naming names – 9.11

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Editor in 9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood

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9.11, Amazing Grace, American Airlines Flight 77, Billy Collins, Daily Show, Healing Field, Irish DIASPORA, Juiana McCourt Children's Education Fund, Juliana Valentine McCourt, Love, mother daughter relationship, Pentagon, Politics, September 11 2001, Taps, terrorism, The Names, Themes of childhood, United Airlines Flight 175, War, World Trade Center

Flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms to touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001. The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning.

We first visited the memorial in 2012. I remember watching as my daughter walked away from me, a somber and solitary figure cutting a new path deep into the Healing Field of red, white, and blue. I was undone by the sheer enormity of the memorial and her diminished stature in it. I had to force myself to look away to remember the way we were that September morning when I dropped her off at pre-school. And in that blink of an eye, she vanished into the field of flags. Instinctively I knew she was not lost, but the very thought of it is still what scares me most.

In 2001, September 11th fell on a Tuesday and began with a little girl only a few months older than mine, boarding United Airlines Flight 175. Just four years old, Juliana Valentine McCourt, and her mother, an Irish immigrant, were on their way to Disneyland, the “happiest place on earth.”

Juliana and her mom were best friends, close as sisters. They were traveling together to California.

Close. Like my daughter and me on our trips from Phoenix to Newark, Newark to Belfast, and back again.

Close. Even when we were rendered illogical and unreasonable, she by raging adolescent hormones, me by the effects of cancer treatment, I recall we were – and still are – as two peas in a pod.

We have the same hands. We love dark chocolate-covered almonds, pancakes, and the smell of books. We love two little chihuahuas that compete for our attention. We binge-watch Netflix originals – me on Ozark, she on re-runs of Law and Order. We love each other and know we filled the heart of the man who died when we were far away from him and home one November.

We know anything can happen, but sometimes we forget.

Juliana and her mother died on September 11, 2001, on the plane that plunged through the South Tower of the World Trade Center with horrifying velocity. In Washington, D.C., Dana and Zoe Falkenberg died too. Just 3 and 8, they had boarded American Airlines Flight 77 with their parents, beginning a dream trip to Australia. And then when terrorists hijacked their plane and crashed it into the Pentagon, they were gone too. So many dead, so many names:

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart

The colorful tulle butterflies attached to the flagpoles in the Healing Field and the stuffed bears on the grass remind me again that terrorism is an awful equalizer. Children, parents, grandparents, and those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not – in a terrorist attack, they are all legitimate targets.

In the Field every year there are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the desert air and then Amazing Grace.

Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky are wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. And, on the grass, for all the veterans who perished that day, pair after pair of combat boots.

In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names.

Juliana Valentine McCourt. She would be in college now, Disneyland days with her mom perhaps less appealing than thoughts of a new car or a part-time job to help pay for tuition. Such a trajectory is only in my imagination. For Juliana, there was no Disneyland, no first day of school, no soft place to fall.

So we will remember them. We will lower our flags and watch again the footage of the World Trade Center’s final moments on television retrospectives. Our politicians will pay their respects after which some of them will resume campaign trails that are not always respectful.

9.11 is history.

My daughter tells me that in her final year of high school not one of her teachers remembered it out loud. Ostensibly, it was no different than the day before, no different than September 10, 2001, when Ruth McCourt was packing for a trip to Disneyland with her daughter, Juliana.

“The Names” is in dedication to all the victims of September 11 and their survivors. Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, is one of those brilliant poets who uses words and rhythms to cut through with clarity and compassion to the heart of a matter, right when we need it most:

The Names – Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.

A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,

Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

by Billy Collins, June 24, 2005

The Last Name on the List on the Eleventh of September

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Editor in 9.11.2013, 9/11, Anything can Happen, Belfast, Billy Collins, Blogging, bombing, British Army, cancer, Diary, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Healing Field Tempe, Loss, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Peace, Poetry, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, September 11, The Peace Process, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writers

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Billy Collins, Blog Awards Ireland, Healing Field Tempe, Lesley Richardson, Northern Ireland, Remembering 9.11, Seamus Heaney, The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir, The Names, Troubles, World Trade Center

I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney still matters; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain and of it, and the shiver of fear that lingers long after it is no longer detectable; about clearing a path to things that matter most and things that need to be said; and, about magic and loss.

