A lesson in gratitude . . . in every thing, give thanks.

26 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by Editor in Art, Belfast, Christmas, Memoir, Photography, Saying Thank You, Thanksgiving, Van Morrison, Writers

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Amazing Grace, Annie Lamott, Astral Weeks, camera angles, Christmas, gratitude, identity, immigration, Life Lessons, Memoir, perspective, photography, prayer, thanks, Thanksgiving, trees, Van Morrison, Words of Wisdom, Writing

Several years ago, I enrolled in a college photography class with a friend. This was something I had been meaning to do for about thirty year but had never made time for it before a breast cancer diagnosis shifted my priorities. Until then, I had been very busy being busy, bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of professional, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, all the while wishing Tom Petty would show up on my doorstep one day and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.

A pleaser, I wanted to be the photography instructor’s favorite. I was off to a promising start – like me, she preferred Nikon over Canon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and to never miss a class even though I dreaded disappointing her, or even worse, boring her. And, she was often bored – to the point of openly bristling at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, subject in the center. What did we know of the rule of thirds? She would sigh and stress that there was no magic in great photography, that it was “just light.”

“It is just light, and you just need to find it.”

Trying to relate – and reminding myself that it was also about composition – I told myself that photography was “writing with light.” I wanted to learn how to do it and to one day take just one photograph of the variety Amyn Nasser admires – a magical, grand photograph:

I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.

Determined that her students would create at least one grand moment – a moment of vision – in our often pedestrian pictures, my photography teacher assigned as homework over that Thanksgiving weekend, what she coined a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” It would require us to shoot from various angles, to shift our perspective – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . It would require ‘a good eye.’

So it was that I found myself on that Thanksgiving morning, wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, and pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I forget how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking – just thinking. I remember that it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Astral Weeks and Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl on another November evening more than a decade ago.

There, he mystifies those gathered before him the way he does when he seems younger than the grumpy old man he can appear to be. His rendition of Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended is immaculate as he teases out the song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” from the album of the same name described by legendary rock critic, Lester Bangs, on the tenth anniversary of its release:

Insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.

Now, over fifty years since its release, people like me continue to find their own understandings of “Astral Weeks.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Gavin Edwards says it is “still the sweetest slice of mystery in Van Morrison’s catalog.” Naturally then, I serve it up every November, especially around Thanksgiving.

Sitting in Phoenix in the shade of trees that do not grow in Belfast, I could not be further from Cyprus Avenue which boasts over 85 trees sprouting from wide cement pavements to providing light and shade. Pine, maple, sycamore, lime, beech . . . Once upon a time, this avenue would have been a place beyond Van Morrison’s station as a working class boy from Hynford Street:

Cyprus Avenue was a place where there’s a lot of wealth. It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.

Eventually, the avenue of trees would belong to him. It would belong to all of us. For his 70th birthday, Van Morrison would play a concert on Cyprus Avenue, and pilgrims would come from all over the globe to experience it, to share his ‘sense of wonder.’

In the spirit of the holiday season, I could maybe say that it was the Thanksgiving holiday that had something to do with my moment of transcendence as I gazed at those pink blossoms shimmering above me. That would not be true. The celebration of America’s most significant holiday does not come naturally to me, even after over thirty years here. Christmas is still the holiday that warms me, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,

With apologies to members of my American family joining us for Christmas, we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.

No, it wasn’t thoughts of Thanksgiving that took me where I went that November afternoon in a green space in downtown Phoenix. It was a yearning. Looking up, losing track of time and place, I could find my footing again, knowing full well I would lose it – and rediscover it – again and again. And, fearless, I was grateful for it.

May the spirit of Thanksgiving hold us aloft.

james gandolfini ~ forever with the wild things

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by Editor in Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are

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Christoph Niemann, HBO, In the Night Kitchen, James Gandolfini, live your wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, Maurice Sendak, mother daughter relationship, NPR, Terry Gross, tony Soprano, True Romance, Where the Wild Things Are, Words of Wisdom, Writing

The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits – still – among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.

Once upon a time, at 8 o’clock every night, my late husband would ask, “Well? Are we ready for Tony and the boys?” and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we had seen before more, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of James Gandolfini. I still tune in to the odd episode on Netflix, where his Tony Soprano is larger than life, fighting about money with Edie Falco’s Carmela, and I tell myself he didn’t really die in Rome six summers ago.

Six. Summers. Ago.

Before the creation of Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini was already playing the part. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,

the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.

Brilliantly.

I had seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance, his performance crackling with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end is quintessential Quentin Tarantino. I can only peek out through my fingers. Still, even though I know Tony’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I have been – and continue to be – charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness – duped, like many of his victims, I suppose, by a vulnerability that makes him relatable and likable. Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. But not James Gandolfini, with us for the briefest sojourn, and dead at 51.

