if my books could talk to you …

09 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by Editor 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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bookcases, books, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Field of Dreams, George Eliot, Great Gatsby, Hollywood, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Red Badge of Courage, These Diversions: Reading, Virginia Woolf

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.

Dear Nelson Mandela

18 Monday Jul 2022

Posted by Editor in Apartheid, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Death and dying, From the Republic of Conscience, Funerals, Human Rights, Loss, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Politics, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Cure at Troy, Themes of Childhood, Writing

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#MandelaDay2017, Amnesty International, Barack Obama, Free Nelson Mandela, Mandela, Mandela Lecture, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Paul Simon, Seamus Heaney, South Africa, United States

Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names.

~ Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

Not you, Nelson Mandela. Over one hundred years ago, you came into this world with boldness and made your mark on it – Madiba will ring out forever. On this day in 2018, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, went to Johannesburg, to commemorate the anniversary of your birth, and did so with an eloquence and a rallying cry that many Americas had been missing – a reminder to cleave to your values of democracy and diversity, of equity, of kindness:

I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality, justice, freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal.

Madiba, I am drawn back to June of 2013, to when we heard news that you were gravely ill. As reports poured out of Pretoria, South Africa that you were on life support, we held our breath, not wanting to accept that you were frail at 94, ill, and nearing the end of your life. Then – and today – in my mind’s eye, you are still at the beginning of your life as Mandela, the free man, who stepped onto the world’s stage in 1990 after spending 27 years behind bars.

In the darkest days of Apartheid, no one – other than you – could have imagined the man in that tiny cell as the future President of your country, that you would one day stand among rock stars and royalty and popes and presidents to advocate for democracy and justice, to inspire a vision of peace that transcended race and creed, that you would matter to so many people and that he would make so many people matter. People like me. As Obama is reminding us today:

Through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and perhaps, most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world.

Mandela mattered to me because he embodied what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the dream of peace envisioned for Northern Ireland by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, his vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election. Mandela moved more than 17 million black South Africans – 17 million – to vote for the first time. What a sight to behold, even on a tiny television screen in a tiny country on the other side of the world. Before our eyes, proof that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme. Before our eyes, “madiba magic.”

Over 30 years ago, not long before I emigrated to the United States, a boyfriend surprised me with a ticket to Paul Simon’s Graceland concert in Dublin for my birthday. Boisterous and beautiful, the performance sparkles in my memory as one that transcended the ugliness of apartheid. Paul Simon had been and still is widely criticized for performing in South Africa, but how could we fault him for accepting an invitation from black South African musicians to collaborate on some of the most hopeful and uplifting music ever created? This was glorious music that represented the “days of miracle and wonder” that were possible in the heart of Mandela, music that represented the universal dream of Martin Luther King.

In accepting a Grammy award for the album, Simon said of his fellow musicians and friends:

They live under one of the most oppressive regimes on earth today, and still they are able to produce music of great power, nuance and joy, and they have my respect for that.

I remember Paul Simon was one of the first people Mandela invited to South Africa as a free man – not just because the bars had been removed, but because he had left bitterness and rancor behind. Not everyone could or would. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. When the Iron Lady took office, I recall her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that following her death, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.

As young university students in Belfast in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative; it was the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were so young and full of hope for a better future, and it was through that lens that Thatcher and others in her party appeared resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s time in that tiny cell. On the other side of the argument, there were those, including De Klerk, who felt that “Thatcher correctly believed that more could be achieved through constructive engagement with his government than international sanctions and isolation of the South African government.”

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It always does.

When Mandela walked out of jail, the world cracked open. Enormous challenges lay ahead with even more bloodshed, but apartheid would eventually come to an end. Together, De Klerk and Mandela would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, of a democratic nation. Perhaps this would be the example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness.

Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award inspired by fellow Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” was presented to Mandela in 2006. Perfect then that Heaney would be the first to congratulate Mandela thus:

To have written a line about “hope and history rhyming for Mr. Mandela in 1990 is one thing . . . to have the man who made them rhyme accept the Award inspired by my poem is something else again.

At the beginning of the summer of 2013, I imagine Seamus Heaney was vexed over the thought of a world without Mandela. I think we all were. I remember a Sunday morning conversation with my late husband about Mandela’s charisma and fortitude, his inestimable influence – the “Madiba magic” that changed the world. Drinking our coffee, aware of our smallness in the world, we were sad that Mandela’s time was coming to an end. I didn’t want to believe it – the world still needed him, and so I turned to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the way I still do in the in-between times.

And then, just six months later, Madiba was gone. Seamus Heaney was gone. My husband was gone too. Gone. Like three shooting stars in the night sky above me – startling and beautiful and gone forever. For a time, it felt like my world might end. But only for a time.

Addressing the United Nations back in 1990 Mandela reminded those listening:

We must work for the day when we, as South Africans, see one another and interact with one another as equal human beings and as part of one nation united, rather than torn asunder, by its diversity,

He knew that many of those who had fought against apartheid had been made refugees by it. He would surely be alarmed today by the growing levels of xenophobia and nationalism in Africa – and beyond. The 2022 Africa Youth Survey reveals intolerance for refugees and immigrants among young people surveyed in 15 African nations; two new political parties, ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance, made significant gains in municipal elections in 2021 by running on divisive, anti-immigrant platforms. This we know – freedom untended runs the risk of slipping away from us.

