Writing by Yvonne Watterson

~ considering the lilies & lessons from the field ©

Writing by Yvonne Watterson

Category Archives: Aging

Things aren’t what they were … Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

23 Thursday May 2024

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Bob Dylan, Daniel Kramer, Dispatch from the Diaspora, It's Not Dark Yet, Michael Gray, Photography, Positively 4th Street, Street Legal, Tangled up in Blue, Where Are You Tonight? Subterranean Homesick Blues

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Tags

"Where Are You Tonight?", Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan's 75th Birthday, Daniel Kramer, Dylanologists, Mavis Staples, Michael Gray, Not Dark Yet, photography, Slane Castle, Street Legal, The Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, Van Morrison

FullSizeRender (1)

Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the yellowing cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades.

When was it that a Bob Dylan song first mattered to me? I cant remember. Nor can I remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue.

Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than the rest of us to measure the success of a Dylan song. Pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, was not among them, writing that Street Legal is “one of Dylan’s most important and cohesive albums . . . of astonishing complexity and confidence delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices.” Granted, he points out that it was badly produced, but that certainly didn’t occur to teenage me.  What mattered to me then and still and to anyone else who has ever missed someone – or something – is “Where Are You Tonight?” It remains a staple in the soundtrack of my life. I’m sure you have one too.

But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

“Hey, hey, HEY, hey.”

Where are you tonight? 

Picturing the picture on the cover of the Street Legal album, it occurs to me that this was the first time I had considered Bob Dylan in color. Until then my idea of him was monochromatic, an iteration of the Dylan we know from the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video – forever flippant, flipping over cue cards, dropping them in the alley. Deadpan.

Laid Off. Bad Cough. Paid Off. And, finally – naturally – What?? 

What??

Always on the road, heading for another joint.

That’s what.

That’s why. 

During one of my first summers in the United States, an American cousin took me to Buffalo to see The Grateful Dead open for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.  In color. Previously, I had seen Dylan perform at Slane Castle in Ireland in the summer of 1984–a mighty performance with Santana and  Van Morrison.

This was different. This was as American as the idea could be. Deadheads. Tie-dye. Weed. The Wave. This was the Fourth of July.  “It doesn’t rain on the Fourth of July!” Bob Weir told the crowd, and like poetry, the heavens opened. True story.

This was Positively 4th Street (What??) and I loved it.

bob-002

As a going away present, that same cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of black and white photographs by Daniel Kramer, indelible images taken over a period of two years, revealing a young man Kramer characterized as someone “who set his own marks and did not allow himself to be manipulated.”

Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes

IMG_7430

For Kramer, Dylan was “someone worth photographing,” someone worth seeing from different perspectives. For me, Dylan is someone who forces you – without telling you – to shift a little in order to see better.  Thus we find him perched on a branch in a tree or in an alleyway in London or Stuck Inside of Mobile. Or in the falling shadows.

Photography is just light, of course, and the good photographer will always find the right light. It is writing with light. As Amyn Nasser describes there is a kind of magic in this

. . . ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. [The photographer] respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.

Like a welder … seeing things in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. The self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items, spanners, chains, car parts, and axes. Some include reminders that he is also a musician – a treble clef or a guitar. Born and raised in iron ore country in Hibbling, Minnesota, Dylan writes in Chronicles, that he has always worked with iron in one way or another. Paul Green, the president of the Halcyon Gallery in London – which first showcased Dylan’s iron works explains, “He’s drawing from an industrial past, a working man’s past . . . It’s partly about looking back but it’s also about resurrecting these items and the physical act of putting these objects together.”

Why do gates hold such appeal to Dylan? He says it’s “because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”

Bob-Dylan-674-x-280

What??

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Something is happening here, and Nobel Prize winner, Bob Dylan, doesn’t have the answers either.

His Never Ending Tour began in 1988 and continued for more than 3,000 shows until COVID-19 changed plans. During his time away from the road, he stayed busy, releasing three original songs from a new album,  Rough and Rowdy Ways. “Murder Most Foul,” a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music,  arrived unexpectedly one midnight  with a Tweet from Dylan: “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”

Two years later, The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour began, and it continues with Dylan scheduled to join Willie Nelson along with an impressive lineup that includes Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, John Mellencamp, and Billy Strings at the 2024 Outlaw Summer Festival.

