exhaust the little moment

20 Tuesday May 2025

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

This little moment … quickly captured by my daughter’s dad after her 8th grade promotion ceremony, he had just figured out how to use my new camera.

I remember she was apprehensive about going to the dance afterwards, but her dad said something wise that buoyed her confidence—the way he always did—and off she went, waving brightly to us like the yellow flowers on her new dress.

Had I known at the time that he would not live to see her graduate from high school or university, I know I would have embraced this moment more. I also know I sometimes forget to make the time for all the little moments. I shouldn’t.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise ~Gwendolyn Brooks

a more onerous citizenship: biden

19 Monday May 2025

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Cancer, joe biden cancer diagnosis

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Whether you liked Joe Biden or not, it takes a particular kind of person to exploit his health for profit. To every journalist writing books, every person in the White House administration and/or Trump family commenting on his well-being, what’s wrong with you? He’s a private citizen, and he’s dealing with cancer. And, dealing with cancer is tough.

I can only write with real authority on my own experience. I’ll tell you that when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, all I heard was “you’re going to die.” I was devastated. How could I be the 1 in 9 of my friends? What had I done wrong? These are the irrational questions I asked myself. Obviously I didn’t die. But I cried a lot. I was scared a lot. I worried a lot. Mostly, I worried about my daughter and my husband and how life would be for them without me in it.

At the time, I also had a job. I was a pro. As such, I compartmentalized the way professionals do. I went to work every day. I gave it my all and when the time came to step away from it, I did. Were some people cruel to me? Sure. In ways that honestly took my breath away. But through surgeries and recovery and all of that, my circle of friends and family was there for me. I’m forever indebted to them.

Unlike Joe Biden, I didn’t have to deal with media coverage tearing into every detail of my health every day. My breast cancer diagnosis didn’t make the headlines – nor should it. Nor should Biden’s cancer. Biden is no longer in the White House but his successor is there and it seems to me the main story should be his fitness for office.

While Biden and millions of people we’ll never hear about are dealing with cancer, the Trump administration is punishing them – cutting funding for life-saving research, deporting kids with cancer, threatening their benefits. And somehow Biden is the main story? Come on now.

To anyone on “the night-side,” may you find compassion and comfort there.

a mother’s days

10 Saturday May 2025

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right.–-Anna Quindlen

I quit work for a year after my daughter was born. It was the best year of my life, with Sophie attached to me in one of those baby carriers without which I would have been unprepared for motherhood. That’s what the salesperson in Babies R Us had told me.

Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. I was usually bare-faced unlike Dolly Parton, who is always in full-make up, “ambulance, tornado, and earthquake ready” – and who is always – always – ready with the right words at the right time. Sophie didn’t care what I looked like as long as I was right there.

Some days, I showered. Most days, I think I resembled the child I once was, the one who had to be reminded more than once to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play; the child who made wishes on dandelions and chains out of buttercups and daisies. I loved playing with my baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with the softest toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her dad off at work, she was all mine. Drunk on new baby smell, I danced in the afternoons around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road.” Almost 28 years later, I can still smell it.

In those first months of her life, I spent interminable hours looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. I examined every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents. I often paused to ponder how it was that two imperfect people had made perfection. She would stared back, cooing like a little bird, babbling and gurgling before discovering the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, our baby bounced with joy and curiosity. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the minute she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me to do so, pointing out that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better.

My mother was right.

If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting in some sort of emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency like that night I spent in the ICU following eight hours of surgery, when my teenage daughter wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep.

I hate cancer.

When it was time for me to return to work after that year at home with her, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that came immediately before and continuing some time after I placed her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where all the other mothers appeared not to have jobs outside the home. Every morning, they loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstocks, drinking coffee from mugs filled at home. This was B.S. (Before Starbucks).

While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I imagine I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with boring Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. An assistant principal at the time, I was trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother” who could do it all and have it all and “lean in” blah, blah, blah. I’ve had my fill of leaning in.

Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. I made this a much bigger deal than it was, eventually discovering that if I didn’t put the blouses in the tumble dryer, they survived. Realizing there must be a lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry, I took a lasting umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans.