South Africa – the world – could use Mandela’s inspiration and his example, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded us just yesterday, “Our world today is marred by war; overwhelmed by emergencies; blighted by racism, discrimination, poverty, and inequalities; and threatened by climate disaster.” South Africa is among the world’s most unequal countries, the gap between rich and poor ever widening, the poor being told to wash their hands – with little access to water – as the pandemic overwhelmed the country; unemployment is at its highest in the country’s history and among the highest globally; over 65% of the population struggling to afford food. The inequality in South Africa has increased since apartheid ended in 1994, according to the World Bank. The country is unraveling without Mandela, the man whose greatest miracle perhaps was that he made people in every corner of the world believe that the way things should be can overcome the way things are, that the world can change.

Time to change the world. No time to play small. No time to settle for smallness in hearts and minds and governments.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

mothering in the time of COVID-19 . . .

21 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by Editor in Aging, Awesome Women, Castledawson, Coming of age, Family, grandmother, Irish culture, Irish mammies, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood

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Mothering Sunday

Having worked in education for over thirty years, it is not uncommon for me to encounter – in real life or the virtual version – my former students, all grown-up, some of them married with careers and children. Surreal to find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were scribbling in composition books about who they might become. They are often incredulous to discover I am now the mother of a daughter who is over a decade older than they were when they sat in my classroom. Equally perturbed by this scenario and its implications is my daughter. It amuses me to watch my students confront the truth that I had a life outside their classroom, and my daughter acknowledge again that once upon a time I was not her mother and other people’s children took up most of my time and even considered me cool with great taste in clothes and music.

And, before that, there was another time when I was younger than she, bored and adolescent, rolling my eyes as my mother told me from behind the ironing board, “Daughter dear, the world is your oyster,” and maybe to charm me out of my ennui, she would add, “you have the heart of a lion.” Non-plussed, I probably dismissed her as someone who had no life before I came along, someone who could never have been a hopeful teenager or somebody’s BFF or the one with the great sense of style. What a fool I was. My mother was all of these . . .

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She is far away today, in the place that made her, South Derry, the distance between there and here stretched taut on Mothering Sunday. A phone call or a visit on Facetime will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it will not be the same as handing her a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table or spotting a suitably showy Mother’s Day card on the mantelpiece. Even if I were there, I would still have to stay away, adhering to the rules of social distancing that are in place all over the globe to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the crisis that has only begun to unfold.

When we spoke by phone earlier today, she sounded vexed and resigned as she relayed the ways in which her ways of living have changed in recent weeks. She and my father have been warned not to go out – the village supermarket now presents a threat to them. So too does the church that has always been their refuge, and it is to that space I am drawn today, to an enduring memory of my brother and me.

It is perhaps 1975, and we are scrubbed clean and uncomfortable in our Sunday best. We join a crooked line with all the other children, and make our way to the front of the aisle of Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church, where each of us collects from a beaming Reverend Thornton a single fresh flower to give to our mother.

Fresh flowers.

My mother is wholly responsible for my appreciation – and expectation still – of flowers as apology, get-well wish, gratitude, birthday greeting, or a just-because (like the asters and tulips da used to pull from our garden and hastily wrap in newspaper as a present for my primary school teachers). Before all the shops shut down, before we were warned about the ease with which this virus can spread, I had planned again to send flowers this year along with gourmet chocolate brownies from a company in the Cotswolds. I knew the latter would remind her of a Christmas night in Phoenix, when I baked a pan of chocolate fudge brownies while she and my dad napped. More than that, the appeal of the chocolate brownie company is in its packaging. The product arrives in a brown paper package tied up with string, the kind of package that for years has traveled across the sea from my mother’s address to mine.

Since the late 1980s my mother has sent such packages – boxes filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not immediately remember, chocolate for my daughter, the obligatory three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion crisps, teabags, and something for me to wear. This last is typically something for which she paid too much, and something I never need, but she always dismisses it as “just-something-to-throw-on”. My late husband was always intrigued by the brown wrapping paper and the string, unaware – as was I – that, by all accounts, consumer demand for my mother’s type of handiwork would become mainstream. Ordinarily, I am but a few clicks away from artisanal gift-wrapping, jam-making and even the knitting of very complicated Aaran sweaters, all of which she has practiced and perfected since she was a girl – not because it was organic or trendy, but out of necessity. But this is an extraordinary time.

crawford's shop

My mother’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson. Behind the counter, she learned, among other things, to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. In the same way she had learned to bake and sew by watching her mother, she watched proprietor, Jim Crawford, skillfully wrap parcels for the customers. Soon she was expertly packaging sweets and biscuits – Rich Tea or Arrowroot – that would deliver a taste of home to neighbors further afield, like Mrs O’Connor’s daughter across the water in England. Always efficient, Mr. Crawford had even devised a method of tying newspapers with string so news could travel easily to his relatives in America or Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, quick to remind me that all this wrapping and knot-tying was long before there was any such thing as Scotch tape, and instead she carefully poured hot sealing wax over the knotted string. There is heart and craft in such an activity, so much that I cannot bring myself to open these Mid-Ulster dispatches. They remain in a drawer in my Phoenix kitchen – preserved ordinariness, a tribute to the way things used to be, the way they might be again.