Why does he keep touring?

I keep touring because: it is a perfect way to stay anonymous and still be a member of the social order,” he said. “You’re the master of your fate. But it’s not an easy path to take, not fun and games.

Wall Street Journal

Happy Birthday, Bob. I find myself remembering you on a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988. You were playing at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during “Mr Tambourine Man.” Of course it did. At the time, a brand new immigrant to the United States, those were days of wonder for me, days before we worried about what waited around the corner – before we were observant, and before we knew better.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

On your birthday – and every day, Bob Dylan – may you stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.

P.S. I see you’re heading back to Buffalo in September. Maybe I’ll be seeing you again. I love a full circle moment.

 

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walking away on the last first day of school

18 Friday Aug 2023

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You

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Tags

Cecil Day Lewis, children's books, Going back to work, Irish DIASPORA, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, Separation, Themes of childhood, Walking Away

11076209_10206338396959924_1949742644_n

Her last first day at school – 2015

WALKING AWAY – Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.


The best year of my life was the one I spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. With her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine.  Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I held her in my arms as I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. In the afternoons, I spent interminable hours just looking at her.

Just. Looking. At. Her.

I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, marveling that two imperfect people had created this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, these were the days before she had a cache of words or discovered the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was right there in front of us. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to let her ‘cry it out’ at night. When I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her.  My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only an Irish mammy could, that there would be plenty of nights further on down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right – of course she was right, and it has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.

When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and – in the era pre-Starbucks – sipping coffee in mugs brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot.  I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and a hairdo on the verge of sensible. A school principal at the time,  I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – mostly me – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.

In spite of my grown-up job, I failed to impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be absolutely fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to tell me more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes –  at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the child writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave, but I remained in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to children crying.  How, out of that early morning cacophony, could we mothers pluck out the sound of even the tiniest whimper from our own children?

Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and the final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had wept off, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went to work for other people’s children.

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Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Appelt knew this anguish of leaving a child to go back to work and relived it when her 12 year old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would find one Saturday afternoon on the discard table at a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

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

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Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. Why didn’t they understand I was sending them the very best child I have? By the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Regrets? Yes.


On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman –  and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do when she was in grade school. Watching her stride to the car her dad used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.

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But I pulled myself together the way we do and gave into the day,  knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, it would unfold with delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.


Some days still, in an unguarded moment between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she’s doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.

And I will remind myself – as I will again today –  that the love is all around.

11082706_10206339247181179_1731566572_n

 

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Something is happening here … Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

24 Wednesday May 2023

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Bob Dylan, Daniel Kramer, Dispatch from the Diaspora, It's Not Dark Yet, Michael Gray, Photography, Positively 4th Street, Street Legal, Tangled up in Blue, Where Are You Tonight? Subterranean Homesick Blues

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Tags

"Where Are You Tonight?", Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan's 75th Birthday, Daniel Kramer, Dylanologists, Mavis Staples, Michael Gray, Not Dark Yet, photography, Slane Castle, Street Legal, The Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, Van Morrison

FullSizeRender (1)

Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the cover of  the book that has graced my coffee table for decades.

When was it that a Bob Dylan song first mattered to me? I cant remember. Nor can I remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue.

Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than the rest of us to measure the success of a Dylan song. Pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, was not among them, writing that Street Legal is “one of Dylan’s most important and cohesive albums . . . of astonishing complexity and confidence delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices.” Granted, he points out that it was badly produced, but that doesn’t matter to me.  What matters to me and anyone else who has ever missed someone – or something – is “Where Are You Tonight?” It remains a staple in the soundtrack of my life. Everybody has one. We all have one.

But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

“Hey, hey, HEY, hey.”

Where are you tonight? 

Picturing the picture on the cover of the Street Legal album, it occurs to me that this was the first time I considered Bob Dylan in color. Until then my idea of him was monochromatic, an iteration of the Dylan we know from the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video – forever flippant, flipping over cue cards, dropping them in the alley. Deadpan.

