for the record . . . a reprise

09 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by Editor in Antrim, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, British Army, Bruce Springsteen, Castledawson, Good Vibrations, IRA, Joe Strummer, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Mix tapes, Movies, Music, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Sectarianism, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Clash, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Undertones, Themes of childhood, UVF, Vinyl Records

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!970s Northern Ireland, Belfast, Europa Hotel, Good Vibrations, La Mon Bombing, Miami Showband Massacre, Mix tapes, Phoenix, Punk Rock, Record Shops, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Troubles, vinyl

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.

imgres-2

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.

Unlike me, Terri Hooley didn’t leave Northern Ireland:

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.

cover

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.

bruce-springsteen-born-to-run_1028114617005

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 21^st 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.

FOOTNOTE:

The work of a November. . .

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Editor in Act Two, Amputation, Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Treatment, Breast Reconstruction, Cancer Language, david bowie, Diagnosis, Glenn Frey, Language matters, Mastectomy, Memoir, Milestones

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Breast, Cancer, cancerversary, Deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey, DIEP Flap, dolores o'riordan, Lumpectomy, mastectomy, medical euphemisms, Memoir, Piestewa Peak, reconstruction, Sherman Alexie, sniglets, Surgery, Tom Petty

We end the set with what has become one of our songs. I make a joke about how I only sing in C. My love knows that’s not true, but he humors me because he knows I panic if he says it’s in A minor. Without saying it aloud, I remind him not to sing my verse. You know the one, the one about most Novembers and why they make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C” – a sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – for anyone who is sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it; it is a song for November.

Eight years ago, on a too-bright November morning, I was diagnosed with Stage II invasive breast cancer. I am loathe to declare the November date a “cancerversary,” one of those cheery-sounding sniglets used to mark milestones in cancer country. The scars on this body that carries me from one moment to the next are daily and unavoidable reminders of that Halloween morning when I discovered the lump and the afternoon thereafter when an earnest young doctor, a stranger, delivered my diagnosis. For cancer patients, there are plenty of these milestones – the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung; the completion of radiation or chemotherapy; the momentous day, five years after diagnosis, when a kindly oncologist will make the pronouncement of NED – No Evidence of Disease; and the day we dread most – discovery of metastasis.

Maybe it’s because there are no right words to respond to cancer, that we invent others to minimize and manage its havoc, to shelter us from it or make us smile through the illusion of it even as it terrifies us. And, make no mistake; we are terrified.

Filed away is an imperative from novelist, Sherman Alexie who once told an audience of writers that they “must share the scariest things about their lives.” Intrigued, I bought a ticket to hear him speak at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, bearing in mind advice he had given elsewhere: “Don’t lose the sense of awe you feel whenever you meet one of your favorite writers. However, don’t confuse any writer’s talent with his or her worth as a human being. Those two qualities are not necessarily related.” Accompanying me was my daughter, at the time a junior high student immersed in the words and drawings of Alexi’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. ALong with everyone else, we laughed conspiratorially as he shared what were surely the scariest things about his early years on the Spokane Indian Reserve. Describing his father’s booze of choice,”Squodka” – a mix of Squirt soda and vodka – Alexie’s cheery nonchalance belied, I imagine, the anguish of a young boy confronting the reality of an alcoholic father who would disappear for days at a time. He knows, I know, that alcoholism on the rez is no laughing matter.

Nor is cancer. It is a serious disease deserving of serious words, but we do a lousy job of talking about it in a way that conveys its reality or leads us to knowing what causes it or how to prevent it. So we rely on codes invented to keep this scariest of things at a safe distance. Code is acceptable in the cancer conversation and not just in the pink stuff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – “save the boobies” fare. “Mastectomy,” code for “amputation,” causes me to wonder if I were an amputee in the “traditional” sense, if I would ever refer to the day I lost a limb as my “ampuversary.” I think not.

The truth is that in the mythology of cancer, medical euphemisms abound. Myself, I have bandied about “lumpectomy” as though it is the thing we do to remove an inconsequential wart. In reality, it is a partial amputation. When I was first diagnosed, I presumed a lumpectomy was in the cards for me. As a word, it didn’t pack much of a punch, so it didn’t frighten me. Then I met the surgeon who pointed out that my cancer was not amenable to lumpectomy given its proximity to the nipple and the fact that I was not endowed with large breasts. Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. As her meticulous notes would later confirm, “dissection was very difficult given the very small circumareolar incision used for the skin-sparing mastectomy.” It would require additional time and effort, not to mention skill and patience. So she recommended – and I nodded sagely as though I knew what she was talking about – a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. Duly spared – spared, no less – the skin would then accommodate a reconstruction using my own tissue. Simple.

