Monthly Archives: October 2021

Halloween Ghosts

31 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Memoir, Northern Ireland

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.

~ Roger Shattuck 1958 (Source: Listening to Van Morrison, Neill Marcus).

It’s Halloween. Where I’m from, the holiday derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain, that time of year when, on the cusp of winter,  the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us.

Trick or treating has its origins in the ancient holiday too.  Legend has it that Stingy Jack, sentenced by the devil to roam the earth for eternity, his path lit by a burning coal inside the carved-out turnip he carried.  To scare Jack away  and any other wandering evil spirits, people eventually fashioned their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips and placing them in windows.  When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-0′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern.

Growing up in Northern Ireland, Halloween was very different from the holiday I eventually embraced in the United States.  There were no expensive costumes and no elaborately carved pumpkins.  There were no pumpkins. If our mothers were feeling creative, some of us went out  dressed in a white sheet with holes cut out for our eyes – or a black bin bag. But mostly, we were wrapped up in our duffel coats –  our only disguise a hard plastic ‘false face’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe. For those of us who didn’t want to make any effort at all, we just pulled our sweaters up over our heads. We carried a plastic bag from the Spar or a pillowcase that would be filled to the brim with sweets. Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light our way.   We thought we were menacing.

To be clear, this was not “trick or treating.” We knocked on doors or rang doorbells and sang at the top of our lungs:

Halloween’s coming on and the goose is getting fat,
Would you please put a penny in the old mans hat,
If you haven’t got a penny a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny then god bless you

In 1970s Northern Ireland, the grown ups I knew never dressed up. Never.  They stayed at home and watched telly, while we roamed the housing estate, sweating under false faces. If we were lucky – somebody would give us sparklers (all the more exciting because fireworks had been banned). At the time, fireworks were outlawed in Northern Ireland due to fears that the noise they made might be confused with the sound of bombs or gunfire. There were also concerns that they would be used to make bombs or weapons. This was 1970s Northern Ireland.

With all this behind me by the time I became a mother – in America – I had embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory.  Every year, my husband dutifully lit candles inside the pumpkins I made him carve with our daughter the day before Halloween. We would fill the biggest bowl in the house  with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Between us, we always took turns handing out the candy, but my preference was always to join the merry band of trick-or-treaters that strolled our street, stopping only a few paces behind to wait while my miniature make-believe princess knocked on the doors of strangers. This annual trek through the neighborhood ceremoniously ended with a sprint to our front door, where she would ring the doorbell and call out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door wide and fill her plastic pumpkin basket with chocolate and sweets. For this reason, I have always attributed to Halloween her sweet tooth.

There was never a trick – always a treat for her and the scores of children who walked the path to our door over the years, reminiscent of that wonderful scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, and even the sitting President of the United States. On our last Halloween as a family,  I remember it was our teenage daughter’s turn to dole out candy. Sporting ears of a fictional Japanese cat and a black tail, both hand-sewn by her best friend, she took great delight in the younger children who couldn’t wait to be scared by the pale and howling motion-sensitive ghost that hung above the doorway.

We knew it would be a quiet Halloween, falling on a week-night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Naturally, there was homework for voters, with a plethora of Propositions to study and decisions to make over who would be sent to Washington. It didn’t feel like Hallowe’en with November just hours away and the night air hanging warm at almost 80 degrees. Nonetheless, at sunset, the ritual began.

Behind the scenes, I was restless.  Paying bills, scrolling through the work emails I didn’t have time to read at work, and following, in disbelief, the devastation and the rising death-toll of Hurricane Sandy. I was also listening to a voice from home, Van Morrison, a voice that has disappointed me in the last couple of years, as it has raved madly on conspiracy theories around COVID-19. But on this Halloween, the singer repeating the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I feel a deep nostalgia, the kind Greill Marcus describes in his brilliant book Listening to Van Morrison. The space between the relentlessly repetitive words, is where I still find the themes of home, of memory and ritual.

“Behind the Ritual” still takes me back home to County Antrim, into the lives of two sisters I have never met. The first, Mary, had stumbled upon something I had written in this online space and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world where we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this shrinking world, I learned that her cousin had been my hairdresser some 40 years ago. Every time I visited Pauline for a trim or carefully placed auburn highlights, there was always a moment, a ritual, when I considered, silently, the pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stands, almost stoic, on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. It was and remains the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look. Unremarkable, except for those that know of the horror that visited Byrne’s pub on May 24, 1974. And every time I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it. We never talked about it.

