It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a big satin bow in her hair, the little girl is the picture of happiness, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, and it is equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers – her first big word. Even now, I like saying the word and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, a firm hold, balance. By all accounts, Santa had not read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science  in which the professor wholly dismisses training wheels, pointing out, obviously, that they do not teach how to balance; they teach how to pedal. Because bicycling is the quintessential balancing act, Wilson 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.” No wonder we are unsure when we push off that first time without training wheels. We have to learn how to balance, much like the way we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But this recollection is not about the bicycle or the little girl on it. It is about the green crib in the bottom corner of the photograph. My father made it for Gloria, my first doll. He wouldn’t have known it at the time, but my father could have been Eric Dawson on Christmas Eve in “An Ulster Twilight.” Like his namesake,  he belongs in a Heaney poem, adept in all his balancing acts.

Good with his hands and frugal, da’s artisinal handiwork is the kind that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on a motorbike in the early 1960s. He tells me it began as a matter of economic necessity – the farming and the gardening, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, the craft and the carpentry all shaping and shaped by his home-place.

Older – and presumably wiser – I appreciate my father’s frugality and the way he crafted a thing to last.  In my mind’s eye, I see him doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”  

At eighty, he is acutely aware of the miles between us and harbors a yearning to be just down the road, to make things and make things right for his grand-daughter and me. There’s the mantlepiece I’ve wanted since 1993, and the fascia board needs more than paint. I don’t know why I don’t remember to wind the Regulator clock he found for me in a Phoenix thrift shop six Christmases ago or make the effort to make my windows sparkle with newspaper soaked in vinegar and elbow grease. It would be no bother for him to mix cement to repair the  brick mailbox again, or to show Sophie how to put windshield washer fluid in her car.

Once upon a time I had no time for what I construed as his obsessiveness, no tolerance for his sense of urgency over why all these things need fixing. I didn’t understand.  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 or as heart-wrenching as the loss of those we love. We want to make the magic last, to stretch time and close distance, and find the right words right when we need them.

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 – 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 da has transformed into the grandfather he was always meant to be, eager for news of his granddaughter’s accomplishments that will be broadcast over hill and dale. He will not admit that he likes the “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 about the weather forecast or for assistance on the daily crossword. Such virtual connections soften the blow of time and distance.

He is sentimental, my da. I am too.  Seeing the photo of his 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 and wonder which Dawson he is. “Would he be anything to Jack Dawson, do you think?” My mother a childhood neighbor of the Heaneys, she will know. Once they place him, da will return to the picture and  wonder aloud where in the name of God the past fifty odd years have gone, and under his breath, a “Boys a dear,” before he falls silent, remembering the night he made Christmas for his wee girl.

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.

Comments

comments