Category Archives: Northern Ireland Culture

the write stuff … for valentine’s day

13 Thursday Feb 2025

Posted by 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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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.

with all boldness

11 Monday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anahorish, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Art, Awesome Women, Great Advice, Human Rights, Justice, Language matters, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Oprah Winfrey, Peace, Phoenix, Politics, Prop 300, Punishment, Seamus Heaney, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Theater

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On her afternoon talk show some years ago, Oprah Winfrey shared a list of eight powerful women she thought we should all know— as if we might encounter any of them at the grocery store or on the bus.  I remember one of them got my attention—Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps better known to some of you as Nancy McNally from the The West Wing, or as Gloria in Nurse Jackie. She told Oprah that woman should be bolder; that we should argue as much as our male counterparts, and that we shouldn’t try so hard to avoid conflict. We should speak up and out, she said. Boldly.

We should, and we do. At least two of us—the only two women ever nominated to be president by a major party—ran for President of the United States by doing so. They lost. Of course they lost. As post-election analyses continue to dissect the results with historians and pundits presenting their conclusions about why America overwhelmingly chose to elect Trump again, the fact remains that the United States is still bedeviled by misogyny.  If you don’t want to go that far, you’ll maybe look up and see that there’s only one crack in the ultimate glass ceiling.

Gender has always played a role in presidential politics, and the 2024 campaign was no exception. During the last one hundred odd days of it, we heard many of the same old story lines from the same old playbook that, according to Kristina Wilfore, co-founder #shepersisted  “undermine voter behavior toward women,”

Gendered disinformation is the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and images against women political leaders, journalists, and female public figures. Following story lines that draw on misogyny, and gendered stereotypes, the goal of these attacks is to frame female politicians and government officials as inherently untrustworthy, unintelligent, unlikable, or uncontrollable – too emotional to hold office or participate in democratic politics. 

Vice President Harris chose to downplay her gender, her eyes fixed on a new era where it would be irrelevant in America. She rarely spoke about it or the historic nature of her candidacy as potentially the first Black woman to be elected president. Instead, she talked about the cost of groceries and prescription drugs and issues that should have galvanized the Democratic party—affordable housing,  protecting reproductive rights, bringing an end to gun violence, and strengthening the middle class. But it didn’t work, and too many Democrats chose to stay home on November 5th. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies chose to talk a whole lot about the Vice President’s  gender, to exploit it, with some of his allies branding her a “DEI candidate,”  “a childless cat lady,” “crazy,” “dumb as a rock.” One of them even likened her to a prostitute at a Madison Square Rally in the final stretch of the campaign.

She rose above it all. Was that a mistake? Maybe. Maybe she should have confronted him directly about his misogynistic remarks. Maybe during her one debate with him, she should have challenged him passionately on his overt sexism and his plans to put women back in their place, where he will protect us “whether we like it or not.” Maybe the more apathetic voters in those all-important swing states would have been more motivated to vote if they had seen Harris campaign harder on breaking the glass ceiling. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

Sure. Women turned out for Harris. She won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but her opponent won an even wider margin with women who did not go to college. And, in 2024 there were more of them who voted. Add his gains with men in every age group, there was just no way for Harris to make up that ground, no path to victory.  In a nutshell, Trump won the working and middle classes, and Kamala Harris won over college-educated people who are financially better-off. Why? Maybe the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office is too much for the United States. 

Maybe not. Maybe misogyny wasn’t the deciding factor in Trump’s victory, but for many women it certainly feels like the “same old tired playbook” helped him win.  It will take some time to retire that particular playbook. The fight will take time, as Kamala Harris reminded us in her concession speech, but “That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

It will take outrageous acts—lots of them.

An Outrageous Act

The week before Barack Obama won his second term, I met Gloria Steinem in Phoenix.  Following her remarks at a YWCA luncheon, she described a deal she has been making for years at the end of organizing events. To sustain momentum, she promised organizers that if, in the next 24 hours, they would do just one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, that she would do the same. She told us it could be anything. Anything we wanted it to be. She also said that only we would know what it should be—pick it up yourself, run for office, suggest that everyone in the office say out loud how much they make thereby allowing everyone to know who is being discriminated against.