Living in sunny Arizona – where any Northern Ireland mother would be impressed with the “great drying” most every day – I never understood why I owned a tumble dryer. Where I grew up, everybody hung the washing out on the line and then ran like hell to rescue it when the rain invariably began. The first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board. She loved it.

I remember I once asked my late husband about the logic of owning a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. He loved that machine so much that he used it to dry all clothes, regardless of fabric. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, and he used it for all my favorite clothes too. I never figured out what this setting means. It doesn’t press anything permanently, but it has permanently reduced some of my skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. To be fair, when I was pretending to be a grown-up with a real job that required more than pajamas, he didn’t do my laundry. I did. All my clothes were safe.

My safe clothes and my sensible job held no clout with Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand over my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie would attempt to placate me with repeated reassurances that Sophie would be fine as soon as I left. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it at least three times, Bonnie showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation. I wrestled with the reality that Bonnie had other children to attend to. She would not be spending hours like Madonna (mother of Jesus, not Lourdes) at my perfect child or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when Sophie did something for the first time. Anything.

I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or blew bubbles or cracked a nut in the classroom nutcracker. Not your typical developmental milestones, but Bonnie’s boss had deemed them important. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that our brilliant child had experienced another genuis-level achievement like that time she spoke her first word – daddy – or when she clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of our hands and stood straight like a little warrior to an ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie, with some magic trick up her sleeve, who would charm Sophie’s tears away. Every day, I walked away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” pretending to leave but I stayed in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, prolonging the agony, listening to Sophie cry. When the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop, I reapplied my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Off I went – to work for other people’s children.

Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt who understood the rhythm of these daily separations – and reunions – and experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college—and inspired by Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind—she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”

I found it on a discard table in a Borders when central Phoenix still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically—and in the shape of a little red heart— it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.

And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper to me as though it were our secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased the morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and all the other teachers throughout the years. There were lots of them. They never seemed to understand that I was Sophie’s first teacher, that I knew her best, so by the time she was in 2nd grade, she had become a tourist in Arizona’s public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. We never stopped looking. I’m not sure the superhero teacher ever showed up, and Sophie’s formal education is now over with her post-graduate program completed.

One summer morning, I watched from my car as she strode onto a community college campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. As tall as me but braver, I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. She did. She never lets me down.

So blow a kiss and wave good-bye – my baby, don’t you cry. This love is always with you. Like the sun is in the sky.

Sometimes, in an unguarded moment – my mother in Northern Ireland, me in Mexico, my daughter in Arizona – between emails and Zoom meetings, home improvement projects and grocery store runs, things that matter and things that don’t, we’ll each wonder what the other is doing and pick up the phone. Looking for love.

I can’t help but smile as I recall my daughter as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the tiny red heart cleverly hidden on each page.

Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scatted around my home – and hers – are little reminders in stone and glass and fabric that the love actually is all around – something we have known long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so.

If you’re looking for love, you can always find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for a clothesline strung across the backyard. Great drying. My mother would love it here. Reminiscent of the rhythms of rural County Derry, it is a place peopled with the kind of characters that fill Seamus Heaney’s poems – men like my father, makers of things.

One day, a stonemason working on the wall around our house, asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall?

I would.

Home is where the heart is.

Happy Mother’s Day.

every day is teacher appreciation day

06 Tuesday May 2025

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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#closednotclosed, #thankateacher, Memoir, Prince of Tides, reading, Teacher Appreciation Week 2020, Teaching, Thank a teacher, Writing

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.

I won’t be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides during this Teacher Appreciation Week We should honor our teachers and their craft. Navigating multiple challenges and crises wrought by COVID, millions of them learned to teach from their homes, to harness the power of whatever technology was available to them to maintain a connection with their students, many of whom they didn’t see for months, many of whom dropped out. They learned to improvise—with phone calls and postcards and hand-written letters to the families without access to home computers and the online Zoom classrooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch grid. In spite of their efforts to keep students engaged, the effects of COVID disruptions resonate in 2025, with many students still far away from full academic recovery in math and reading.