Today would have been his 58th birthday, and thinking about him and what what he left behind for his baby daughter, pokes a hole in a well-hidden stash of thoughts about my own mortality. My daughter does not read this blog often. A young woman and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later. When I am gone, she will open the jar. It is a beautiful strategy, isn’t it? A way to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, and it reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview, illustrated in this animated film by Christoph Niemann. It is the purest expression of mortality I have ever heard, Sendak’s impassioned entreaty:

Live your life, live your life, live your life.

Hearing Maurice Sendak tell the interviewer,

Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you . . .

is especially poignant knowing he died just over a year before James Gandolfini left us. I think Maurice Sendak would have missed the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best and most heartsome performance may well have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max who, after his mother sends him to bed without any dinner, sails off to a fantasy island inhabited by the wild things. In the movie version, Max runs away from home, running down menacing city streets until he reaches a waterfront where a boat is waiting to take him far away to the land where the wild things roam. At first, these ferocious creatures try to scare him away, but Max remains unfazed, fearless – the wildest of them all, apparently. Emboldened and now in charge, he is pronounced king of this kingdom and orders his new subjects to ‘let the wild rumpus start!’ But when he tires of the moonlit shenanigans, he invokes his mother and sends them to bed without dinner.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all

As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as those that flutter across the faces of Tony Soprano or any of the ‘wild things’ he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the very embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination.

I suspect every child knows where the wild things are. Over fifty years ago, I remember my mother telling me not to let my imagination run away with me when I fretted over the dark, or death, or disappointments, big and small. And, fueled by these wild things, I sailed off by myself many times. Just like Max, I always found my way back home – some journeys were longer than others.

Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for no longer wanting to be king, Carol chases him, lunging at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Undaunted, Max refuses to stay and eventually returns home to a happy ending, with dinner waiting and still hot.

Thus, the heartbreaking farewell as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore – keening – howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.

mr. jones and me . . . in appreciation of a teacher

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Editor in favorite teacher, Frank O'Connor, Great teachers, Memoir, Mr. Jones, Music, Short Stories, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Themes of childhood

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Letter Writing, Letters from former students, Memoir, Prince of Tides, reading, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Thank a teacher, Writing

My first teaching job

There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

This week, I will not be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides. All over America, during Teacher Appreciation Week, we honor teachers and their craft with public fanfare and more personal gestures as well. It’s the time of year when some teachers are counting down the days until school’s out for summer, while others are figuring out how to make every instructional minute matter until the final bell rings on the last day of school. Cards and hand-written letters of gratitude will be saved in shoeboxes and reopened over the years, lasting reminders of what Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity. “He can never tell where his influence stops.”

So come away with me to your favorite teacher’s classroom . . . what was that teacher’s name? What made that teacher so special?

Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your painting in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish your book report because your mother was in the hospital, and who you overheard one day tell a student during detention, “you will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love.” Or maybe it was the junior high history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind wanders to the fields of the Antebellum South whenever you use a cotton ball.

Each of us has had this teacher. For me, it was my English teacher, Mr. Jones. When I first encountered him, it was at Antrim Grammar School in Northern Ireland, then a young man at the beginning of his career. Every day, he wore the same tweed jacket – it had leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but more importantly, he was accessible. Always the best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of Richard Church’s Over the Bridge or the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

For emphasis, he would add “Great stuff!”

How we loved it when he indulged, with good humor, the odd red herring. In those seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones revealed a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. Then back to business, he would painstakingly guide us through the required reading for O-level and A-level English exams, the routines and rituals of his classroom elevating an ordinary space into a place of possibility. Every. Single Day.

Mr. Jones’s professional journey led him to Friends School in Lisburn in 1996. By then, I had spent more than a decade as a teacher myself. It makes me smile to consider the possibility that, on the same day, Mr. Jones and I might have been introducing our respective students on either side of the Atlantic, to Robert Frost’s Birches. You can imagine my delight to rediscover a tribute to my favorite teacher – middle-aged and retired – in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter

Mr Terry Jones, Senior Teacher, joined the staff at Friends’ from Antrim Grammar School as Head of the English Department in 1996. At the heart of his teaching was an abiding love of literature, an endless enthusiasm for books and reading, that enriched and enlivened all in his classroom over the years. At the heart of his work in school were kindness, warmth and good sense – qualities that drew the best from pupils and fostered the good relationships so important in our community. A man with many interests, those good relationships extended throughout the staff at Friends’ and Terry Jones was a most highly valued colleague and friend. Calm and steadfast in upholding what is really important in education, Terry Jones made an immense contribution and his example will be a pattern for those who worked with him here in years to come. There is no doubt that retirement will be busy and fulfilling and Terry Jones has our thanks and very best wishes for the future

Like Mr. Jones, great teachers are passionately committed to the most important subject – their students. They understand that their students enter a classroom sharing basic needs – to feel safe, to learn, to matter.