In return, Steinem guaranteed two outcomes. First, she guaranteed that after just one day, the world would be a better place, and secondly that we would have a good time. Never again would we wake up wondering if we would do an outrageous thing; rather, we would wake up and consider which outrageous thing we might do today, tomorrow, and the next day.

I’m not sure I did anything that even felt remotely bold or outrageous until I was in my forties. The principal of a small high school in Phoenix at the time, I was struggling to turn it around while dealing with the devastating impact of a new Arizona law, Proposition 300. It required me to inform 38 of my bright immigrant students that they would no longer be able to take state-funded college courses, because they were in the country without documentation. They had been brought to the US as infants by parents in pursuit of a better life for them, but without Social Security Numbers or visas, the American Dream would remain achingly elusive.

The irony wasn’t lost on me as an immigrant from Northern Ireland, being asked to segregate children at school—school which should be the sacred space in any country – placing those who could prove citizenship in college classes and denying those who could not prove residency and could certainly not afford to pay their own way. Over 90% of my students lived below the American poverty level. The law was unfair. It felt un-American and anti-immigrant. To be specific, it felt anti-Mexican immigrant. My white Northern European skin seemed much more acceptable. Who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day? Because nobody told me what to do or what not to do about my students, I decided to reach out to the local media and anyone who would listen. By my own standards, this was outrageous. Bold, I even asked for money. The kindness of strangers helped raised over $100,000 to pay for tuition. The world was a little better, the way Gloria Steinem would one day tell me it would be, and the story made it to the New York Times, “A Principal Sees Injustice and Picks a Fight with It.”

Of all people, Anna Deavere Smith read the New York Times on a morning in March 2008 during a trip to Phoenix. Later that day, during Spring parent-teacher conferences, Nancy from the West Wing arrived at my office. Initially star-struck, I wasn’t sure what to say to one of Oprah’s phenomenal women. But as she explained what she was doing in Phoenix, we fell into an easy conversation that covered a lot of ground—from Northern Ireland to Arizona. She was in town to interview, along with me, an array of politicians, community activists, lawyers, and incarcerated women, for her one-woman play, “The Arizona Project,” commissioned to honor the 2006 naming of Arizona State University’s law school for retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—the first U.S. law school to be named for a woman. We talked about our respective childhoods, and Anna recalled that when she was a girl, her grandfather had told her that

 . . . if you say a word enough, it becomes you.

Walking in Other People’s Words

Inspired, Anna Deavere Smith traveled around the United States, interviewing people touched by some of our most harrowing social and racial tensions, recording her conversations with them, and shaping them into collections of monologues which she presents, verbatim, on stage. Using the real words of real people, Anna Deavere Smith breathes in – and out – America. It was surreal, sitting in my office talking to an acclaimed actress. She had “people”  who set up the camera in my office and left us to chat about justice and education and my beloved Seamus Heaney.

A fan of Heaney, she admired the picture of him hanging on my office wall. I made a copy of it for her,  and now that he’s gone, I like knowing his picture hangs in our respective living rooms.

Worlds apart but connected all the same. 

When our conversation ended, and the camera and tape recorder packed away, Anna Deavere Smith told her assistant to be sure to get a picture of the shoes. My shoes. They weren’t my favorites. They were uncomfortable. Beige, high-heeled and professional, chosen that morning I suppose in an effort to look a bit bolder at work, to be perceived as strong— a part of my armor.

It wasn’t until the night after President Obama was elected to his first term, when my students and I went to see Anna perform her one-woman show at the Herberger Theater that I understood the shoes.

Changing shoes between each of her monologues, Anna Deavere Smith walked for miles in our words, in our world. Boldly, she crisscrossed Arizona and America and showed us ourselves—how interconnected we are—prison system employees, incarcerated women, female lawyers, immigration activists and others including Justice O’Connor who was in the audience,  Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Mayor of Phoenix, and the principal I was at the time. We were looking in the mirror, and much of what we saw was bleak. At the same time, with a brand new President elected the night before, there was hope in the air.