Until about a decade ago, I only knew what I had remembered from the newspaper stories, until my father told me his story of the night one of his friends had suggested they call into the Wayside Halt for a quick pint since it was on the road home. Knowing the unlikelihood of a “quick pint”  and because he had been in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, daddy declined. But before reaching Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, Mary’s uncles – Shaun Byrne and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked too, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.

Shaun and Brendan Byrne were executed while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture Mary sent me, the only child not home that evening was the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.

Because it is Halloween, and because she is Mary’s sister, I am compelled to share again Anne’s recollection of Hallowe’en, first posted on online on November 1, 2005. Like Mary, she had left a comment for me, and the world contracts once more:

Uncle Brendan and the Hallowe’en Parties

I loved Hallowe’en when I was wee, except it was called Holloween in those days. Next to Christmas, it was the best holiday of the year.  It was also mid-term break. Holloween was always celebrated in our house.  When we were very small my mother would make a lantern from a turnip she’d scobe out with a knife which, if you’ve ever tried to do it, is bloody hard work. The next oldest sister to me was very keen on traditions even ones she’d made up herself.  When she was around eight she decided that every year she and I would make witches’ hats out of newspapers rolled into cones and blackened with shoe polish.  So we did this for at least 3 or 4 years.  We’d run around the yard with the pointy, floppy hats falling down over our eyes, our faces and hair stained with polish, singing:

I’m Winnie the Witch, Witches can fly and so can I, I’m Winnie the Witch’

I have no idea where this came from.

In the evening we would tie apples from a string attached to the ceiling and try to bite lumps out of them or duck for apples in a basin of water set on the kitchen floor.  This involved much splashing on the quarry tiles and younger siblings spluttering and snottering into the water.   I was pretty crap at it but my brother would have drowned himself rather than admit defeat. He would suddenly rear out of the water, his whole upper body soaked, grinning so widely that he was in danger of dropping his prize.  Later we’d have apple tart with hidden money in it wrapped up in silver paper.

When we all got to be a bit older my aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own,  held a party each Hallowe’en.  They only invited our family and one set of cousins which meant they had 15 children in attendance. There was always a bonfire and sparklers but no fireworks as they were banned in Northern Ireland.In the middle of the party there would be a loud clatter on the door and my uncle would go and investigate.  Without fail he would return with a scary stranger with a stick, wearing a thick coat and a scarf wrapped round his face.  Usually the stranger did a lot of muttering and, more often than not, he’d use his stick to take a swing at you if you came too close.  As the evening progressed and we worked ourselves up into a frenzy the stranger would suddenly reveal themselves to be the man who lived next door or even occasionally our Aunt Mary.  Presumably she got drafted in by my uncle in the years when he couldn’t persuade any of the neighbors to come and scare us half to death. I think the parties started coming to an end when I was in my early teens but by then I’d grown out of them.

I always think of my uncle at this time of year.  He was murdered, along with his brother, in the mid 70s but in Spring not October.  The scary, masked strangers who came to the door that night didn’t reveal themselves to be friends or family.

All this happened a long time ago and besides, the past is a different country – but it has been haunting me lately.

Domestic Affairs – Northern Ireland style.

25 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by in Belfast Peace Lines, Borders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights Movement, Human Rights, Ireland, Justice, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

It was the morning after Thanksgiving, uncharacteristically rainy and gray in the desert southwest. Relishing my solitude and a second cup of coffee, I settled in to read the Irish Times and when I spotted this headline, I put down my cup. Writer, Louise Kennedy, was about to make my Thanksgiving complete. Even though we only know each other the way you know people on Twitter, Louise knows something about me, something I had until that very morning discarded as trivial. Indulge me while I tell you about the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook as remembered by Louise Kennedy:

The book seems hideously kitsch now, but there was something heartbreakingly earnest and aspirational on those pages. There were tips on how to cut corners and save time and money, on how to substitute ingredients that were scarce or unavailable.

Like aubergines or Morelio cherries.