A few summers ago, I got lost in the blogosphere and before finding my way home, I stumbled upon the personal blog of Lesley Richardson, author of The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir. Within minutes, I was completely at home – back home – howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving adolescence in Northern Ireland long before curly-hair products had been invented. Both of us born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with unruly curls, we each have a teenage daughter, we share a love for Seamus Heaney and for Belfast, and we are compelled to rite. On September 11th of that year, Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls were just four years old, safe in their preschools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The reports tumbled out of New York city, stopping us in our tracks. We were heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again. We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and transatlantic talks of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen. Anything. We should have known better.

Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.

~ Seamus Heaney

Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? I don’t know. Growing up where we did, when we did, we were confounded by the bombs and bullets, by the brutality and barbarism on both sides. But we were also resigned to it, as we clung to our ordinary rituals and routines, the ones we thought we could control, and the notion that it would never happen to us. Denial worked for us the way it works for everyone else. So we refused to surrender to fear and we went to our schools and our shops or to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.

For myself, one such routine entailed writing in a diary every day. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. A young woman, just starting out on my own, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to set words down on a page. The world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and writing in my diary, my once cherished ritual, gave way to more mundane tasks and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.

Just when I thought I had my house in order, a breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard – with a jolt. And I began to write again, the way I had done in that old diary. Just for me. I kept it private at first, afraid to hit “publish.” Inexplicably, I felt like I was speaking out of turn or that I would get in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation about the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists.

As I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” I found that here, I could lean back rather than Lean In obediently just because all the other women were doing it. I could take stock and trade. I could light the match if I wanted to burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs. But that has happened only once. This is my home away from home, so I keep writing. For myself. I suppose cancer made a writer out of me.

For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare those things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her, and it led her to publish her first novel The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir.

Lesley’s first homework assignment in that class was ostensibly simple – to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:

I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.

When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I knew what to do. I promised to print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.

20130911_3481-2

On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend brought a plastic bag to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and a bit of green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything.

Making our way up the little hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the roar of airplanes above ensuring we will not forget the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers.

Letters and paper flowers, candles aglow in the bright morning, tiny stuffed bears on the grass at the bottom of six flagpoles – I have been cleaved in two by such things before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”

20130911_3452 And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.

The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, and everyone falls silent and still; then bagpipes and then Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.

20130911_3446

In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names. We remember them.

I found Igor’s flag and found out that he was born in the Ukraine in 1972. An immigrant like me, he came to America to make a better life for himself and finally landed a job as a computer analyst for the Fiduciary Trust Company. He worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. He was married with a three-year-old son, and he had become an American citizen just months before he died.

I said his name and attached Lesley’s letter to the flag pole. Before turning away, a whisper “Godspeed.”

I will never forget his name. “The Names” is in dedication to all the victims of September 11 and their survivors. Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, finds the right words and rhythms to cut through with clarity and compassion to the heart of the matter – right when we need it most. Remember their names.

545250_10202012082884776_38091935_n

The Names – Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

The Eagles – on a Corner in Phoenix, Arizona.

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Editor in American Dream, Being young, Belfast, Concerts, Eagles Tour 2018, Glenn Frey, Irish Diaspora, Take It Easy, The Eagles

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Deacon Frey, deacon grey, Death of Glenn Frey, Eagles 2018 Talking Stick, Linda Ronstadt, Lowell George, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Take It Easy, Vince Gill

When I was young, I only liked the Eagles because I knew they had been Linda Ronstadt’s backing vocalists – and I loved Linda Ronstadt. I wanted to be her and therefore learned by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. In my teenage bedroom, I spent hours singing along to her records, dreamy and delusional, telling myself that I was absolutely within her vocal range. Bored and adolescent, I longed to be far away Northern Ireland and its grey skies, from Margaret Thatcher, from politics and parades, from flags and fighting – far away from a country that has “no prairies to slice a big sun at evening.” I wanted to be an American girl. I wanted to hang out in a place called California with long-haired rockers who sometimes sounded a little more country than I thought I liked. I wanted to drive down an American highway on a sunny day with the top down and the radio up. For miles.

I loved everything about Linda Ronstadt and wanted to appear as confident, to stride onstage in a mini-skirt, one hand on my hip, the other shakin’ a tambourine. I wanted to belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me with the kind of authority that after all these years alludes me still – “Well I met a man out in Hollywood/Now I ain’t naming names.” I would never have imagined the woman behind that heartsome voice could know vulnerability or inadequacy. I know better now. Moving through the world to the beat of a different drum is not always easy.