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It’s time to get back at it, to look in the mirror, to take a walk in the shoes of other people—people with whom we vehemently disagree, people who appear to want something very different from the same place all Americans call home.  This is not the time to retreat or to recriminate. It’s a time for boldness, and I can think of no better voice to remind us than that of Seamus Heaney:

… make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

Haunted

23 Wednesday Oct 2024

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland, Rituals, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, United Workers Council Strike 1974

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This weekend, inspired by an Instagram post about a perfect Fall appetizer, I bought a pumpkin. Looking at it taking up too much space on the kitchen counter, it occurs to me that it’s too big for the Hot Honey Pumpkin Baked Brie I planned. It will be better as a jack-o’-lantern by the front door. This leads me to Halloweens past and a story you should know.

Where I’m from, there’s some debate about Halloween, with some saying it’s derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain and others that it started out as Hallows’ Eve, the day before All Saints’ Day. Whatever it is, it remains my favorite 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.

Halloween in 1970s Northern Ireland was 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. Wrapped up in our duffel coats, “disguised” in hard plastic ‘false faces’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe we roamed the estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:

We roamed the housing estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:

Halloween is coming 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

Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light up our faces. Sweating under our false faces, I suppose we thought we looked menacing. Meanwhile, our parents stayed at home and watched television. If we were lucky, somebody gave us sparklers which was very exciting because fireworks had been banned—outlawed due to fears that they might sound like bomb blasts or gunfire. I suppose there were also concerns that they might be used to make bombs or weapons.

With this behind me by the time I became a mother in the United States, I embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory, unaware of its origins in my native land. I didn’t know until recently the legend of Stingy Jack who had been 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 away Jack and any other wandering evil spirits, Irish people eventually made their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips placed in windows.  When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-o′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern. Indeed they do.

Every year, we’d go to the nearest pumpkin patch for three perfect pumpkins which would be carved and decorated, and when the sun went down on Halloween, my husband lit candles inside them to welcome the scores of children who walked to our door over the years. It always reminded me of that whimsical scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, even the sitting President of the United States.

There was never a trick, always a treat from a big popcorn bowl filled with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and full-size Snickers bars. Word on the street was that all the good candy was at our house. Between us, we took turns handing out the candy, but I preferred to be with the merry band of trick-or-treaters, strolling along Montebello Avenue, 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 always ended with her sprinting to our front door, where she rang the doorbell and called out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door open and fill her plastic pumpkin basket to the brim.

Our last family Halloween was quiet. It was a school night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Not yet a United States citizen, I couldn’t vote, but I nonetheless studied the pamphlet of Arizona Propositions on our kitchen table, and my husband let me fill in the bubbles on his ballot. I remember promising him I would become a citizen in time for the next presidential election.

When I voted early last week, I imagined him smiling down at me. Imagine. Me, early.

That particular Halloween didn’t feel right, with November just hours away and the night air still hovering around 80 degrees. Nonetheless, when the sun went down, our ritual began. We lit the candles in the pumpkins, and Sophie decided it was her turn to dole out the Halloween 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 motion-sensitive ghost howling above our door.

I remember I was preoccupied, sitting at my computer paying bills for the breast cancer treatment that had dominated our lives that year, scrolling through work emails I hadn’t found time to read at work, and following news of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. I was also half-listening to Van Morrison playing in the background, and as he repeated the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I remember feeling a strong pull to days gone by. Surreal and visceral, maybe the kind of moment Greill Marcus described in his Listening to Van Morrison.

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.

In an instant, Van Morrison takes me back to County Antrim and into the lives of two sisters I have yet to meet in real life. The first, Mary, had once stumbled upon something I had written online and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world. You know how it goes—we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this much smaller world, I learned that her cousin, Pauline, had been my hairdresser in the 1980s.

Every time I visited her for bigger hair or more highlights, there was always a moment—a ritual— when I considered silently, the family pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stood on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. Nondescript, it was the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look, unremarkable except to those of us who knew about the horror that had visited on May 24, 1974. When I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it.

It wasn’t until one night years after I had left Northern Ireland, that I learned more about what had happened at The Wayside Halt. I don’t remember how the subject came up—my father was maybe trying to explain The Troubles to my American husband, and the ways in which we were all impacted by those years. He recalled for us that evening, when 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 was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, my father declined.

Even in the days before cell phones, news in our place always traveled fast. Before daddy reached Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that a mob of 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 remained open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974 a seminal two weeks in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles.’ Just a child at the time, I remember the rolling electricity blackouts—the “power cuts” that meant candle light and dinners cooked on a camping stove to cook. In my naivete, I didn’t know I had any reason to be afraid.

