Making something of ourselves …

28 Monday Oct 2024

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

Tags

charm, cure, Faith, faith healer, folklore, Memoir, Miracles, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, World Poetry Day 2023

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until … their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight … and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance

This is actor, Ethan Hawke, talking about creativity on a video that’s been making the rounds on social media. I finally watched it in its entirety, and maybe you should too, especially if you’re more than a little concerned about creativity and creative people or maybe you’re perplexed about why some people you know on Facebook don’t sound like people you know anymore because they are using AI chatbots to generate their status updates. Some of them no longer look like themselves either, opting for AI generated images of their faces rather than than photos of their real faces for profile pictures. But that’s not the point. Not really.

It’s been bothering me, knowing that algorithmic tactics are often behind the content on our Facebook timelines—our friends’ vacation photos, political news, brand mentions, status updates etc Ah, those Facebook timelines. Mine is just a record of moments I mostly enjoyed or cared about and don’t want to forget. Milestones. It’s not my life in real time. It’s not real, not really. My Facebook persona is better than real-life-me. What’s happening on my Facebook page is not really what’s going on in my life, because if it were, the algorithms would surely bury it below more shareable content that won’t make other people uncomfortable—AI generated dogs dressed up for Halloween or cat videos.

I grew up pre-Facebook, pre-Internet, pre-computer in a working class household in Northern Ireland. We eventually had a television, and it had three channels. We had a record player with a non-curated record collection and weekly access to a mobile library where we judged books by their covers. The paper boy delivered magazines and comics every week. I liked what I liked which was different from what my friends liked and that was just fine. There were no algorithms guiding my choices and leading me towards people who also liked what I liked. Northern Ireland was divided enough.

My parents grew up pre-TV and pre-phone. They tuned into the radio when they wanted to hear what was going on near and far. They read newspapers and they talked to their neighbors. I think they got a phone in the 1970s and shared the line with a neighbor. The phone made possible long-distance conversations with relatives in America. It seemed our world expanded and contracted all at the same time. I remember my parents’ resourcefulness—they still have it. Creative people and pragmatic, good with their hands.

My father was the more musical of the two, with an ear for lyrical poetry. My earliest recollection of poetry is his recitation from memory of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service or Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” When I’m back home in the spring when the daffodils appear, I’m transported back to our living room where my father is reciting the opening lines. Where he learned those poems, I have no idea. He is not an academic; he did not rub shoulders with the Northern Ireland literati. He is a maker of things.

He always whistled or he sang as he worked. He was one of those people who could always pick out a tune on whatever instrument was within reach—”The Black Velvet Band” on a hefty piano accordion with mother of pearl keys comes to mind. He always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the radio, most likely not realizing he was teaching me to find the harmonies, not the melody, first. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, daddy made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the lovely old violin that has opened doors for me in places I would never have imagined —from East Berlin before the Wall came down all the way to the Mexican village I now call him. I don’t remember my father buying an instrument or a hard-bound book of poetry for himself. He didn’t avail himself of the mobile library. Somehow poetry found him.

I’ve said before that my dad belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. If you know him, you know I’m right. He has the “Midas touch” of the thatcher, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. Both he and my mother grew up in Heaney country, a place where people believed in “miracles and cures and healing wells,” and where everyone knew the “folk healer,” the individual uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed them.

In those days, the folk healer meted out charms in plasters and poultices, and potions that swirled in brown bottles. It was to the healer my father once turned when the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her severe bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this response from a man with formal medical training, my father ventured deep into the Derry countryside to the home of the man with “the charm.” Observant and eager to help even though he could not discern which wild herbs held the curing powers, my father accompanied him into the fields. He watched and then waited as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm – beat the juices from the herbs with a stone, then mixed it with two bottles of Guinness stout and poured it into a C&C lemonade bottle. He sent my father on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. There was no payment – other than faith in what had been created and the man who created it.

Admittedly, I have always been skeptical of the faith healer but never of the faith at work in the transaction. In times of crisis, when all else fails, where do we turn?

Wherever it is, faith is a part of it. As is human connection. Human creativity.

After suffering a stroke in 2005, Seamus Heaney wrote “Miracle,” as part of his Human Chain collection. Recalling the men who had to carry him up and down stairs immediately following his stroke, Heaney draws on the New Testament story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof into Christ’s presence:

Just then some men came, carrying a paralyzed man on a bed. They were trying to bring him in and lay him before Jesus; but finding no way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus. When he saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” – Luke 5:18-20

In a 2009 interview Heaney, a non-believer, said that “Miracle” was not a spiritual poem, but instead one that marked “being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear.” I suppose every now and again we all read one that transforms us.