Linda Ronstadt covered every genre – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – exposing me to the dozens of American musicians who would score the soundtrack of my life. Buddy Holly. Roy Orbison. Smokey Robinson. Jackson Browne. Lowell George. Neil Young. Warren Zevon. Bob Seger. The Flying Burrito Brothers. The Eagles. The Eagles. Glenn Frey and Don Henley – The Eagles. That’s right. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. Linda Ronstadt was living my dream, making harmonies – sweet harmonies – with long-haired rockers:

I got tougher being on the road with the Eagles. I walked differently, I became more foulmouthed. I swore so much I sounded like a truck driver. But that’s the way it was. I was the only girl on the road so the boys always kind of took charge. They were working for me, and yet it always seemed like I was working for them.

KXgoR3T

In 1971, she had hired Glenn Frey and a singing drummer, Don Henley, to be her back-up vocalists, and when they later decided to form their own band, she helped them. In 2014, when Linda Ronstadt was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but unable to attend due to illness, it was her long-time friend, her former back-up singer, Glenn Frey, who paid tribute to her. He made a point of saying that it was a long time coming, and he reminded everyone of what she would later reveal in Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir about why she sang:

people sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.

Glenn Frey knew this delight. He knew why people sing. He knew how to give voice to our heartaches and hangovers, to lying eyes and life in the fast lane, to Desperados, and to James Dean. He knew how to sing to the girl who might slow down in a flat bed Ford just to take a look at him, in Winslow, Arizona, where I drove one day in 1987. I was 24 years old without a care in the world and a tank full of gas. It was 110 degrees, and I was hot and bothered wearing a shirt tied at the waist and cut-off denim shorts. I was Linda Ronstadt, and I had the radio on.

unnamed The sky was on fire when I pulled over to the side of the road. It didn’t matter that it was late in the afternoon. It was close enough to a tequila sunrise. I turned up the music, got out of my car, and I stood on the corner. Of Winslow Arizona. I was an American Girl.

For that moment, I am forever in your debt, Glenn Frey. But, I never saw him perform in concert, somehow missing the Eagles every time they rolled into town even after they reunited – when hell froze over. And then Glenn Frey died, and I remember thinking this meant the Eagles had died too. But last week, I found out that their “Greatest Hits” album overtook Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” to claim the top spot on the list of best-selling albums in the United States, and that they are touring sold-out stadiums all over the country. How could that be? I wanted to find out. In retrospect, I wish I’d wanted to find out earlier than two hours before they took to the stage in Phoenix, but better late than never. It was just plain wrong to be settling into a night of binge-watching on Netflix knowing that the Eagles were playing just a few miles away from my boyfriend’s condo. The Eagles were playing – without Glenn Frey – but still. The Eagles were playing, and we didn’t have tickets. Linda Ronstadt’s back-up singers were playing in Phoenix – and we didn’t have tickets. Unacceptable.

Now I’m not going to tell you what we paid for those tickets. I’m still surprised that two were available on a dubious website just 90 minutes before the Eagles stepped on stage with a flawless performance of “Seven Bridges Road.” But I will tell you I’m very glad we did.

In place of Glenn Frey were Vince Gill and a young man in a red plaid shirt and jeans, his long hair pulled back under sunglasses, looking as though he had just grabbed his guitar from a flat-bed Ford. Then he announced that he was going to “sing one that my dad used to sing, if that’s okay.” Sentimental? Yes. But also pitch perfect, reminding me of the first time I saw the E Street Band without Clarence Clemons, when Springsteen introduced the big man’s nephew on saxophone.

With thousands of people singing along and waving illuminated smart phones, Deacon Frey, sang lead on “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” the resemblance to his father unsettling and magical. And, as the final chord rang throughout the arena, a black and white image of his smiling father, Glenn Frey, appeared on the screen behind him – a reminder of his legacy, not that we needed it.

A little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit, Steuart Smith, Deacon Frey, and Vince Gill, shimmered through a set that as it unfurled, affirmed for everyone in that arena that life’s been good and that we can forget about the news for a couple of hours. As Henley pointed out, “It’ll all be there in the morning.”