Perusing the details of my surgery, you would be forgiven for dismissing the removal of a breast as painless. At times it sounds regal, befitting a fanfare of trumpets for that climactic moment when my breast tissue was “elevated off the pectoralis and delivered from the wound.”

While three surgeons operated on me, my then-alive husband and our girl waited in a waiting room where a set of paintings of the desert at dusk hung on the walls. It would have been about ten o’clock in the morning when my surgeon came out to find my weary, tiny family leaning on each other , waiting for the announcement she would later document, that “the frozen section was negative for metastatic disease.” There were no abnormal nodes and no further dissection was necessary. Celebrating, she and my husband performed a silent high-five in the hospital hallway. Three hours later, having removed all the cancer she could see, she went about her day, leaving me in the capable hands of two highly sought after plastic surgeons, one being one of the best in Phoenix, the other a master of DIEP flap reconstruction, who had flown in the previous evening from Texas. When I eventually emerged from the ICU, high on Dilaudid, they say I told the young nurse on duty to pretend I was Madonna. Before I went home, she shampooed my hair.

In surgery, they worked on me for the next six hours, and two days later released me back to my life. Eight years later, I am told I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, or I summoned the courage to show you, that I really don’t look like myself. Not my original self. Hidden under my clothes, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny white scars. Below it, a thin crooked scar, faded to white, stretches from hip to hip, with ‘dog-eared’ reminders on either end where JP drains pulled excess bloody fluid for several days after the surgery. I have a right breast too. Sort of. It is in the shape of a breast, impressively so, now that all the post-surgical swelling and discoloration has gone. Its skin is the same, spared by the mastectomy that removed its cancerous tissue through a very small incision around the areola also removed with its nipple.

As a rule, I tend not to dwell on the macabre, but I sometimes find myself obsessing about my old right breast, now a mastectomy specimen preserved in a container of formaldehyde solution. It weighed 294 grams, “the words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.'”

Contemplating all that has happened in the past eight years – the cancer, the plunge into widowhood two Novembers later, the shift in priorities – I hear my mother say, in the parlance of home, that I have “come through the mill.” Lest I wallow too much, somebody will always be there to point out that things could be worse.

One evening, shortly after the death of my husband, I bumped into a former colleague. He hadn’t seen me for a few years but had still kept up with my professional exploits. Standing in the produce department at Safeway, he tendered his condolences and then wondered aloud if I had ever read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Of course I have. Several times. I know great chunks of it by heart. It is an exquisite study of loss that blows open my heart. And then he said to me, “Well, at least your daughter didn’t die.”

At least your daughter didn’t die.

The sentence hung in the space between us for too long. I don’t remember what I said. Something perhaps. Probably nothing. I know I scrambled internally to excuse him as someone who had never lost anyone that mattered much to him. I know I also hated him.

At least your daughter didn’t die.

No. She is right here. Just 21 years old and beautiful, tough without being hard, unmoored without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a Dairy Queen, since demolished, on Fridays after school. She learned to drive his Jeep without him and she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma without his cheers ringing in her ears. He would have liked that they used the Talking Heads for the graduation processional – “This Must Be the Place.” He would have tapped his feet and winked at me and brushed away a tear, because by then, he would have grown sentimental – all the more if he’d had any inkling of the milestones on her horizon. She would earn her first paycheck without the ready winks and smiles that had always encouraged her to keep being great at being herself regardless of the bullshit that comes with a part-time job in retail. In spite of her trouble with math, she is navigating her way through the degree program that will allow her to one day work with teenagers who are lost without their parents. She is lovely, reminding me sometimes of the kind of bird that only flies in a faraway place. Exotic. Rare. Endangered.

On one of the anniversaries of his death that November morning when we were far from our home, she told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm.

At least my daughter didn’t die.