It was only when he suffered a stroke and had to be carried himself, Heaney realized how important those men were, and he invites us to realize the same, to “be mindful” of those who carried him – the human chain – the ones who knew him all along. Without the community of people around the sick man, there is no miracle.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Ethan Hawke’s appreciation for the power of poetry reminds me of what poet, Carol Ann Duffy, once said about it in her response to the devastation of the Haiti earthquake as it unfolded on television. “We turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . when we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.”

As for Heaney, when asked about the value of poetry in turbulent times, he replied that it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

It works like a charm. We need it more than algorithms.

Make something.

Make something of yourself—for yourself today.

Omagh. On a sunny afternoon.

15 Thursday Aug 2024

Posted by Editor in Birthdays, bombing, IRA, John Hewitt, Loughinisland, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF, W.B. Yeats

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto", 1994 World Cup, 2004 World Series, bombings, Boston Red Sox, Giants Stadium, Good Friday Agreement, Ireland, Irish DIASPORA, John Hewitt, New Jersey, North Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland, Omagh, REAL IRA

photo-62

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no peace.

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

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

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

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

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

Bear in mind these dead.

“Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” by John Hewitt

So I say only: Bear in mind

Those men and lads killed in the streets;

But do not differentiate between

Those deliberately gunned down

And those caught by unaddressed bullets:

Such distinctions are not relevant . . .

Bear in mind the skipping child hit

By the anonymous ricochet . . .

And the garrulous neighbours at the bar

When the bomb exploded near them;

The gesticulating deaf-mute stilled

by the soldier’s rifle in the town square

And the policeman dismembered by the booby trap

in the car . . .

Patriotism has to do with keeping

the country in good heart, the community

ordered by justice and mercy;

these will enlist loyalty and courage often,

and sacrifice, sometimes even martyrdom.

Bear these eventualities in mind also;

they will concern you forever:

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

13920888_10210319570086764_6748659015835251386_n

James Barker (12) from Buncrana

Fernando Blasco Baselga(12) from Madrid

Geraldine Breslin (43) from Omagh

Deborah Anne Cartwright (20) from Omagh

Gareth Conway (18) from Carrickmore

Breda Devine (20 months) from Donemana

Oran Doherty (8) from Buncrana

Aidan Gallagher (21) from Omagh

Esther Gibson (36) from Beragh

Mary Grimes (65) from Beragh

Olive Hawkes (60) from Omagh

Julia Hughes (21) Omagh

Brenda Logue (17) from Omagh

Anne McCombe (45) from Omagh

Brian McCrory(54) from Omagh

Samantha McFarland (17) Omagh

Seán McGrath (61) from Omagh

Sean McLaughlin (12) from Buncrana

Jolene Marlow (17) Omagh

Avril Monaghan (30) from Augher

Maura Monaghan (18 months) from Augher

Alan Radford (16) Omagh

Rocio Abad Ramos (23) from Madrid

Elizabeth Rush (57) Omagh

Veda Short (46) from Omagh

Philomena Skelton (39) from Durmquin

Frederick White (60) from Omagh

Bryan White (26) from Omagh

Lorraine Wilson (15) Omagh

a red letter day

28 Thursday Dec 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

christmas cards, Letter Writing, Northern Ireland, paper calendar, paper v digital

I’m sure he exists, but I have never seen the mailman where I live in Mexico. Regardless, I still peek into the letterbox every day, the way I used to all those years I lived in Arizona when there was likely to be an envelope marked By Air Mail, Par Avion waiting for me in the mailbox in front of our house. My Mexican mail amounts to an electricity bill (without an envelope let alone a stamp) delivered once every two months by someone I have never seen. There’s the occasional business card from someone who wants to wash my car, sell my house, or extend my eyelashes. And once a year, after Christmas, I’ll find in the mailbox the brown envelope I’ve been waiting for. There it was yesterday morning, with its tell-tale Air Mail stickers and a silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II on a postage stamp and its perfect timing. Inside it was the Northern Ireland calendar for the coming year. And, my heart did a little happy dance . . .

The Northern Ireland 2024 appointment calendar features a dozen beautiful photographs of places I never really appreciated when I was growing up there – Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, “Game of Thrones” filming locations on the Antrim coast, or the Mountains of Mourne sweeping, as only they do, down to the sea. My mother has sent a NI calendar every year to our relatives in America or Australia, and ever since I became one of those far away relatives in the late 1980s when I emigrated to the USA and then moved to Mexico four years ago, I too have been the recipient of a Northern Ireland calendar. No matter what else is happening in the world that might affect the mail, my calendar has arrived unscathed every single year and almost always before January 1.

