One afternoon in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara, I paused by an impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. If you’re from a certain time and place in Northern Ireland, you’ll understand this was no small act. I was raised by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths.
My mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her, and it is Mother’s Day there. With all good intentions, I had marked the day on the Northern Ireland calendar she has sent me every year since 1988, but I still forgot to send a card, time running away from me like Bukowski’s wild horses.
The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. I pick up the phone to tell her I was full of good intentions this Mother’s Day and sorry about the card. She tells me, in the parlance, to catch myself on. I make a mental to note to call the florist in Magherafelt tomorrow.
In my mind’s eye, mummy is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her a couple of years ago. It’s raining again, and there’s no craic, she tells me, hoping I’ll have some news. She lights up when I tell her that I’ve been spending time with a girl visiting here from Belfast. It’s been lovely, I tell her. Long chats and cups of proper tea and plates of biscuits and buns. Somehow, I let it slip that I don’t have an electric kettle. There’s a too-long silence on the other end of the line and then, “How can anyone living in this century not have an electric kettle? ” She’s just getting warmed up, “Some people have two. How can you not have an electric kettle? My God, no house should be without a kettle in this day and age.” I don’t tell her that my friend from Belfast had the same reaction. It’s 2024, after all.
People from back home don’t understand that people everywhere else don’t have the kettle going at all times. To be fair to me, there’s not much point, because the only other person here who would drink tea with me the way we do (think chain-smoking) is from Enniskillen, and he moved to the other side of the village so I don’t see him enough anymore to merit buying an electric kettle. And, I’ve lived with Scott long enough to know that he’s not about to start drinking tea either. He’s a coffee man, a heathen who has to grind the beans himself.
Drinking tea alone just isn’t the same. It’s a bit sad, a bit Bridget Jones at the beginning of the first film with Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” in the background, except with tea not wine. Zero craic.
Still, after my second cup of coffee this morning, I know I’ll head over to Amazon to order the latest greatest electric kettle. Then I’ll ring the flower shop.
But back to the ironing – my mother’s a master. The last time I was home, I sat there and watched as she expertly smoothed out with hot steam the stubborn wrinkles in my favorite old denim shirt. When she paused to make a point about something I’d forgotten, I was drawn back to all those times she eased into a story I’d heard a time or two before. Lessons from behind the ironing board I call them, and they include the one about taking time to consider the lilies and to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.
Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead.
Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers she sees on the news – from bombs in Belfast shops to tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, and mass shootings anywhere in the United States – while at the same time encouraging me to find a voice to explore its realities without hurting myself.
I wasn’t open to what she had to say all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was Northern Ireland in the 1970s and I couldn’t wait to turn my back on it.
Many of us felt the same, and maybe that’s why the granny’s words in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast packed such an emotional punch, “Go now – don’t look back.” I heard my own granny say something similar to my parents so many times when I was very small. “Go. Follow the sun.” My parents had toyed with the idea of immigration – Canada, South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but they remained where they were, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years, as their American grand-daughter grew up so far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.
I still feel a kind of guilt over leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now that our once massive extended family has diminished in size. The last of my dad’s brothers died a year ago. My mother’s brothers are all dead too. I have no more uncles, but in my mind’s eye they are vibrant and young, full of hope for their youngsters.
Maybe the best thing would have been to stay, to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
But I left, unafraid of what the future held, taking what Doris Kearns Goodwin once described as a “spectacular risk.” At 60, having spent much of my adult my life in Arizona and the last four years in a Mexican village, I know very well the unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a visceral longing for “home,” perhaps even for the things that sent me away in the first place – low hanging clouds full of rain, the accent, the colloquialisms, the oul’ banter.
One day last Spring, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in Connemara, to a little shop in the village. “Si, si amiga,” and the young woman handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to our sunny back garden where there is a clothes line.
While the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “God, there’s great drying out there.” Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother was with me.
On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there’s ma rushing in from our wee back garden, a young mother with a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain.
Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late one August afternoon as the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.
Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
Still we dance.
I’m thinking of mothers back home today, and paraphrasing Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left, and all the ones who were lost.
Thank you for staying, ma – for being home for me.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
The other day I was in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara and paused by the impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. This was no small act, with me raised in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. I’m thinking of her this morning. It is Mother’s Day where I am from, and my mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her last year.
Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my old denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have since forgotten I am drawn back to all those times she would ease into a story I had heard a time or two before, to the lessons from behind the ironing board – the one about taking time to consider the lilies; to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by. Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead after all.
Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers – tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, mass shootings anywhere in the United States, or bombs in Belfast shops – while at the same time encouraging me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.
I recall one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our little kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including the heartthrob lead singer.
Our David Cassidy was dead.
Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, people like us believed that musicians like The Miami were immune to the horrors of political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. They represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. The band was as my dear friend, bass guitarist, Stephen Travers, recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.”
That night in 1975 left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” a tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy. As Belfast writer, Stuart Bailie, points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”
The handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men whose response was to continue shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Stephen was gravely wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
As the man on the radio continued his report, my mother kept ironing, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was horrific – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would, but many of us would leave, and maybe that’s why Granny’s final words in Kenneth Branagh’s movie Belfast pack such a punch, “Go now – don’t look back” – words I heard my own granny say to my parents so many times when I was very small. My parents toyed with the idea of immigration – South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but in the end they stayed, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years as their American grand-daugher grew up far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.
I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now, our once massive extended family growing smaller – the last of my dad’s brothers died just a few weeks ago. My mother’s brothers all dead too. I have no more uncles. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
From the sectarian and political, to the deeply personal, Mothers Day always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I was secure in my place; I knew my steps in the dance. On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our wee back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon just as the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.
Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
And still we dance.
I’m thinking of all the mothers back home today, to paraphrase Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left. And for all the ones who were lost.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
It is my mother’s birthday, and she is far away in a village in Northern Ireland, in the place that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in the kitchen, just the way she was one morning when I visited her this Spring.
Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have forgotten – I find myself remembering again all the times she told me – from behind the ironing board – to consider the lilies, or to “mark her words” that there will be plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea. “What’s meant for you won’t pass you by.” Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away.
Mostly, my mother has struck an artful balance between shielding me from the world while encouraging me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.
I recall one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including the heartthrob lead singer.
Our David Cassidy was dead.
Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, we believed musicians like The Miami were immune. They represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. It was as bass guitarist, Stephen Travers, recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” But on that night in 1975, what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy. As Stuart Bailie points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”
The handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men who only kept shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Stephen was gravely wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
That summer morning, listening to the radio, my mother kept ironing, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was unimaginable – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would.
Sometimes I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving my family. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
From the sectarian and political, to the personal, my mother’s birthday always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I knew my place, my steps in the dance. The miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon before the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.
Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes. CD burners, iPods, and iTunes Have taken the place Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon Enough, clever introverts will create Quicker point-and-click ways to declare One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor. But I miss the labor Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song At a time. It sometimes took days To play, choose, pause, Ponder, record, replay, erase, And replace. But there was no magic wand. It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape Was sculpture designed to seduce And let the hounds loose. A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave, A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,” Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye. The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” or something by Hank. But O, the last track Was the vessel that contained The most devotion and pain And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
But back to the ironing – my mother’s a master. The last time I was home, I sat there and watched as she expertly smoothed out with hot steam the stubborn wrinkles in my favorite old denim shirt. When she paused to make a point about something I’d forgotten, I was drawn back to all those times she eased into a story I’d heard a time or two before. Lessons from behind the ironing board I call them, and they include the one about taking time to consider the lilies and to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.