My Hamlyn (for years referred to as Old Faithful) is still with me, leaning against a slick volume of recipes by Julia Child and Jaques Pepin. It is of little practical use in my Mexican kitchen, in spite of the guide to metrication and the peppy opener by Mary Berry. Yes, that Mary Berry. A dust collecting memento of my schoolgirl days, with ingredients and words that make more sense back home – well not necessarily my home, but often in the kinds of homes where Frank Bryant’s  student, “Rita” fancied herself serving the right wine to accompany hor d’oeuvres that involved aspic jelly crystals, radishes fashioned into roses, and a garnish of watercress or parsley.  Neither piquant herring salad nor sole véronique have yet to make an appearance in my life, but, to be fair, other dishes regularly did. There was mandarin gâteau and iced coffee sponge, and Victoria sandwich, slices of which showed up regularly at Tupperware parties, hosted by mothers like mine – unashamed celebrations of plastic and its place in our kitchen cupboards. The first time I wanted to impress a boy with my middling cooking skills, I turned to the “Continental Favourites” section for a Spaghetti bolognese recipe. When I was asked to make cupcakes for my daughter’s class, I turned to #282, by any other name a “wee buns” recipe. The boy is long gone, and my daughter’s all grown up, but the recipe is indelible. So it is that I  can’t bring myself to part with this relic from my Domestic Science class in 1970s Northern Ireland.

The Hamlyn was the first school textbook my mother didn’t have to back with brown parcel paper, because it came with its very own dust-jacket.  A stay-at-home-mother at the time – the ‘housewife’ to whom Mary Berry is speaking in the introduction –  “backing books” had been one of her favorite jobs. By the first day of school every September, my mother had rolls of  paper set aside for this special task. My teachers were very particular about the way our books were backed. There was definitely an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. Each book she placed carefully in the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she had it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. I remember one September, because she was ill and in the hospital – she might as well have been on the moon –  I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look so easy, but unlike my mother I had not learned by watching. It was impossible for me to get the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who knew but didn’t care that my mother was in the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast. I’m almost sixty years old, and  I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face.

The dust jacket of the Hamlyn, I’m proud to report, is relatively intact, bearing only a few tears and the odd smear left behind by buttery adolescent fingers. How my mother pored over its photographs when it was brand new,  delighted to find so many cakes and sweets she already knew how to make without as much as a precise measurement, let alone a “method” like the one we had to painstakingly write out in our Domestic Science notebooks. My mother was a great baker, and when I was growing up, I loved her Baking Days. Ever Friday, by the time daddy came home from work, all the square biscuit tins left over from Christmas were lined with greaseproof paper and filled to their brims with irresistible confections –  caramel fingers, melting moments, fudge cakes, shortbread, and butterfly buns.  And, every Sunday – honest to God – for desert, there was an apple or a rhubarb tart, Pavlova, Trifle, a Victoria Sponge, or a Swiss Roll.  I am surprised we still have our own teeth.

Even though she had copied down many of these recipes, which I stuck inside a book for future reference, ma never took much notice of them. She did, however, take one precaution while baking and that was to  give my brother and me advance warning not to slam the backdoor. If there was a fruitcake in the oven, she would remind us  “Don’t you bang the door or the fruit cake will collapse in the oven!”  I have resisted the urge to fact check this. If Irish mammies say it, it must be true.

I once called her for her boiled cake recipe – a version of Irish Barmbrack which she made every Halloween. I remember for luck – or because her mother had done it too – she’d bake a sixpence or a thruppenny bit inside.  I had pen and paper ready to capture forever the helpful directions and measurements and times that I foolishly believed were in the cards. The conversation went as follows:
My mother: Och, Yvonne, sure you know yourself, you just put your ingredients in, boil them, and then let them cool.
Me: But what are the ingredients?
My mother: Long sigh.
Me: I’m writing this down.
My mother: OK. Just add your egg and your flour, put in your margarine, sugar, and a cup or two of black tea, all your cherries, raisins, and sultanas. Be you careful when you bring it to the boil. Let it cool and then throw in two or three eggs. Stir it all up and pour it in your loaf tin. Throw it in the oven and that’s your boiled cake. Now for a fruit cake, you just cream your butter and sugar in the mixer until they are nice and fluffy. Put in your eggs and your flour and all your fruit. Stir it all up and throw it in the oven. It will take longer to cook than the boiled cake. Use a slower oven.

A reminder to tell her granddaughter not to bang the kitchen door and I was  none the wiser. Having said that, I know if this were a fruit cake/Barmbrack throw-down with Bobby Flay my mother would win hands-down, but my Domestic Science teacher would have dismissed her “method” as highly unsatisfactory without the obligatory list of ingredients and numbered directions that included the weighing of things copied into notebooks by girls – only girls – in the classrooms of segregated schools.  For those of you paying attention, a 93 percent of Northern Ireland’s children still attend segregated schools that overwhelmingly educate children from only a Catholic or a Protestant background.  It wasn’t until I was a college student in Belfast that the fight for integrated education was just beginning . . .