Setlist

“Seven Bridges Road”

“Take It Easy”

“One of These Nights”

“Take It to the Limit”

“Tequila Sunrise”

“Witchy Woman”

“In the City”

“I Can’t Tell You Why”

“New Kid in Town”

“Peaceful Easy Feeling”

“Ol’ ’55”

“Lyin’ Eyes”

“Love Will Keep Us Alive”

“Don’t Let Our Love Start Slippin’ Away”

“Those Shoes”

“Already Gone”

“Walk Away”

“Life’s Been Good”

“Heartache Tonight”

“Funk #49”

“Life In the Fast Lane”

Encore 1

“Hotel California”

Encore 2

“Rocky Mountain Way”

“Desperado”

What a gift. Thank you Glenn Frey and thank you, Eagles.

in dublin’s fair city . . . edna o’brien

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Editor in #MeToo, Memoir

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bray, DART, Dublin, Gerald Smith, One City One Book, Pat Boran, Seamus Heaney

. . . if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

~ James Joyce

Every April, the Dublin: One City One Book initiative celebrates one book connected with the capital city. Led by Dublin’s public libraries, it encourages everyone to read that book during the month, making print and digital copies available to borrow for free throughout the public library network. To be a contender for this recognition, the book must:

have a connection to the city either through the author/s or content of the book
lend itself to the organization of a wide range of associated events
have as broad an appeal as possible
be in print and easily available
have a publisher partner willing and with the capacity to be involved.

In April 2019, the honor will go to Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy, representing what acting Dublin City Librarian, Brendan Teeling, describes as a book that will, “capture the imagination of the people of Dublin, of all ages and walks of life,” adding that it is “exquisitely written, moving, humorous, full of compelling characters – and still as relevant as when it was written in 1960.”

I couldn’t be more pleased. Ms. O’Brien was the first woman to commit to paper anything that made any sense to me, lambasting Ireland’s constraints on girls and women. And I think it’s fair to say that in her own over-the-top life, she has continued to kick the door wide open on what it means to be yourself in a world that might prefer a different version of yourself. I’ve lost count of how many times her words have jumped off the page, making me want to stand up and cheer her on as well as those other times, quieter times when I’ve wondered if maybe she’s lonely at the end of a day, or feeling unloved. Maybe that’s because of a poignant scene in The Country Girls, when she describes Kate’s mother waving goodbye. Maybe it’s because I’m projecting.

She was waving. In her brown dress, she looked sad, the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome.

Or maybe it’s because I know she loves Van Morrison and told an audience one night before reading his ‘Madame George’ to them that she thought he was “in the business of making magic.” She should know.

#MeToo

I own copies of every book she has ever written and even some things written about her, the latter not always favorable. I even saved my seven page hand-written paper about her from a college class in 1982 with the nice comment in red ink deeming it “A very perceptive, well presented and documented survey.” And I also saved the photocopied pages of literary criticism that informed my essay. I suppose I should be thankful anything had been written about Edna O’Brien at all. In1982, when I informed my college tutor that she would be the subject of my dissertation on Irish Fiction Since James Joyce. He pointed out that it was entirely up to me, and good luck of course, but to bear in mind that, unlike Joyce’s body of work, Edna O’Brien’s fiction had not been the subject of “substantial critical inquiry.” Well, that was unfair, but it was also true, and he did not seem entirely happy about it. So while everybody else was checking out dusty hard-back books about bloody Samuel Beckett and Sean O’Casey, I spent hours in the Stranmillis Library when it would have been easier to go to the Errigle Inn to hear Kenny McDowell and Jim Armstrong play than find a handful of words in a tattered periodical about Edna O’Brien suffering the same indignity as James Joyce and Frank O’Connor in having had her books banned. Her Country Girls, published in 1960, was banned for its ‘explicit sexual content,” content that offended a Catholic Church that has offended – and continues to offend – millions infinitely more than Edna O’Brien ever did, yet she was driven into exile – banished for words published in a book. Were they afraid of her? Yes. I think they were. Why? Because she said #MeToo long before the rest of us, and they knew she was right.

For context, I suppose we could look back to around the time O’Brien was born. In 1927, then Bishop of Ardagh had this to say about the danger to the “Irish” character:

In many respects, the danger to our national characteristic is greater now than ever. The foreign press is more widely diffused among us; the cinema brings very vivid representations of foreign manners an customs, and the radio will bring foreign music, and the propagation of foreign ideals.

Add to that the novelty of television and a new kind of popular press in the 1950s when a young Edna O’Brien began writing, and the same speech might apply. To be Irish was to cleave to a certain set of values, to heed your elders, hold your tongue, and mind your manners. Edna O’Brien said no. She said #MeToo. She was stepping up and out to challenge the Irish establishment that had so many of us tied in knots with our parents, priests, politicians. And, I would never have encountered the wit and wisdom of this woman from County Clare, had it not been for Brian Baird who, in addition to reading the six o’clock news with gravitas on UTV every night, was my Tutor at Stranmillis University College Belfast. I will never forget him.

