The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane

At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil …

It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a satin bow in her hair, the little girl in the faded photograph is joyous, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers.’ Her first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability and steadfastness, a firm hold, balance.

Santa and his helpers must not have read MIT engineering professor, David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science in which the scientist dismisses stabilizers, pointing out that training wheels do not teach a child how to balance; they teach how to pedal. Bicycling, Professor Wilson says, is the quintessential balancing act and advises instead to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.”  Most children have no time for practice. When they push off for the first time without their training wheels, they have to learn how to balance – quickly –  just like the way they would be expected to swim if they were thrown in the deep end.

But this recollection is not about the bicycle or even the little girl on it. It is about the green wooden crib in the bottom left corner of the photograph. Unbeknownst to me, in the weeks before that Christmas, out in his shed, my father made it for Gloria, my first doll. He is humble about it, as he is all the other things he has made over the years.

Adept in all his balancing acts, my father belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. Good with his hands and frugal, his is the kind of artisinal handiwork that imbues the Derry town-lands he criss-crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. Reminiscing, he explains it all began as a matter of economic necessity – the farming and the gardening, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, the craft and the carpentry shaping and shaped by his home-place.

I appreciate now in ways I could not when I was young, my father’s frugality and the ways in which he crafted a thing to last.  In my mind’s eye, I can see him doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”  

In his 80s, daddy is acutely aware of the miles between us – even more since the onset of the pandemic that kept us apart for too long. I know he yearns to be just down the road, to make things and make things right for his grand-daughter and me – shelves to hang in her new house and advice to give about gardening.  I over-wound the old Regulator clock he once found for me in a Phoenix thrift shop many Christmases ago. I brought it to Mexico with me, wishfully thinking he might travel here one day to fix it. Were he here, he would make the windows sparkle with newspaper soaked in vinegar and elbow grease. A master gardener, he would know how to care for the little maple tree by the front door. 

Once upon a time, I had no time for what I dismissed as his obsessiveness. I had no tolerance for his sense of urgency over why all these things needed fixing. I didn’t understand or maybe I didn’t want to.  I understand now. I understand that each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience something as minor as a flat tire on the freeway or as heart-wrenching as the loss of someone they love. We want to make the magic last forever, to stretch time and close distance, and find the right words right when we need them to find a way forward.

With so many minutes and miles between us, it startles me sometimes to take stock of the things I traded for a life in America – all the bits and pieces of homespun wisdom from the heart of rural Derry, the gardening tips and home improvement projects that would have colored our lives had we lived just up the road. It is from too far away, relying heavily on photographs and phone calls, brown paper packages and greeting cards, texts and status updates on Facebook, that my father has transformed into the grandfather he was always meant to be, eager for news of his grandchildren’s accomplishments that he will broadcast widely. He will not admit out loud that he likes what he still refers to as “new-fangled” technology – but secretly I think he loves it. He can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. He can ask Alexa to tell him a joke or forecast the weather or help him out on Sudoku or the daily crossword. I suppose such virtual connections soften the blow of time and distance.

He is sentimental. I am too.  Seeing the photo of his only daughter on her first bicycle will bring a smile.  I can imagine him standing over my mother’s shoulder, curiosity and anticipation twinkling behind his reading glasses. Together, they will ponder Eric Dawson, Seamus Heaney’s carpenter, and they’ll ask each other which Dawson he is. “Would he be any relation to Jack Dawson, do you think?” My mother, a childhood neighbor of the Heaneys, will know. And once they place him, my father will return to the photograph and wonder aloud where in the name of God the past sixty odd years have gone.  Under his breath, in the parlance a “boys a dear,” before falling silent to remember the night he made Christmas for his wee girl.

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An Ulster Twilight by Seamus Heaney

The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane

At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.

A mile away it was taking shape,
The hulk of a toy battleship,
As waterbuckets iced and frost
Hardened the quiet on roof and post.

Where is he now?
There were fifteen years between us two
That night I strained to hear the bells
Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal

Into our lane, get off at the gable,
Steady his Raleigh bicycle
Against the whitewash, stand to make sure
The house was quiet, knock at the door

And hand his parcel to a peering woman:
“I suppose you thought I was never coming.”
Eric, tonight I saw it all
Like shadows on your workshop wall,

Smelled wood shavings under the bench,
Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench
In my soft hand, then stood at the road
To watch your wavering tail-light fade

And knew that if we met again
In an Ulster twilight we would begin
And end whatever we might say
In a speech all toys and carpentry,

A doorstep courtesy to shun
Your father’s uniform and gun,
But—now that I have said it out—
Maybe none the worse for that.

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