I  was what they call around here “a first generation” college student, the first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school.  Although university was  less than twenty miles away in Belfast, it was still away, a phenomenon Seamus Heaney explains 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.”

For Heaney, a university education in Belfast, was a world away from the Broagh and necessitated a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him as I can my young self – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word, weighing its impact before uttering it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, “sure you know all them things.”

There were other tricky steps to learn, moving through Northern Ireland’s various dances, but once learned, they are indelible. In May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who live there, Tony Parker makes the unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, right from the start, about a person’s background, so they can proceed in the dialogue, in the longer relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” We know that our last names or the names of our schools, or the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” are also clues we use to help establish who we think we are.

“Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the conflict,” or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”

It was in a secondary school in the outskirts of North Belfast that I cut my pedagogical teeth. A student teacher who didn’t know any better, a ‘blow-in’ from Antrim, I took a black taxi to school every morning. On my first day in  in Rathcoole, then the largest housing estate in Western Europe and a loyalist stronghold, I held my own. On the second, I faltered when a first former, showing off for his mates, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Roman Catholic. He said he thought I was “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, but there was ambiguity around first name.

At the time, if I’m honest, an honest answer may not have been the right one. There I stood, chalk in hand, knowing where I was but not entirely sure of who I was. And, that’s what I told him. Thus we began a kind of partnership, my pupils and me, knowing we had some control over went on within those walls, but not so much beyond them.

At the same time, before Home Economics was standard fare on the Northern Ireland curriculum, the curriculum included Domestic Science. Other than Physical Education, which I had skillfully avoided with a note from my mother when I “had cramps,” it was my least favorite subject.  It involved the planning and cooking of meals which usually failed –  in spite of quick tips from May Berry on every page of the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book – baking, and, God help me, knitting.  There was time set aside for sewing, during which I learned how to finish the edges of something, presumably a blanket, with blanket stitch. I even learned a kind of embroidery, stitching all six letters of my name in green thread on a red gingham apron, all the while wishing I had been christened with something shorter, “Eve” perhaps.

There were no boys in Domestic Science, nor were there any girls in Woodwork, Metalwork, or the exotic-sounding Technical Studies.  There were, however, some grown up people who had noted the fundamental unfairness of this situation and pledged to remedy it. They obviously had some clout too, because along came  The Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order of 1976  making unlawful the inequality of access for boys and girls to all areas of the curriculum. Landmark legislation, this enabled boys and girls, in the same classroom, to partake of Craft, Design, and Technology, although it would be another 14 years before a National Curriculum would be implemented.  Along with these efforts to make Domestic Science and Technical Studies curricula more gender-neutral, was the work that continues today to confront the fact that schools in Northern Ireland were segregating Protestant and Catholic children.  Since 1974, All Children Together (ACT) had been imploring churches and government to take the initiative in educating Protestant and Catholic children together. Finally, in 1981, a small group of Belfast parents dared to change the course of history, to force the issue, to confront aloud what happens to the heart of a country and the identity of its children when they are educated in segregated schools. Ordinary Catholics and Protestants, we already knew what happened. It was time for change, to demand an answer to questions such as this, asked in 1957 by  Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lester Bowles Pearson:

How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?

As I learned in Rathcoole, there are few better places to learn about one another, to learn about humanity, than in the classroom.

In 1981, Lagan College became the first integrated secondary school in Northern Ireland to offer such a space for boys and girls, Catholics and Protestants. Named for the river that runs through Belfast, Lagan College, under armed guard, opened its doors to 28 children. It is different today. According to the school’s website, as of January 2017 there are 1270 pupils on the Lisnabreeny site with more than 150 staff.

It is now a 21st century school with a curriculum that includes Home Economics, the central focus of which is “the consideration of the home and family in relation to the development of the individual and society and is designed to enable students to acquire the knowledge and skills to improve the quality of life for themselves and others. During the three years, they will address the areas of Diet and Health, Family Life and Choice and Management of Resources, using a variety of teaching and learning techniques.”

That sounds infinitely more important and doable than the Domestic Science of my youth, which leads me back to where I started, to the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book . . . to Northern Ireland, to a place forever apart of which I will forever be a part.

an emotional rescue . . . happy birthday edgar.