Laid Off. Bad Cough. Paid Off. And, finally – naturally – What?? 

What??

Always on the road, heading for another joint.

That’s what.

That’s why. 

During one of my first summers in the United States, an American cousin took me to Buffalo to see The Grateful Dead open for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.  In color. Previously, I had seen Dylan perform at Slane Castle in Ireland in the summer of 1984 –  a mighty performance with Santana and  Van Morrison. But this was different. This was as American as the idea could be. Deadheads. Tie-dye. Weed. The Wave. This was the Fourth of July.  “It doesn’t rain on the Fourth of July!” Bob Weir told the crowd, and like poetry,  the heavens opened.

This was Positively 4th Street (What??) and I loved it.

bob-002

As a going away present, my cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of black and white photographs by Daniel Kramer, indelible images taken over a period of two years, revealing a young man Kramer characterized as someone “who set his own marks and did not allow himself to be manipulated.”

Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes

IMG_7430

For Kramer, Dylan was “someone worth photographing,” someone worth seeing from different perspectives. For me, Dylan is someone who forces you – without telling you – to shift a little in order to see better.  Thus we find him perched on a branch in a tree or in an alleyway in London or Stuck Inside of Mobile. Or in the falling shadows.

Photography is just light, of course, and the good photographer will always find the right light. It is writing with light. As Amyn Nasser describes there is a kind of magic in this

. . . ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. [The photographer] respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.

Like a welder … seeing things in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. The self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items, spanners, chains, car parts, and axes. Some include reminders that he is also a musician – a treble clef or a guitar. Born and raised in iron ore country in Hibbling, Minnesota, Dylan writes in Chronicles, that he has always worked with iron in one way or another. Paul Green, the president of the Halcyon Gallery in London – which first showcased Dylan’s iron works explains, “He’s drawing from an industrial past, a working man’s past . . . It’s partly about looking back but it’s also about resurrecting these items and the physical act of putting these objects together.”

Why do gates hold such appeal to Dylan? He says it’s “because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”

Bob-Dylan-674-x-280

What??

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Something is happening here, and Nobel Prize winner, Bob Dylan, doesn’t have the answers either.

His Never Ending Tour began in 1988 and continued for more than 3,000 shows until COVID-19 changed plans. During his time away from the road, , he stayed busy, releasing three original songs from a new album,  Rough and Rowdy Ways. “Murder Most Foul,” a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music,  arrived unexpectedly one midnight  with a Tweet from Dylan: Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.” Two years later, The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour began. It continues in Portgual next week.

Why does he keep touring?

I keep touring because: it is a perfect way to stay anonymous and still be a member of the social order,” he said. “You’re the master of your fate. But it’s not an easy path to take, not fun and games.

Wall Street Journal

Happy Birthday, Bob. I find myself remembering you on a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988. You were playing at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during “Mr Tambourine Man.” Of course it did. At the time, a recent immigrant to the United States, those were days of wonder for me, days before we worried about what waited around the corner – before we were observant, before we knew better.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

On your birthday – and every day, Bob Dylan – may you stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.

 

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Epitaph . . . for your birthday

20 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by Editor in After death of a spouse, Aging, Being a Widow, Bellaghy, Castledawson, Death and dying, Dennis O'Driscoll, Derry, Dispatch from the Diaspora, FInal wishes, Funeral, Grieving, Keeping Going, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Mourning, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Postscript, Rituals, Seamus Heaney

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Tags

Funerals, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, The Gravel Walks, Traditions of Dying, widowhood

Epitaph
by Merrit Malloy

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

I’ll see you at home
In the earth.


He always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because then he wouldn’t have to miss me. Far better – for him. A private man, my late husband also insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do or say; maybe he thought it would be easier if he just disappeared into nothingness without ceremony. He would have been wrong.

Like a catechism, I know what to do and say. Knowing is part of the Northern Ireland culture that formed me – it is sewn tidily in our DNA – and I am bound to it. Where I’m from, we know to mark the time of death, to stop the clocks and cover the mirrors, to draw down the blinds and close the curtains; we know what to say and what to do at the wake  when led silently into a small bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out” in an open coffin; we know how to pay our respects in private and in public, how to offer condolences over tea in china cups balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, when to whisper, when to weep and when to throw our heads back in laughter over the craic about a life lived in full.