The most important subject — and good teachers know this — is their students. Good teachers understand that all students enter the classroom—online or off— with the same basic needs – to feel safe, to learn, to matter. Some children, especially those struggling during the pandemic with hunger or poverty or an unsafe home, will always remember the schools and teachers who went above and beyond to make sure they made it through. As Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity.

He can never tell where his influence stops.

On this teacher appreciation day, come away with me to the classroom with your favorite teacher’s name on the door. You know the one. Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your drawing in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish a 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. Never.” Or maybe it was the history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind drifts to the fields of the Antebellum South every time you use a cotton ball.

Each of us should have this extraordinary teacher.

Mr. Jones and me

For me, it was Mr. Jones, my English teacher. I was a teenager when I first encountered. I knew nothing about pedagogy, but because of him, I learned what great teaching looked like. It looked like Mr. Jones in his classroom every day at Antrim Grammar School. Then a young man at the beginning of his career, he wore a tweed jacket with 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. 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. Like this:

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.

“Great stuff!” he would add for emphasis. Every time.

Mr. Jones created a classroom that was a place of hope during often hopeless and harrowing days in 1970s Northern Ireland. The daughter of working-class parents who pushed me to do well in school, I was the first in our extended family to pass the 11+ exam that gained me a spot at Antrim Grammar, the posh school, where the headmaster and teachers showed up to morning assembly in Hogwarts-style black gowns. Insecure and unsure of my place there, I loved how Mr. Jones took us away from all that, indulging with good humor, our wrong answers and red herrings and the questions we were never afraid to ask. I remember one day I raised my hand to ask what “pre-Raphaelite” meant, and I jotted down the definition in the margin of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. A few minutes later, I raised my hand to ask if I could go to the toilet, and when I returned to the classroom, Mr. Jones asked – but not unkindly – if I had looked in the mirror to consider if perhaps I too had pre-Raphaelite features like the coquettish Eustacia Vye. Of course I had looked in the mirror. I also remember the day I said out loud that I was surprised one of the women in the novel had turned out to be “that type of woman,” and Mr. Jones, glasses balanced on his head, looked right at me and said, “Yvonne, there is no type. Remember that.” I have never forgotten it.

My musical education

In these seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones revealed to us a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. He even let me borrow his records. But 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.

Conversely, I also encountered teachers who didn’t seem to like children very much – the strident PE teacher who watched as we showered and questioned the validity of notes our mothers had written to excuse us from swimming because we were menstruating. She even asked for evidence. There were teachers who used sarcasm and big words as they undermined working class parents who lacked a formal education but more than made up for it with hard work and a desire to know the things to do and say that would help ensure their children a place at university, a competitive edge in a world foreign to them. Parents like mine.

When I think back to my parents observing their university-bound daughter, I am reminded of something Seamus Heaney once told Dennis O’Driscoll:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.

My First Teacher

From this vantage point, my mother – my first teacher – took pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our textbooks. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table, late one September evening after our first day back at school. One at a time, she places each of our new books carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown parcel paper. With a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.

One September, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look easy. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected me to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up while he berated me in front of everyone, told me I was useless, and that he didn’t want to hear another word about my mother in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and almost 50 years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face.

I never forgave him.

Full circle

In the classroom across the hall, however, and because of Mr. Jones, I mattered, and I knew that I mattered. This might explain why I became a teacher and remained a teacher for so many years, driven I suppose by the hope that kids in my classroom might feel they mattered too.

By the time I had spent more than a decade as a teacher, Mr. Jones had moved on to s new teaching post at Friends School in Lisburn. 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.

Years later, curious about where his career had taken him, and hoping to connect with him so I could say thank you, I searched online, where I found in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter a tribute to my favorite teacher, now middle-aged and retired

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.

At the heart of his work were kindness, warmth, and good sense – the likes of which we saw from teachers everywhere during COVID-19. Perhaps it took a pandemic for us to notice that good teachers are essential.

Remember to thank one of them.