the write stuff … for valentine’s day

13 Thursday Feb 2025

Posted by Editor in Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed

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A Life in Letters, Advice, Air Mail, E-mail, Friendship, Letter Writing, Letters home, Letters of Note, long distance relationships, Love, marriage advice, matters of the heart, Memoir, Michael Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Par Avion, President Ronald Reagan, Shaun Usher, Skype, social media, telegram, Telephone, Themes of childhood, treasure chest, Unbound books, Valentine's Day, Words of Wisdom, Writing

I have conducted many of the most significant relationships in my life almost entirely by telephone. With so many miles of ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it has been easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. There is always something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about.

Once upon a time, before WhatsApp and Facebook, there were long-distance phone calls with my mother. We would schedule these for odd hours during weekends when we could be less circumspect about the time difference and the cost per minute. There were also sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we would fall easily and softly into conversation, picking up from where we left off years before.

By telephone, we delivered and received the most important news of our lives—the kind that cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “She said yes!” “We’re having a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the stuff that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From a tiny village in Wales, news from an old friend that her husband had been killed outright in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling is gone! Gone!” From me in a parking lot outside a Scottsdale hospital, to my best friend, who, fingers crossed waiting for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” A couple of years passed before it was my turn to wait on the other end of the line on another continent while she, parked outside my Phoenix home, told me on a bad connection that, yes, both my car and his were parked in the driveway, that, yes, our little dog, Edgar, was inside sitting on the couch, silently staring back at her. My ear pressed hard to the phone, I heard her open the front door and tentatively call my husband’s name once, twice, and then after a third time, the words traveling over the wires “He’s passed away! He’s passed away! Oh, he’s so cold. I’m so sorry.” And then the hanging up so she could make another call to 9.1.1. And then I was back on the line again to listen to the sounds of my sunny little house on the other side of the world fill up with kind and efficient strangers from the police and fire departments, the crisis management team, and then the people from the sole mortuary that agreed to take my husband’s body even though there was some unresolved fuss over who would sign the death certificate.

If nobody would sign it, perhaps he wasn’t dead.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” I breathed into the phone.

“Yes. He’s dead. He’s dead. Yes. I’m so sorry. He’s dead. He’s gone.”

Gone.

Thus, two best friends are connected in an ephemeral silence with nothing to hold on to.

Nothing.

In a different time, I would have received a telegram, or a hand-written letter. Words on paper deal the blow differently—better than the surreal real-time of a phone call. Sitting down to write a letter brings more time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have.

The best words are still inadequate.

The letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor generally, snuffed out by e-mails and texts that, regardless of font and typeface, emoji and GIF, are just not the same. I miss what Simon Garfield says we have lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers,” I miss walking out to a brick mailbox, to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, thin as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, Par Avion. I used to imagine its journey and all the hands it passed through on its way from a red pillar box in a Northern Ireland village across the Atlantic Ocean to me in the desert southwest of the United States. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely there fragrance of her soap.

I have saved so many of them. Along with faded picture postcards, they are in a cardboard box, waiting to be reread, immortal reminders of people I treasure and who treasure me. I cannot say the same of my textual exchanges.

I have been living in Mexico since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t know if there is a mailman here. I have yet to see him, but still check the letterbox in our front door every day. Although it never arrives on time, there is always a card from my mother —the envelope marked par avion—to mark my birthday and Christmas, and a Northern Ireland calendar.

To send or receive a letter, I’ll drive about a mile to a shop between here and the lovely little village which four years later has returned to normal after on-again-off-again lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing protocols, new vaccines, new variants, and never-ending social media debates about all of these. These days, the online discourse has shifted to Trump and Elon Musk and how the world as we know it is a) over or b) entering the ‘golden age.’ I’m not sure people are exchanging letters about this.

Nonetheless, in the heady days of 2020, the United States Postal Service reported that letter writing had increased, perhaps gaining more interest because unlike digital and disposable exchanges, letters require a little more labor, a little more intention. You have to find your best pen, write the letter, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it.

You have to slow down – even as the world around you spins at breakneck speed.

In part, these are the sentiments behind the Letters of Note website, a homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that deserve a wider audience. Among my favorite books is this beautiful book of letters. Because I am of a time when telegrams came from America and other places, to be read by the Best Man at wedding receptions, I opted for the collectible first edition. It arrived in my Phoenix mailbox along with an old-fashioned telegram.

Anyway, considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d share some advice from then future President Ronald Reagan to his son, Michael.