There would be no funeral, the likes of which I remember from my childhood, the women staying behind and staying busy, making sandwiches cut into tidy little triangles and placed with shortbread and buns on three-tiered china cake stands. After the burial, the men returned to the house followed by a steady stream of mourners, to pay their respects over cups of tea and maybe a half-un of whiskey. After my grandfather’s funeral, my mother reminds me the men came back to the house not for a cup of tea in your hand, in the parlance, but instead to sit down at a tea-table, on which a white linen tablecloth bore plates of salad, meats, chutneys, and homemade damson plum jam to spread on just baked wheaten bread. Well into the wee hours, callers came and went with hugs and home-baked Victoria sponges and songs and stoic handshakes punctuated with that simple salve – “I’m sorry for your trouble” that conjures Big Jim Evans and the old men in Heaney’s Mid-Term Break – parochial and intimate.

There was none of that for Ken, and without these rituals in the days following his death, I raged internally and selfishly. Only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the ever-widening distance between the Arizona desert and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I  wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye and to fill the air with his favorite music, a bit of trad, a toe-tapping Irish reel. I wanted a place to go on his birthday, to bring flowers, maybe some freesias because he loved their scent.  He wanted none of that. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.


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I was far away when he died. A few days before, I had visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. My recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two struggling plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that when the time came,  a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider such a spot as a final resting place.

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575765_10202486824553021_27462196_n The local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to this particular task and moved by the number of people visiting to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:

I don’t know what Seamus would have made of it but I think he might be pleased enough.

I think so too.

When I returned to Bellaghy the following summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross leaned into the dirt. This time, I was a widow, changed and contemplative, convinced that cosmic strings keep us connected. This time, I wondered about the spiritual space in which both men might move. Where are they? 

IMG_8120


In Stepping Stones, Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll that he did not fear death the way he had done as a boy.

It’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.

Unsure of what to say but saying it anyway,  some people in those early days told me my husband had gone on to a better place. What place could be better than here among the living?  What place could be better than at our kitchen table opening a hand-made birthday card from his daughter or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or on the other end of the line to hear the news of her acceptance into a graduate program or that she’s madly in love with a boy who is kind and true?  How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come?  

There is no more desolate space than the empty seat at the table.

For just a minute today, I’d like to hear the two of them laugh over a comic strip in the Sunday paper.  The truth is that all these years later, it still sometimes feels as though he just went missing.

Where is he?  

The lingering wonderings are different from the madness that accompanied the early urgent grip of grief, the all-consuming quest to fix the unfixable, stop time, close distance, find the right word, and do the right thing. Doing the right thing – as he had requested – felt wrong.

He did not want to be buried in the ground. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes – all of them – strewn on a piece of ground in the desert, at the base of Black Mountain, where his childhood home had once stood –  his first place.

We obliged. My parents, far from Heaney country, our daughter, and a close friend did as he asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man we loved. That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. Fixating on that detail, I wondered about his soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it?  Where is it? Is it possible he knows we’re thinking of him today?

On his birthday, two years after he died, we returned there to find “his” tree had been cut down and the surrounding area chained off for commercial development. For the time being, an empty space that brought me to tears even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one second would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. Coolly resigned to the price of urban progress, he would have been unfazed. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no place for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on milestone days – the anniversaries of the day we married, the day our girl was born, the day of his death, or a day like today – his birthday.

With the right words at the right time – again – came Seamus Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the headstone in place for the second anniversary of his death. Lines he had explained once to  the Harvard Crimson

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called ‘The Gravel Walks,’ which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that’s where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don’t just want photography, and you don’t want fantasy either.

The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second.

All that’s left of him now is love – to give away. 

I am giving it away. I am walking on air.

Happy birthday.

Courtesy: Laurel Villa

Photograph: Laurel Villa

 

So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green

 
The Gravel Walks reel starts around 3:02

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Yvonne writes a fortnightly column for her hometown newspaper, The Antrim Guardian

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From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .
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