Some years later, I sent him a letter to tell him so and to thank him, because thanking our great teachers is the right thing to do. Too, I was about to teach an Irish literature class, and I wondered if Mr. Baird would share with me his course outline and a reading list. He obliged, and to this day, his letter back to me and his list of recommended works remain carefully folded between pages 186 and 187 of the Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh.

How it angers me to know that cancer took my Mr. Baird eight years after he sent me this letter. Cancer. There’s just no getting away from it. I hate it.

And how I would love one more opportunity to run into him. Just one more time, perhaps in the lobby of The Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street, just a few doors down from where I lived as a student. It should be before a play, while he is enjoying a cigar and a laugh with local playwrights, his thick gold bracelet chinking against a brandy glass as he raises it to a student on the other side of the lobby. This time, I would say hello and ask if he thought the play was going to be all it was cracked up to be. I would be like Edna O’Brien, unafraid and confident, with the voice she helped me find so I could move in a world where women are still struggling. Yes, Mr. Baird. I am still struggling. Still learning.

Looking over that essay I wrote for him, I notice I included something Edna O’Brien had shared in an interview all those years ago, and it resonates with me still:

You canot escape the themes of childhood . . . the bulk of the rest of our lives is shadowed or colored by that time.

You see, Edna O’Brien, unlike Yeats and Joyce and various other dead men, made me pay attention to my lot in life, the child I had been, and the young woman, the first in the family to “go away” to university. For years, our heads had been turned by The Troubles in Northern Ireland, our schools, the literature and history we studied there, all segregated. Then in college, our heads were turned by Joyce, Beckett, and O’Casey, and I was sick of memorizing the poetry, although beautiful, of W.B. Yeats. In retrospect, I was sicker of all the pseudo-intellectuals who tried to sparkle and enchant their way through lectures with ill-placed ironies by Oscar Wilde. But they were no match for Mr. Baird. He introduced us to Seamus Heaney whose poetry has saved me a time or two, and to the books of Brian Moore – the Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne comes to mind, The Emporer of Ice Cream. Moore even tried his hand at writing as a woman in The Doctor’s Wife in the early 1970s. He did a good job too and received critical acclaim for his portraits of women “on the edge” as he did for his dead-on depiction of and disillusionment with the Belfast I loved. Still, I remember wondering why Moore’s books seemed were more “acceptable” than those of Edna O’Brien who didn’t have to “get into character” to be a real Irish woman writing about real Irish women, about the unwavering parochialism of Irish catholicism and the oppressive constraints of hard life in rural Ireland.

She breathed it.

With caustic wit and trademark humor, O’Brien held up to the light the limitations of a repressed Irish society that oppressed its women. Now, at twenty-one, I don’t pretend to have known much about being a feminist or being a woman for that matter. In the middle of my fifth decade, I know now they should be one and the same. As a young woman stepping out into a new world – Belfast may as well have been on Mars – I found O’Brien’s voice both new and familiar – and she was accessible. We could find it in the pages of books in the mobile library van and bring it home to share with our mothers.

I remember reading that I shared with Seamus Heaney the phenomenon of being first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school. As he explained to Dennis O’Driscoll “In Stepping Stones”:

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.

A university education in Belfast was a world away from his mother and necessitated a a kind of verbal dance with her, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word he says, weighing its impact before he utters it. And I can tell you what Heaney – and Edna O’Brien would know – my mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me even today from across the water, “you know all them things.”

But when I put “The Country Girls” in my mother’s hands, and told her “Read this, ma!” I knew with all confidence that she would weep with sorrow and joy in equal measure. With recognition. Edna O’Brien knew who we were;

Such women weep, accepting their lot, knowing no other, for Ireland – lost for so long in struggles with invaders, with poverty, and with the land, has had too little time for the delicacy of polite society and leisurely relationships.

Too little time indeed.In 1974 O’Brien’s A Scandalous Woman was published, a collection of nine short stories, the title story ending with the author’s comment on the lot of Irish women, “I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, sacrificial women.”

Looking back from where I sit in 2018 America, I wonder if this was perhaps about the sacrifices of the first Irish feminists and if at last, we have embraced this country girl and her critique of the repressive Ireland that produced her.

Her publisher, Lee Brackstone, points out that, “in 1960 Edna O’Brien detonated a literary bomb, the reverberations of which continue to work their way through the culture and the Irish diaspora. The Country Girls is one of the beacons of radical 20th century literature.”

Long may it burn.