Tag Archives: Writing

thank goodness, thanksgiving & astral weeks

27 Thursday Nov 2014

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

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In the Fall of 2012,  I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers.

I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent.  Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it. It was “writing with light.” I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:

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

Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, and upon. And so it was that I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol on a Thanksgiving afternoon, eventually sitting below a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I don’t know how long I sat there, just thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace –  Amazing Grace –  and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying us (the way he does when he forgets to be a grumpy old man) with Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In the spirit of today’s holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving had something to do with my moment of transcendence looking up at the shimmering leaves, but that would not have been true. Even after living in America for over twenty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. It amuses me still that some of my American friends are surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland. Christmas is the holiday that warms us, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,

. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.

Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I may even have found the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:

Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.

And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.

So please. Say thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

dear teacher . . .

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by 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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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 know 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 said about a teacher’s effect on eternity. “He can never tell where his influence stops.”

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 good at art and entered your painting in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the teacher who cut you some slack because your mother was in the hospital or the one whose mantra was that “you will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love.” Perhaps it was the teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind wanders to the fields of the Antebellum South when you use a cotton ball.

Each of us has had this teacher. For me, it was my high school English teacher, Mr. Jones. When I first encountered him, it was at Antrim Grammar School in Northern Ireland. He was 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. 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 Brow
ne – 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. 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 students enter a classroom sharing a basic need 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 know. I don’t even know 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 fifteen 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 . . .” 
 

‘time for a few small repairs’ she said . . .

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Act Two, After death of a spouse, Antrim Guardian, Being a Widow, Blogging, Memoir, News Travels by Yvonne Watterson, Women and careers, Writing, Writing a book

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closedsign

~ perhaps you have stopped here because you too are considering the lilies and the view from where you are. Maybe you don’t know why or how you arrived at this particular corner of the blogosphere; you just took the road less traveled to get here.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad you found Considering the Lilies & Lessons from the Field and hope you’ll stay a while.  Myself, I am taking a break from writing here for a while. I’m not sure for how long.

Four months ago Ken died. I don’t know when I stopped measuring the time in days (it would be 129) but I think that is a good thing. I can almost hear the clocks ticking again, and with that comes a realization that I cannot waste any more time. Life is short, and it is for living.

There are fences to mend and bridges to burn, walls to erect and barriers to tear down, stories to tell and secrets to reveal, loose ends to tie up and elephants in the living room that can no longer be ignored. There are places to go. There is a book to write. Why worry? Why?

The book is important to me, and I am excited to have finally committed to it as a creative project and grateful to have found a collaborator with the time management and organization skills I lack. 

Until it’s finished, you can find me at IrishCentral.com where I’m sharing opinions that you may not agree with, but that’s what keeps the conversation going. I will also continue to contribute to The Antrim Guardian as long as the editor reminds me that I have a deadline. You can also find me on Facebook. 

Until then, the blog stays up, a reminder to me that it is a living, breathing document of my life (in other words, it needs some serious editing) with its 182 reminders to heed Anna Quindlen’s good advice every day . . .  

Thanks for stopping by ~ 

Y

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived …

No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office. I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15 years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless survive in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule; panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amidst the Tilt a Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other seasonal rides. But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.And I asked him why. Why didn’t he go to one of the shelters? Why didn’t he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, “Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.” And every day, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the view. And that’s the last thing I have to tell you today, words of wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere to be. Look at the view. You’ll never be disappointed.

~ ANNA QUINDLEN, VILLANOVA COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

for valentine’s day ~ ronald reagan’s love medicine

14 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed

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Many relationships in my life I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With too much ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it is easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Before Skype, I treasured long-distance phone calls with my mother, usually during weekends when we could be less circumspect with the time difference and the cost per minute. Before Facebook, there were sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell softly into conversation, picking up where we left off years ago.

By telephone, we have delivered and received the most important news of our lives, from that which cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “We’re getting married!” “I’m going to have a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the kind that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From my dear friend, Audrey, so far away in Wales, calling to tell me her husband had been killed outright in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling Kev is gone! Gone!”

Then, November 11, 2011, my best friend Amanda, who, waiting for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” And, Amanda, again, when just 90 days ago, I sent her a text from Ireland, asking her to please drive to my house in Phoenix and check if my husband was at home and alright. The sense of foreboding was almost palpable and worsened as I heard her tell me on the phone that, yes, both my car and his were parked in the driveway, that our little dog, Edgar, was inside sitting on the couch, silently staring back at her. My ear pressed to the phone, I heard my friend open the front door and tentatively call my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response; and, then she crumpled.

“He’s passed away! He’s passed away!” she cried from the other side of the world. “He’s so cold. I’m so sorry.”

I heard myself screaming and crying to my friend on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the Atlantic to please call 911. Just. Call. 9.1.1. Too quickly to be true or anything good, I heard the noise of our house fill up with strangers, kind and efficient, from the police and fire departments, the crisis management team, and finally the people from the one mortuary that agreed to take my husband’s body even though there was some as yet unresolved fuss over who would sign the death certificate.

If nobody would sign it, perhaps he wasn’t dead.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” I breathed into the phone.

“Yes. He’s dead. He’s dead. Yes. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”

Gone.

Thus, two best friends are connected in an ephemeral silence that left each with nothing to hold on to.

photo (56)In a different time, I would have received a telegram, or perhaps a hand-written letter. So different than being on the phone, in surreal real-time. Sitting down to write a letter brings more time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have. And even these will be inadequate.

I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by e-mails that, regardless of font and typeface, are not the same. How I miss opening a mailbox made of bricks, to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.

Yes. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, my first as a widow. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to to. I’m glad I saved every Valentine card my husband and I exchanged over twenty four years. When I read the Hallmark verses and the love notes we scribbled inside, I am transported back to all those Februaries when we were invincible. For a minute, it is as though Ken is alive again, sitting next to me on the couch, laughing at his choice of card. I am lucky to have this treasure chest of reminders of a shared life.

In part, it is this sentiment that is behind the exquisite Letters of Note, website, a veritable homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that deserve a wider audience. I ordered the book that has grown from the website, and you should too. Because I am of a time when telegrams came from America and other places, to be read by the Best Man at wedding receptions, I opted for the collectible first edition, accompanied by an old-fashioned telegram.

Considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I am reading again the letter of marriage advice from then future President Ronald Reagan to his son, Michael. Published in Reagan – A Life in Letters, I think there is both heart and craft in it, regardless of what I may think of Reagan as a Presiden:

Michael Reagan

Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971

Dear Mike:

Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.

You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the ‘unhappy marrieds’ and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. 

The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.