Regardless of what I may think of Reagan as a President, there is both heart and craft in this love letter, originally published in Reagan – A Life in Letters.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Michael Reagan

Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971

Dear Mike:

Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.

You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the ‘unhappy marrieds’ and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was ’til three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it.

The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

How to ride a bike . . .

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by Editor in Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, John Lennon, learning to drive, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, riding a bicycle, saying goodbye, Starting over, Time, widowed

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developmental milestones, father's day, identity, Learning to drive, learning to ride a bike, Memoir, mother daughter relationship

“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”

~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY

It’s Father’s Day—it’s a big deal. In a recent survey, the National Retail Foundation found that 76 percent of Americans plan to celebrate it. That celebration will look different for all of us. Scrolling through social media, my feed is already lit up with photos of fathers – including my own – all poignant reminders that my daughter has been without her dad for some of the biggest moments of her life, the moments that don’t happen on Father’s Day. It feels unfair. We can’t dodge it of course. On the one hand, we celebrate my dad, her grandfather—grateful for the fatherly people in our lives. On the other, the day is a keen reminder that my daughter’s father is physically not here.

The list of milestones continues to grow, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and Facebook memories. He has missed so much—her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America he had dreamed would be hers. He missed meeting her boyfriend, a gentle soul with hair as long as his used to be and a vinyl record collection and who studies archeology—the subject he once told me he would study in his next life. He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands—the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And, she missed him.

It was on our first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from rural Derry, had been teaching her to drive on what he considered the wrong side of the road. Watching from the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, he encouraged her to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s.

Watching from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, I was transported from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me then and today of Seamus Heaney’s symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain

~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.

We are fit for it.

When I’m in Phoenix these days, she drives me to places I miss—Target, the bookstore, and her favorite antique store. One morning, as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park—the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite,” the one where he removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas that year, and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.

Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.

~ Nikki Giovanni

sophbike

Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her note to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I’m taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant.

The pink bike had training wheels—”stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child. Stabilizers. It was my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes—stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold.

Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson handily dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal.

Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice 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 so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage, a milestone. In our family’s story, it was A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast—sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and made a joke about how he had given her ma the Protestant discount.

Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. Unconvinced, we had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .

Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only once and with only a few tears, and our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was doing it—riding a bike. Round and round the park, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and our girl, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum,” equipped for bicycle riding, for inevitable tumbles and the promise of a blue skies ahead. Just like her mother.

And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.

memorial day reminder: maya angelou

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by Editor in Awesome Women, Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, Great Advice, Great teachers, Loss, Maya Angelou, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, saying goodbye

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Great souls, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, mother daughter relationship, the human condition, wisdom

“We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who without knowing our names or recognizing our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must say thank you.”

… a reminder this Memorial Day to say thank you to the strangers who made so much possible for so many of us.

I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a Black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, it resonated with me, then a young woman from another generation and from a tiny country on the other side of the world. The humanity in Angelou’s story reaches out into the universe where it will take up permanent residence in millions of hearts.

I remember reading aloud to teenagers from affluent white families, Angelou’s lyrical and clear-eyed account of a harrowing world in which she had been abused, raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, abandoned by her parents, left homeless, poor, and, for almost five years, unable to speak. But in this tumultuous life, she also fell in love with William Shakespeare and Dickens, with the written and spoken word. We are all the better for that, and I suppose the lesson for my students and for me was, as Anne Frank wrote in her diary,

I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.

Such beauty. At 86, the indomitable Maya Angelou was active on Twitter, sending out to almost half a million followers, soul-stirring messages in 140 characters or less. Miniature poems. The day before she died, she took to social media again:

Over the years, I have collected bits and pieces of wisdom and encouragement that I turn to when the going gets tough, as it invariably does. Growing up, I was often told, “show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” I was unconvinced of that, but with age comes experience and discernment and a willingness to listen again to advice I may not always have heeded:

people know themselves much better than you do. That’s why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.

As my daughter made her way into to adulthood, I hoped she would learn that the very first time a person lies to her or about her would be the first of all the other times; that the very first time someone wounds her with indifference or arrogance, manipulation or meanness, acts merely as precedent. The same might be said for integrity and loyalty which I suppose is why betrayal hurts so much, or as Arthur Miller once put it, why it is “the only truth that sticks.”

When people show you who they are, believe them.

Believe them – the first time, not the millionth time, so you know sooner rather than later, whether to walk this road with them or without them, dignity intact either way.

And for that perspective, Maya Angelou, I am forever in your debt.