I still don’t have the words to hand to the man who asked me about Joan Didion’s book. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t remember if I’d said Goodbye to my husband, if he’d heard me say it before my cellphone died the way it always does because I never remember to charge it. I wanted to tell him the last conversation our little family had was a transatlantic phone call – my daughter and I on top of the Titanic museum in a foggy Belfast, my husband in our Phoenix living room, all of us unaware it would be the last time we talked and laughed together. I didn’t. Instead, I reminded myself of Lou Reed reminding me of magic and loss and of Sherman Alexie lighting up the Heard Museum with a coping strategy for those times when we despair at the lack of compassion in the world. Remember, he had said, “the world gave us Hitler – but it also gave us Springsteen.”

The world gave us Bruce Springsteen.

And Prince. And Dolores O’Riordan. And Tom Petty. And Donald Trump. And Steve Earle, sorry for all the lonely nights he put her through, for not remembering if he said goodbye. And all the people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We just have to find the sweet spot in which to live and die.

Magical thinking . . .

How shall I mark this day?

I will climb again to the summit of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It has been almost a year since I stood there, arms akimbo, high up and far away. I have missed it up there, looking down and romanticizing the sprawl glittering below me. I think I’ll go back and wonder the way I do up there about Wordsworth when he first stopped to consider the view. It’s ’emotion recollected in tranquility. ‘ It’s just an illusion.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

spare me the cancer celebration – a reprise

20 Saturday Jan 2018

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Profoundly saddened by the recent death of Dolores O’Riordan and news that Tom Petty died of an accidental overdose, I barely looked at the clock yesterday, the way I have done for the past six years, on January 19th. I am loath to declare the date I underwent the mastectomy and reconstruction of my right breast, a “cancerversary,” one of those cheery-sounding sniglets often used to mark milestones for those ensnared within the disease. There are too many milestones – the day a lump is discovered or a diagnosis delivered; the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung; the day, five years after diagnosis, when an oncologist makes a pronouncement of NED – No Evidence of Disease.

Maybe it’s because we don’t have the right words to respond to cancer, that we make up other words – to minimize and manage its havoc, to shelter us from it, to make us smile through it even as it terrifies us. We are terrified.

Sherman Alexie. says that writers must write about the scariest things in their lives. Intrigued by this advice, I bought a ticket to hear him speak one evening at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Accompanying me was my daughter, in Junior High at the time and immersed in his Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Along with everyone else, we laughed as he shared what were surely the scariest things about his early years on the Spokane Indian Reserve. His laughter as he described his father’s beverage of choice,”Squodka” – a mix of Squirt soda and vodka – belied, I imagine, the anguish of a young boy confronting the reality of an alcoholic father who would disappear for days at a time. I know Sherman Alexie knows that alcoholism on the rez is no laughing matter.

Nor is cancer. It is a serious disease deserving of serious words, but we do a lousy job of talking about it in a way that confronts its reality or that leads us to knowing its cause or how to prevent it. We speak in codes that keep this scariest of things at a safe distance. Code is acceptable in the cancer conversation and not just in the pink stuff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – “save the boobies” fare. Codes. “Mastectomy,” for example, is code for “amputation.” It makes me wonder. Were I an amputee in the “traditional” sense, would I refer to the day I lost a limb as my “ampuversary”? No. I would not. Medical euphemisms abound. I used to toss around “lumpectomy” as though it were the removal of an inconsequential wart, instead of what it really is – a partial amputation. When I was first diagnosed, I presumed a lumpectomy was in the cards for me. As a word, it didn’t pack much of a punch, so it didn’t frighten me. Then I met my surgeon who pointed out that my cancer was not amenable to lumpectomy given its proximity to the nipple and the fact that I was not endowed with large breasts. Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. As her meticulous notes would later confirm, “dissection was very difficult given the very small circumareolar incision used for the skin-sparing mastectomy.” It would require additional time and effort, not to mention skill and patience. So she recommended (and I nodded sagely in agreement as though I knew what she was talking about) a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. Duly spared – spared, no less – the skin would then accommodate a reconstruction using my own tissue. Simple.

Reading through the details of my surgery, you would never know that cancer and its treatment is ugly or that it hurts. At times it sounds downright regal, befitting a fanfare of trumpets, especially that climactic moment when my breast tissue was “elevated off the pectoralis and delivered from the wound.”