Shaun and his brother Brendan 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.

Eight fatherless children. Two widows. A community devastated.

The Byrne Brothers.

The Quinn brothers –  Richard, Mark, and Jason –  three little boys burned to death on July 12, 1998. Just eleven, nine, and seven years old, they had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through their bedroom window. In our small world, their grandmother was the subject of my brother’s first interview as he started a career in journalism covering the kinds of atrocities that should only have happened once.

Bloody Sunday, La Mon Restaurant, Crossmaglen, The Miami Showband Massacre, Kingsmills, Internment, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Greysteel, Frizzell’s fish shop.

The list goes on, hearts grows numb …

Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on a little black and white television.

So many names.

Too many ghosts among us.

This is Anne Byrne’s Halloween story first posted on November 1, 2005. Like her sister Mary, she had left a comment for me. 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.

if my books could talk to you …

09 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by in Art, Artisans, Awesome Women, Books, Cat Stevens, Crafts, Educating Rita, Field of Dreams, Fiftieth Birthday, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Willy Russell

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Scrolling through social media earlier, I spotted an update that on this day 40 years ago, Bob Dylan played at Slane Castle in Ireland. I was there. I don’t remember all the details — it’s been 40 years — but I remember UB40 and Santana and Van Morrison played too and that Bono joined Dylan on “Blowing in the Wind” and improvised the lyrics. Seriously. Nostalgic and forgetting who went with me, I updated my Facebook status with this information adding that I still have my ticket stub which prompted a friend to comment “My god – you still have your ticket stub??? How much stuff did you move to Mexico with you??”

I’m not sure how to quantify the amount of stuff I brought with me, but I can tell you it includes all my favorite books, one of which is my stub book crammed with set-lists and concert tickets.

Book-wrapt

Having said that, my collection of books is smaller than ever, pared down when I knew I would be moving to Mexico over four years ago. I remember sitting on my living room floor in Phoenix, asking every single book, “Are you important enough to move to a new country with me?” with a follow-up question to myself, “How many books do I really need?” What is the magic number? I suppose I need enough to feel “book-wrapt,” a term coined by Reid Byers, author of The Private Library: Being a More Or Less Compendious Disquisition on the History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom to describe the way a well-stocked personal library should make us feel:

“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend … It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.“

So how many?

Byers maintains that 500 books ensures that a room will “begin to feel like a library.” On the other hand, the library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam although “very highly valued, it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.” I’m not sure how my book collection measures up. I’m not even sure I would even call it a library, but it definitely feels like part of whatever home means. I love my books. I love how they look, and the stories behind how they came to be permanent fixtures in my life.

A minute or two spent scanning the contents of a bookshelf – mine or yours – can tell a lot about the owner’s personality, pastimes, and passions. The more interesting books have tell-tale signs of wear —dog-eared pages and marginalia – chunks of underlined text, doodles, scribbles, exclamation points, question marks, even profanities from a reader giving the author a piece of her mind. Some also might have Dewey Decimal numbers on the spine because they may belong to a library …

Marginalia matters. If not for marking up a book, we wouldn’t know that when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa, some of the inmates circulated a Shakespeare book 1975 and 1978. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from Julius Caesar that reads, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’

To this day, I read with pen in hand. Making my marks in a book makes it mine. I can revisit those margins whenever I choose, go back to my side of a conversation with the author and pause to remember that earlier version of myself, younger, curious, and perhaps more naive. One day someone may land on something I highlighted in a book and wonder WTF I was thinking.

Books allow us to be solitary and sociable at the same time. As an introvert-extrovert (at least that what I think I am), this appeals to me.

Book Arranging

Loving books is one thing, but it wasn’t until I began packing them in boxes that I took an interest in the physical space they had occupied in my bookcase. Incongruously, a paperback copy of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native had, for sixteen years, leaned up against a second-hand copy of What to Expect when You’re Expecting passed along to me when I was expecting. Maybe I kept it, thinking I might expect another baby one day and wanted to remember what to expect. For almost a decade, a copy of The Good Friday Peace Agreement (signed for me one morning In Arizona by the late Irish Taoiseach John Bruton) was sandwiched unceremoniously between Bob Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home vinyl record (carried with me from Belfast to New York in 1987), and a large illustrated Beowulf. Maybe the move to Mexico would bring some order.