One evening, while sorting through papers, de-cluttering and discarding, I found folded in four between a hand-made card and a letter of recommendation from my first principal, a letter from a former student. I am ashamed to say I do not remember the woman who took the time to explain in writing her decision to withdraw from my Introduction to World Literature class, nor do I recall how I received her letter. Had she turned it in with an assignment? I don’t remember. I don’t even remember her full name. It appears that in her effort to explain herself on just one side of the note-book paper, she had to tightly position in the bottom right hand corner her signature – diminutive and different from the great loops of flowing cursive that had preceded it. A first name, ‘Carol,’ but a surname that remains a mystery. By some strange twist that can only happen in real life, perhaps Carol will stumble upon this blog and find the letter she wrote twenty years ago, then and forever a tribute to teaching:

9.17.1999

Dear Ms. W.

I wanted to write you a note to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your class. You are a delight and a terrific teacher. We have just learned that my mom has cancer, and it is in the brain, lung, and bones. We don’t have much time, and I need every minute I have to be with her. I remember you saying that your mom is your best friend – it is the same with me – and I hardly know how I can get through life without her.

I wanted you to know also, that because her eyesight has been going – and she has always been an avid reader (and all the zillions of stories she read to us . . . do you know of the poem, “You may have riches and gold – but I had a mother that read to me . . . “?) She has been so frustrated not being able to read – so I have been reading to her – I read her “My Oedipus Complex,” and oh, how we giggled – I told her that I wish she could have heard you read it, with that slight, but wonderful Irish accent! So I was especially glad to have O’Connor’s other story – “First Confession” that you handed out. We call them his “little boy stories” – and it has brought her smiles. The Oedpius Complex was especially wonderful, because my father was a pilot in the Army, and was in Korea and WWII so – she with 3 boys (and 2 girls) could certain relate to ‘Daddy’ coming home and the competition for her attention. Isn’t it strange – I bet you don’t think about the ways you touch other lives – but you have added something beautiful to ours, when we most needed it. I will in time retake this course – so I will be looking for YOUR class.

Thank you,

Carol F.

“Please read the letter that I wrote . . .”

pretty in pink – for my daughter

18 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by Editor in Memoir

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childhood, gardening, Hong Kong orchid tree, Memoir, Phoenix summers, poetry, Writing

For almost twenty years, this Hong Kong orchid tree has welcomed me home every day. I recall the evening we planted it. It was at the end of a hot Saturday when our little family drove to a nursery in Moon Valley in search of a tree exactly like those which provided shade during our weekend strolls through the Biltmore Fashion Park. At the time, this open-air mall boasted a row of what I finally learned were Hong Kong Orchids. My then two year old loved to stand on the tips of her toes and stretch each of her piano-player fingers high into the sky, hoping to pluck one of the enticing pink blossoms that hung there, blooms as worthy as lilies of Georgia O’Keefe’s attention.

So enchanted was Sophie by these, that she wanted a pretty pink tree for our yard. Naturally, I had the perfect spot, because right in front of her bedroom window, she should have something magnificent to look out to every morning. Too, it would fill, at last, a space previously occupied for over seven decades by a grapefruit tree that had given up the ghost.

My girl was at that tender age when she needed to and wanted to hold my hand everywhere we went, on a mission to find a stray cat, a hummingbird drinking from Mexican honeysuckle, or the pink tree, the one that was proving to be more elusive than we had anticipated. The nursery was all out of mature orchid trees, and the saplings were wholly unimpressive. It was anti-climactic at best when we finally found, attached to a single green stalk, all of three feet tall and the width of my little finger, a price tag identifying it as the coveted Hong Kong orchid. Nary a bloom just a couple of leaves drooping sadly from the top of the stalk. The young man who sold it to me was very charming and assured me it would be providing “all kinds of shade” for us in no time. Skeptical, we bought it anyway, and off we went.

More to appease this tired little girl and her mother, than to show off any horticultural prowess, her daddy planted and staked what he called a skinny little excuse for a tree in the vacant spot. Then we began tending it. Like the watched kettle, it was naturally unresponsive to our vigilance. Then, almost magically, not unlike Sophie herself, it grew up all too quickly. Beautiful, independent, fragile and alert, with a strength that sometimes takes my breath away.

Bending and swaying just when it should, at all the right times for almost twenty years, our pink tree is a survivor, standing up to scorching, record-breaking temperatures, frost, intense monsoons, and even a “haboob” in spite of our abandoning it for the cool central coast of California. Unfazed, it was waiting for us when we returned as if to remind us that we live and move in its shadow.

This, my favorite tree, for many years, annually inspired a shock of petunias in the flower beds, geraniums, fragrant pink stock, freesias that remind me of my father planting bulbs, and snapdragons. Too, it played a role in the color of paint I chose for my front door – I had entirely too much fun mixing colors, one of which was “black raspberry” to create something that would complement the pink tree. And as I remembered this week while reading through old scrapbooks, the tree was the inspiration behind Sophie’s first foray into poetry for which she earned a blue ribbon and honorable mention in her grade school’s annual poetry contest.

Through all the beginnings and endings, the reminders of the fragility and fleetingness of life, and the finality of death, the pink tree abides. Transcendent.