18 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by in After death of a spouse, Animals, Arizona Humane Society, Best friends, Dog Rescue, Dogs, Friendship, Love, Mary Oliver, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Rites of passage, Themes of Childhood, Van Morrison

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

It’s Edgar’s unofficial birthday. He came into our lives eight years ago today.  I vividly recall our first encounter. There he was, standing in the center lane of a Phoenix street already busy with Monday morning traffic. I had just left the gym with my daughter, and she noticed him before I did, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car, jumping out, and flailing wildly at the oncoming traffic which she successfully brought to a momentary standstill. Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua that trembled in the widening beam of the headlights before him, named him Edgar – an homage to Mr. Poe –  and announced that he would be moving in with us.

In spite of having run several miles on a treadmill, I had not yet had that first cup of coffee and was neither alert nor ready for Monday let alone a Chihuahua. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was already planning to post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, sure that by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.

Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. Shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, his little ribs were as noticeable as the heart shaped markings on his coat. Sophie was vexed and without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with Molly, a beautiful brindle, some years back, a new dog was probably not in the cards. On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had rescued Molly the greyhound in the Christmas of 2008. That dog adored me, and the feeling was mutual. She was elegant and affectionate and knew how to be retired. She wanted to lounge around the house all day eating Lays  – but she did not want to do it alone.

225596_1069916549279_6005_n (1)

Molly & Me (Xmas 2008)

Ultimately, we had to surrender her to the Arizona Greyhound Rescue. Her separation anxiety had grown so severe, she just couldn’t stay in the house by herself. Heart-broken, I returned Molly to a gruff yet kindly man who told me she was off to a foster family that had another greyhound to keep her company and someone at home all day.

Life with Molly – although brief – had helped seal the deal as far as future pets were concerned. We were a one-cat family.

No more dogs.

No way.

But there were tell-tale signs that tiny Edgar was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he said. He bought dog food. He drove slowly around the neighborhood, posting “Found Dog” signs while at the same time scouring every lamp-post for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. Every morning, he perused the Arizona Republic and Craigslist to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took Edgar to the Humane Society where he was informed that while they didn’t take lost dogs, they would check for a microchip. No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to someone. They estimated “Edgar” at about seven years old, determined that he hadn’t been neutered or cared for. Malnourished and dirty with ghastly breath and worse teeth,  he weighed three pounds. Barely.

Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. Dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He scampered towards us when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all besotted with him, as poet Mary Oliver writes,

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Edgar was ours.

About a month later, my daughter and I were in Northern Ireland visiting my parents. It was a Friday. I remember it vividly.  On another continent, in another time zone, I had been keeping my fingers crossed that a friend would come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. This was before Van Morrison revealed himself as not only a curmudgeon but a dangerous conspiracy theorist who has spent much of the past two years protesting COVID restrictions and denying science. But that Friday, I was distracted – repeatedly – by thoughts of foreboding, by the unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls to Arizona went straight to voice-mail. Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling,” I sent a text to my best friend, Amanda (the original BFF) to ask if she would drive to my house to check on things.

I have a flair for the dramatic and, conventional wisdom be damned, I always sweat the small stuff. The devil is in the tiniest of details. I make mountains out of molehills which sometimes works when I can produce a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But this? This was the second most significant detail of my adult life, wrapped up in a persistent phrase that travelled via text from Castledawson to Chandler at 12:25PM Mountain Standard Time:

“Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt or dead.” 

I stayed on the phone with her – holding on – as she walked to my front door, as she looked through the bay window to see little Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what we had yet to discover. I waited for her  to find the keys under the doormat, to come on in to my cheery living room with the sunny yellow walls, and call my husband’s name once, twice, and a third and final time before finding his lifeless body on the bed, hoping he was just resting but knowing he was gone.

He was gone.

Gone. 

Eight years later, in the quiet of an early morning, when I reflect on all that has transpired,  I find myself finding reassurance that as his fragile heart stopped working Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.

For a long time afterwards, my daughter told me that every day without her dad begins not with sorrow and dread, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile. He is ready, always ready – to walk into the world with her.

He remains the greatest gift. Happy Birthday sweet Edgar. Thank you.

“And that’s the river . . . 41 years later”

17 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Cadillac Ranch, Coming of age, Drive All Night, The Price You Pay, The River, The River Tour 2016

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

You always dream of the kind of love that comes without consequences, without struggle and without responsibility. It’s the kind that doesn’t exist.

 Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” was released on this day 41 years ago.  Shortly thereafter, it was part of my fledgling record collection. Mr. Jones, my English teacher had introduced me to The Boss. He knew – the way good teachers know – that something about Springsteen and his plainspoken poetry about New Jersey life would somehow appeal to me in ways that my school did not. He knew I liked poetry and music and I think he probably even understood that the most valuable lessons were those I picked up in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop – on vinyl. Mr. Jones knew I was trying to find my way and that while I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper – most likely he hadn’t either –  nor heard a screen door slam or the crack of a baseball bat, I knew about romance and romantic longing and rock ‘n’ roll. I heard it on the radio. And,  I  knew about rejection and disappointment.  I knew about dead-end jobs and the dole. I knew about the men who worked at the factory, and when the factory stopped working, those men did too. I knew they would never be the same.

But lately there ain’t been much work
On account of the economy

I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew Antrim Girls were just like Jersey Girls.  I knew the drizzle of rain and the drumbeat of small-town life in a working-class town on the banks of the Six Mile Water – my river.  Any river. Every river.  I knew young people were leaving that life and that I would too, although at 17, I mostly had Friday on my mind – Out in the Street.

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?

On a summer evening four years after I first heard The River,  I was in the crowd at Slane Castle watching fireworks light up the sky as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. Close to 100,000 of us had made the pilgrimage through the sleepy – and disapproving – village of Slane to see him. Between assurances of increased security and a promise – as yet unfulfilled – that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated.  Even the weather cooperated, delivering the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Everybody was young that day, even the crotchety old farmers who let us park on their fields, and when the band burst on stage with Born in the USA, everybody was Irish too. Bruce turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.”

We basked in his pride, denying for a few hours the realities around us. Irish weather was rarely that sunny, and many of us would soon be forced out as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s. But on that glorious day, in spite of the economic and political truths of Ireland, and the ever-diminishing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we believed in the idea of America. It belonged to us.

In his autobiography, he recalls

Precariously perched in a field fifty miles outside of Dublin were 95,000 people. The largest crowd I’d ever seen. They completely filled a grassy bowl bounded by the Boyne River at our stage’s rear and Slane Castle, perched in front on a high green knoll, in the distance.

Behind him and on the huge video screens, “The River” was the Boyne.

In the four decades since, I have been to ten or more Springsteen concerts, the most memorable one Thursday evening in Phoenix, Arizona. From up high in the cheap seats, I  revisited “The River,” flashes of my teenage self showing up to find me a little tougher, and wiser maybe, hardened by the beginnings and endings that make up a full life –  the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for so many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, it occurred to me that my parents – the people I had fought so hard at 17 – were once in the middle of theirs with beautiful dreams that were dashed like some of mine. I know now that sometimes the darkness  got the best of us . . .

Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away

12821593_10208905223048972_5730491656911144977_nUnloading every song, I wonder did Springsteen know how well he was telling the stories in which so many of us played a starring role. I thought about my dead husband and the stories he had told me, like the one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service; the one about how he cut his hippie hair when his buddies didn’t return from that war; and, the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car and settling down when he and his girl were just too young. Settling. On they went, for 27 odd years, each of them compromising and taking care of what became obligations.

Then, a shot of courage one hot Saturday afternoon in a parking lot outside a place a bit like Frankie’s Joint – he showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life – because the alternative was like “dying by inches” – to follow  instead a heart beating wildly.

Cause point blank, bang bang baby you’re dead.

Oh, the price you pay – a young man’s song.

He brought with him just the shirt on his back and a shiny Ford Thunderbird. Young then, he had the heart – and the stomach – for all of it. All of it.  All in. He would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.

For as long as we could be young, we had a great run – born for it – raising the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song. It lost much of its luster before he died and, had he lived, we may not have made it. The “in sickness” part of the deal was tough.

We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we knew we did something good – really good.  He was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so tiny now that they don’t matter. The lesson? Well, it’s about time, isn’t it? It is always about time. We have only so much and not enough to waste to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.

Going back to The River with Springsteen that night in Phoenix,  I found myself believing that another opportunity to live and love better – to do something good or better – was just up the road.

The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’

Word on the street is that Springsteen will be on tour again in 2022 and Ireland is on his itinerary. I hope so. Until then . . .