Before Facebook, email, WhatsApp, and whatever else you’re having, my mother and I exchanged hundreds of letters and greeting cards and packages. For over a decade after I left Northern Ireland, I knew to expect, at least once a week, a red, white, and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope. Marked By Air Mail and Par Avion with a postage stamp bearing the image of a member of the Royal Family or some other famous person, for instance the drummer of the other Queen. Ma’s letter was always crammed with all the news she could squeeze onto one page – who had died, how much it had been raining, what daddy was planting in the garden, and how distance is no good. The water is wide.

I continue to marvel at the journey of the fragile airmail letter; all the inspections it passed and the numerous hands it passed through on its way from a red pillar box in a rainy village in Northern Ireland and over the Atlantic Ocean and on to a desert city in Arizona, where a nice man in a little US mail truck would retrieve it from his big Santa sack and drop it in my red brick mail box.

Along with the airmail envelope/letter, there were other letters too, written on lined pale blue notebook pages my mother had numbered and folded with clippings from The Belfast Telegraph, recipes, packages of flower seeds, death notices. My parents – and I know they are not alone in this particular practice – always turned to “the deaths” before reading anything else in the newspaper. I used to roll my eyes over what I thought was depressing and very Irish behavior, but now that I’m older than my parents were when I was a teenager, I view it differently. It’s pure acknowledgement that someone used to be here. Someone left a mark, blazed a trail, touched a heart – someone will be missed.

Those pages of my mother’s exquisite blue handwriting bore ink-smudges and creases, occasionally a tea-stained ring of her cup; and, I’m convinced, a barely-there scent of Fairly Liquid dish-soap.

Letter-writing was as prominent in our lives as the Sunday roast. With so many of the extended family away in America or Australia and no such thing as cheap phone plans – or cheap phones for that matter, there weren’t just letters, there were birthday and Christmas cards, St Patrick’s Day cards, sympathy cards, parcels (the Christmas box) and scenic postcards. Of the latter, nobody seemed to mind that along with “wish you here,” the writer often put it all out there on a postcard for the postman and anyone else to read if they encountered it on its journey. Oversharing was never an issue and certainly not the phenomenon it became after 2008 when Webster’s New World Dictionary made it their ‘New Word of the Year.’

Maybe it’s because we overshare the way social media allows us to, that we don’t see a need to share at all in handwritten letters or postcards or Christmas cards. I find it odd, given that we’re supposed to be more connected than ever, especially after a pandemic that kept us so far apart. Sitting here in Mexico, I can tell you with stunning accuracy what my friend is having for dinner in Belfast tonight. The last time I sent her a Christmas card was 1991. We haven’t talked in years, but we’re “connected” – just like everybody else on the digital super duper highway – which I think means we’re probably not connected at all.

When my lovely friend Rhonda visited me in real life (IRL) this past year, she gave me an envelope emblazoned in black marker: “Ma. (For Christmas).” I hid it so I wouldn’t be tempted to open it until Christmas, and subsequently couldn’t find it until today. When I read the hand-written wishes on the card inside from my daughter, well, you know the rest. My heart did a little happy dance. She could have just texted me the way she does almost every day, but she sat down and sent me a proper Christmas card. And with it came the realization that this is the first Christmas where I have not received a single Christmas card in the mail. Not one. There have been lots of online greetings – virtual Christmas hugs and Santa hat emojis exchanged on Facebook and in texts and elsewhere. What happened to the Christmas Card tradition in my life? Where is the person I used to be?

For decades, that person had a leather address book that was consulted on a day in early December set aside for writing cards to everyone I knew – friends, neighbors, extended family members, colleagues, the insurance man. I made sure to consult the post office for the final dates for posting cards and parcels for delivery in time for Christmas – to and from the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia. My mother always double-checked the last day to mail packages to her far-flung relatives in America and Australia – and it is no fiction that those packages were indeed of the brown paper variety and tied up with string (butcher string). I also remember – and I think I got this from my mother – I used to put a little check mark next to the name of the person who hadn’t sent a card the year before. I sent one regardless, because … it’s Christmas, and to invoke Love Actually, “if you can’t say it at Christmas, eh?” Still, it would cross my mind that maybe they had been sick or somebody had died and the newspaper forgot to include the death notice or maybe they just decided to join the growing number of people who aren’t “doing” Christmas cards anymore.