Almost a century ago, Hugh Walpole would have agreed:

I believe it then to be quite simply true that books have their own very personal feeling about their place on the shelves. They like to be close to suitable companions, and I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my Jane Eyre. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning’s uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticized Jane will understand why this would never do.

Hugh Walpole, These Diversions: Reading, 1926

When it comes to arranging books on shelves, I need someone with a critical eye and zero tolerance for those books she knows I haven’t read. By ‘someone,’ I mean my mother, who brings a take-no-prisoners to this kind of task. If it hasn’t been worn in a year, or if she suspects that it’s hanging in my closet for “sentimental reasons,” (like she knit it for me or bought it for me in 1987), then it must be placed in the big black trash bag which will then go to a charitable organization or a consignment store. I have often thought about hiring a professional to organize my closet, but I’m afraid of the prospect of being one of “those people” on a reality program on The Learning Channel. I can see myself clearly, mortified in my own front yard by the contents of my closet spread out on the grass and then judged in the glare of a camera crew, by a TV audience and an energetic host as I ask each item if it gives me joy. The answer will determine if it is placed in a box labelled Keep, Toss or Donate.

Before my husband died, I had bought his favorite cologne and kept it in a drawer, unopened, for over 7 years. I never got to give it to him and I never figured out what to do with it. For all I know, the person who bought my house may have found it in the back of a drawer in the bathroom. Just one of those things.

For some reason this takes me to Field of Dreams. If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember Alicia as the wife of Burt Lancaster’s Doc “Moonlight” Graham. We find out about her in that beautiful scene in a bar in Chisholm, Minnesota, where James Earl Jones finds out from an old-timer that

… she moved to South Carolina after Doc passed. She passed a couple years later. She always wore blue. The shopkeepers in town would stock blue hats because they knew if Doc walked by, he’d buy one. When they cleaned out his office, they found boxes of blue hats that he never got around to give her. I’ll bet you didn’t know that …

Field of Dreams

Cleaning up your Bookshelves

While the literati are not coming to party at my house, I can still relate to Bella, friend of Independent columnist, John Walsh, — “your collection of books can say terrible things about you.” Unlike Bella, however, I’m unlikely to be rubbing shoulders with celebrities in the publishing world any time soon, so I’m not sure why the absence – or inclusion – of certain books on my shelves matters. For instance, there’s a blue hardcover 1984. Not the one by George Orwell – rather, it is my diary from the same year, bringing to mind Willy Russell’s Rita, brilliantly played by Julie Waters, as she shouts from the train window to Michael Caine’s Professor Frank Bryant, a line from The Importance of Being Earnest, a play I was delighted to find for just two bucks, along with 20 other brilliant comedies in a first edition Cavalcade of Comedy at the 1996 VNSA booksale in Phoenix.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train”

I think it was the remake of The Great Gatsby that initially caused me to reassess the order of my books. I had re-read it during my Post-Mastectomy Period (PMP), so Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby calling people “old sport” and all those lavish parties were still fresh in my head when the new movie came out. Over Happy Hour one Friday, my best friend and I performed our post-mortem on the film which led to a discussion of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I found myself admitting that I have never read anything by Ernest Hemingway. Never. I suppose to make me feel better, she told me she hated Charles Dickens. And then we both confessed that we hate Moby Dick. The floodgates opened. I detest Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I know. It feels almost criminal to say out loud that the longest running musical of all time leaves me cold, and downright treasonous to also admit that I think James Joyce is over-celebrated.

I have never finished his Ulysees, nor am I sure I ever really started it at its start, given the many beginnings within its pages. Of Joyce’s “Dubliners” I only like “The Dead,” a superb short story. Were it not for Brodie’s Notes, which I imagine are equivalent to the American Cliffs Notes, I don’t imagine I could have answered  a single question about E.M. Forster’s Room with a View or Howards End. I don’t like Virginia Woolf either. I might even be a little afraid of her. I think the same might be true for George Eliot, who, until I was in college, I assumed was male. Then there’s Jane Austen. Emma wore me out, and I didn’t pick up Pride and Prejudice until my PMP (see above). Even then, in the lingering haze from three days of Dilaudid coursing through my system, I just couldn’t understand what was so great about Mr. Darcy.  And, I have remained oblivious to what has been coined The Darcy Effect. There must be something wrong with me.