While three surgeons operated on me, my weary husband waited, leaning on our daughter, she on him. It would have been about ten o’clock in the morning when my surgeon came out to announce to them what she would later write, that “the frozen section was negative for metastatic disease,” that there were no abnormal nodes, that no further dissection would be needed. She and my husband performed a silent high-five in the hospital hallway. And, after three hours, she had removed all the cancer she could see and could go about her day, leaving me in the capable hands of two highly sought after plastic surgeons, one being one of the best in Phoenix, the other a master of DIEP flap reconstruction, who had flown in the previous evening from Texas.

They worked on me for the next six hours, and a day later released me back to my life. Six years later, I am told I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, or I summoned the courage to show you, that I really don’t look like myself. Not my original self. Hidden under my clothes, since the DIEP flap reconstruction, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny white scars. Below it, a thin scar, faded to white, stretching from hip to hip, with ‘dog-eared’ reminders on either end where JP drains pulled excess bloody fluid for days after the surgery. I have a right breast too. Sort of. It is in the shape of a breast, impressively so, now that all the post-surgical swelling and discoloration has gone. Its skin is the same, spared by the mastectomy that removed its cancerous tissue through a very small incision around the areola also removed with its nipple.

I tend not to dwell in the macabre, but I cannot help wonder about my old right breast, now a mastectomy specimen preserved in a container of formaldehyde solution. It weighed 294 grams, “the words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.'”

Contemplating all that has happened in the past six years – the cancer, the death of my daughter’s daddy, the shift in priorities – I suppose you could say what they say in Northern Ireland. “God love her, she’s come through the mill.” Lest I wallow too much, however, there is always the reminder that I could be worse off.

I recall encountering someone I hadn’t seen for a few years, and he asked me if I had read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Yes. Indeed I have. Several times. I know great chunks of it by heart. And then he said, “Well, at least your daughter didn’t die.”

At least your daughter didn’t die.

No. She didn’t. She is right here. She is 20 years old now and beautiful. She is tough without being hard. She is vulnerable without the man who was her first word and who bought her ice-cream every Friday afternoon. She learned to drive without him and walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma without his cheers ringing in her ears. She earned her first paycheck without the winks and smiles that encouraged her to keep being great at at being herself. She completed her Associate’s Degree and is off to complete a degree in Psychology, so she can one day work with young people who have lost parents. Sometimes my lovely girl reminds me of a beautiful bird. Exotic. Rare. Endangered.

On the anniversary of his death, she told me it was beyond her grasp that two years had passed and that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store. To keep her warm.

At least my daughter didn’t die.

So I didn’t know what to say to the person who asked me about Joan Didion and therefore said nothing. I should know but still don’t that when people show you who they are, believe them. Instead I reminded myself of Lou Reed’s reminder of magic and loss and of Sherman Alexie who told us that night in the Heard Museum that when we despair at the lack of compassion in the world, we might remember that the world gave us Hitler – but it also gave us Springsteen.

The world gave us Bruce Springsteen.

And Dolores O’Riordan. And Tom Petty. And, yes, the world also gave us Donald Trump. And all the people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. And somehow we have to find the sweet spot in which to live and die.

Magical thinking . . .

So what will I do to mark the day?

A day late, I may just climb again to the summit of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It has been over a year since I sat at the top, and I have missed it. Up there, I will survey the valley below. And, glad to be so high up and far away from where I lay eight years ago, I will weep.

I will weep.

for the record . . . a reprise

08 Monday Jun 2015

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!970s Northern Ireland, Belfast, Europa Hotel, Good Vibrations, La Mon Bombing, Miami Showband Massacre, Mix tapes, Phoenix, Punk Rock, Record Shops, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Troubles, vinyl

Terri Hooley has decided to close down the Good Vibrations record shop on June 13th. This one’s for him – again.

I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, 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 with Woodbine cigarettes:

“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .”

Terri Hooley.

This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on 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 knew what I’d 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 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 wept 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 about 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.

Sitting here at my computer, almost forty 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?

Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.

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.

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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.

Unlike me, Terri Hooley didn’t leave Northern Ireland:

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.

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 – about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.

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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.

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And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” 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 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 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 strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.

What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21^st 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 right in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.

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 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 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.

By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. Making a mix tape was 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’d 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.

FOOTNOTE: