that a 75 degree day in Ireland, while locally described as ‘a heatwave’ doesn’t begin to come close to a hot day in the Arizona desert. So she did what I do, updating friends and family through Facebook and her blog, 
Still, everything in America is bigger, isn’t it? Of a Circle K Thirstbuster, Elana pointed out that it was “as big as her head.” Mind you, she was grateful for that thirst-buster, given that her stay here included days as hot as116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.67 Celsius).