Since I’m telling the truth about my books as they sit there looking at me, still waiting to be properly arranged, I wonder, guiltily, if any of the fifth graders I taught over thirty years ago remember that Spring morning when I announced the next class novel, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. I passed out the books and then began reading aloud, because I was the best reader in the class and it’s important for kids to hear good reading. We soldiered through the first few pages, me reading with as much expression as I could muster, but we all knew the time wasn’t right. Remembering I was in charge, I quietly told them to close their books and put them back on the shelf for another day (which never came that year). From my bag, I pulled out my high school English textbook and read to them instead Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper” hoping that the last startling sentence would teach them all they needed to know about the tragedy of war.  None of the parents complained that I had strayed from the curriculum and abandoned an American classic for an Irish short story, but then they probably never found out, their children probably telling them “Nothing!” when asked what they did at school that day.

For her first official book report, my daughter read Under the Hawthorne Tree, a book I recall with fondness from my childhood, the story of three children trying to survive the Irish Famine. My daughter had spied it in my bookcase, part of The Belfast Telegraph’s Children’s Collection my mother had saved for her. Knowing it would resonate with her sense of justice, I grabbed the opportunity to tell her about The Great Famine, knowing she was unlikely to learn much if anything about it in an Arizona classroom. Somewhat ironically, a headline in the Belfast Telegraph, Children Turn Away From Books in Favour of Reading Electronically, made me appreciate all the more, that my daughter was and continues to read books made of paper. Thinking of Belfast and all that continues to simmer just below the surface, I wonder why nobody thought to require To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE O level English in the 1980s. Although set in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, many of us in Northern Ireland could have learned a thing or two about fairness and goodness – and about humanity – from Atticus Finch, at a time when our we needed it so much.  Instead we trudged through Richard Church’s autobiography, Over the Bridge. And it was torture.

With all of this off my chest, I feel better about the books I have brought to Mexico. There’s my Choice of Poets textbook, my collections of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, the little blue book of Irish Short Stories, out-of-print Belfast Reviews, and old Rolling Stone and Life magazines.  Still, I wish Independent columnist John Walsh was here to help the way he did when called upon to edit his friend Bella’s library:

I had to re-jig it, alphabetize it, eliminate the once-trendy, excise the cheesy and ill-advised, and bring together all the books that had been lying for years in bedroom, lavabo and kitchen and behind the sofa. My function was like that of Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables, until no trace of Paulo Coelho remained.

When the literati come to party, it’s time to clean up your bookshelves – John Walsh

My Ideal Bookshelf

Walsh points out that a proper bookcase, one in a mature middle-class household, should contain only books. Reference books do not belong there; rather, their place is close to a desk, and poetry needs its own section. Now we’re on to something. Knowing that you can only eat the elephant one bite at a time, and inspired by My Ideal Bookshelf, I have arranged some of my bookshelves with a nod to the women who have helped me find my way in the world with good humor and a sense of home, and some Bob Dylan for good measure:

The Sshh … I’m reading coffee cup just happened to be sitting there when my daughter rendered, by hand, these drawings for my 50th birthday, over a decade ago.

There is of course a place in my bookspace for Seamus Heaney. Naturally. The Irish cottage was a gift to my father over 60 years ago from a Professor Coyle’s wife who lived in a house named “One Acre” on the Belfast Road. She had decided, well into her sixties which was considered ‘a big age’ back home in those days, that she would learn to drive. As a favor, my father taught her—he taught practically everyone I knew to drive. To thank him, and knowing it would appeal to his love of things found in nature, Mrs. Coyle painted the little cottage on an angular remnant of a spruce tree, the bark serving as an approximation of a thatched roof with smoke streaming from a turf fire. He passed it along to me some years ago, and it has been at home with my Heaney books ever since.

With a flourish to end his day of transforming Bella’s library into a thing of beauty, John Walsh placed on her coffee table, “with a bookmark at page 397” a copy of Seamus Heaney’s Stepping Stones, a collection of conversations with my favorite poet.

By coincidence the same book is at home with me in Mexico. On my coffee-table …

I wonder what we’ll have to say to each other today.