When I was young, I remember rushing into our hall as soon as I heard the thud when a pile of Christmas cards fell through the letter box. Bearing postmarks from all over the world, it was a feast of international communication. There were always at least a hundred Christmas cards hanging on string draped across our living room walls. The fanciest cards had pride of place on the mantelpiece or on the phone table where everybody could see them, pick them up and read the message inside for, in the following order: “Betty, Eric, Yvonne, and Keith.” There were often duplicate cards featuring Dickensian winter scenes or perhaps the Wise Men with presents for the baby Jesus, but we still had to display both in case the sender visited and noticed his card wasn’t there. If memory serves me right, my mother also had a stash of favorite cards that she just wouldn’t part with and they would show up in different places around the house each year, like ornaments. From gaudy to sophisticated, to home-made with glitter and fake snow – there was room for all of them. There’s no room for Facebook messages and Christmassy updates on the mantelpiece.

But back to my heart’s little happy dance.

Typically, the Northern Ireland calendar requires three magnets to attach it to my refrigerator where I will see it every day. I love its photographs of places from six counties where the sun is always shining. I love the big white squares for each day of the week and all the reminders of Bank Holidays that don’t coincide with any holidays here, and Mother’s Day is on a different day too. First, I’ll mark on it the birthdays that are already committed to memory. These are ‘red letter days.’ Then I’ll think about when the insurance is due or when the oil needs changing and those will go on the calendar too. These are the opposite of red letter days, but they cannot be ignored. I will put a big circle around the date of a special event like a Bruce Springsteen concert or a trip back home and subsequently count down to these with big red X’s that fill up each square on the calendar, the way a 5th grader writes on the corner of the chalkboard how many days are left before school’s out for summer (about 150).

In spite of all the productivity apps on my phone and the online calendar attached to my work email which asks me to RSVP to Thanksgiving, Christmas, every public holiday in the US, and even my own birthday, the Northern Ireland wall calendar remains the mother of all calendars. The only calendar to equal it was the one I used to make for my parents that featured photos of my daughter, her daddy, and me. It had a different family photo to correspond to the month of the year … the three of us making snow angels for December, or watching fireworks explode in the sky over Morro Bay for July. You get the idea. But without him, the home-made family photo calendar seemed wrong, a reminder that he wasn’t here any more, so I turned instead to the beautiful Arizona Highways wall calendar. When it arrives sometime in January 2024, it will be the calendar hanging in my parent’s kitchen in rural Derry, even though Mother’s Day is on a different day in Ireland and also the USA doesn’t do Bank Holidays.

In the digital age, we’d all be forgiven for thinking the days of the paper calendar are numbered. After all, look what happened to letter-writing and Christmas cards in my family. But then again, look what happened to vinyl records. Vinyl went away and then it occurred to somebody that tangibility matters, and vinyl came back with a vengeance.

Like a handwritten letter or a paper calendar, a vinyl record is tangible and an investment of time. Before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets and online calendar notifications and beeps and alerts, there was a time when we didn’t mind investing time in letters that would help close the distance between us. Letters required a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us. Letters and Christmas Cards and postcards force us to slow down even as the world around us spins at ever-increasing velocity.

I miss all of that and all that Simon Garfield says I – and others – have lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.”

I have an idea. Maybe it’s a resolution just in time for the New Year. I’m going to set aside one day each month to mail a letter or a card to my parents and to my daughter. It will be a red letter day, and one day around this time next year, I’ll be back here to tell you all about it.

May 2024 be good to you and yours. Happy New Year.

talking to strangers

28 Friday Apr 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

baseball, Damian Gorman, Derry Girls, Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, States of Play, USA politics

A month or two ago, I received an email from a stranger. A former journalist with The Financial Times who splits his time between Belfast and Baltimore, Steve McGookin, had landed on an old column I’d written for the Irish Times about my love affair with the Boston Red Sox and wondered if I might be interested in taking part in his States of Play, a project that uses baseball as a window into discussions – a series of nine Q&As – innings – with interesting folks about politics, society, and cultural connections.

Of course I said ‘yes.’ Without hesitation. After all, one of the best things about journalism as Steve points out on his website is just reaching out to random people and hoping they’ll talk to you.”

In retrospect, my only wish is that we could have had the entire conversation in the cheap seats at Fenway all the way into extra innings.

If you’re a baseball fan or if you’re just interested in the state of the nation from the perspective of an immigrant from Northern Ireland, you’ll maybe take a look, with this in mind:

At a ball game, you almost always see something you’ve never seen before. In today’s America, honestly, God only knows what we might see next.

Thanks again, Steve. Hope to see you back on the oul’ sod one day soon.

Here’s the link to my nine innings, conducted over email in the Spring of 2023 shortly before – and after – I returned to Northern Ireland to celebrate my 60th birthday which coincided with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.