I have no idea how the ”Mothering Sunday” tradition began; it may, like a lot of things, have its origins in mythology. It is certainly a red-letter day for the greeting card companies with people like me handing over a fistful of dollars for a folded piece of card-stock emblazoned with a generic message and a stock photograph. In truth, my mother’s day card purchases may have been less about making ma’s day and more about assuaging my guilt over having put down roots so far away from home.

Thus, it is a marked day, Mothering Sunday, and I wonder about its impact on a day that also belongs to adult children without mothers and to mothers with sick children, to women who ache to be biological mothers but are unable, to mothers whose children no longer speak to them and to children whose mothers have disowned them perhaps over a grudge or because the Alzheimer’s has rendered them strangers. What of them?

My mother was the first and best woman I will ever know. As those former students remind my daughter, I remind myself again that my mother has always been the woman who would be my best friend. I just didn’t always know it.

The truth is that greeting cards and cheery bouquets mean little to this woman who has tossed and turned too many nights since November 11th 2011, when the phone rang too late to bring good news. I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on telly, so she could hear me deliver the news that broke her heart. “What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And then too soon, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone again, unable to mend my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from me.

Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands, that I will stay away.

So thank you, ma. On Mother’s Day and every day. I love you.

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Belfast & Van Morrison: Works in Progress

23 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora, Gerald Dawe, Music, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, The Troubles, Van Morrison

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Belfast, Bob Dylan, Gerald Dawe, poetry, Seamus Heaney, Van Morrison

A version of this article appeared in the Ulster issue of Reading Ireland.

There is no denying Gerald Dawe’s sense of wonder for Van Morrison – and for Belfast – in his lovely book In Another World. Culled from all the material Dawe has published on Morrison since the 1990s, it is a portrait of these artists in and of Belfast, their “otherness” in the city that made them, a city that changed forever when sectarian violence took possession of it in the late 1960s. In his preface to this little volume of essays, Dawe welcomes us in to partake of all on offer in Belfast the early and mid-1960s, a wondrous time for the northern capital, a mecca for live music in dancehalls and ‘hops’ all over the city, and in living rooms and parlors, its people tuned into the radio. In his North Belfast home, young Dawe is immersed in a world of creativity, “fascinated by stories overheard” about the way things used to be – in the songs of his opera singing grandmother, of Cleo Laine and Sarah Vaughan, of Ella Fitzgerald on the gramophone. This is another world, a lost world where all the young dudes in Belfast wore black arm-bands following the news that Otis Redding had died in a plane crash in Wisconsin. It was in this other world that Ella Fitzgerald performed one night, and when Dawe’s mother returns home from the gig, she tells him, “I’m sent.”

In the heart of this rocking city, he places Van Morrison, a working man working out his songs with “the accent you heard in the streets,” helping lead the way for Dawe to emerge as a poet, with a new confidence that it was possible to be both “a Belfast guy and lyrical.” Armed thus, two Orangefield Boys School alumni begin their journey in a “city dominated by work, work, work.” But theirs is a creative labor, a different kind of work than expected of them in industrial Belfast. In Another World is a tribute to that labor and to the city that inspired it before The Troubles “put into quarantine those kinds of energies.”

As he has explained elsewhere, Dawe is a poet in love with “the notion of cramming a world into a short space on the page, by allusion, turn of phrase, suggestion,” a notion that is realized in this slim volume of just 116 pages. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s thatcher, Dawe has the Midas touch, “pinning down his world, handful by handful,” with trademark exactitude. The world that produced Van Morrison and Gerry Dawe is a red-bricked “civic landscape of class distinction,” in which children learn their place very early in life. In his music, Morrison revisits this Belfast, in songs of innocence and experience as the guy who worked in a meat-cleaning factory, a chemist’s shop, and as a window-washer in Orangefield. It is in these lyrics that Dawe finds a kinship with Patrick Kavanagh, in the “walking down familiar streets in search of that elusive authentic past, although when he asks Morrison about the Kavanagh connection in a 1995 public conversation, the transcript of which is included in the book, the singer keeps it simple: “It’s really all the same. The difference is you just do it with music.” This suffices for Dawe, the acclaimed poet who once responded when asked If he could write his epitaph in no more than 10 words, what it would be and why,

Gerald Dawe, Poet, born 1952 Belfast. The simpler it is the better.

In retrospect, Dawe is surprised by Morrison’s candor, aware as the rest of us of the singer’s reputation as a notoriously difficult interviewee. Throughout his career, Morrison has explained repeatedly that he will not and, more importantly, cannot “intellectualize” or engage in the kind of navel-gazing analysis of his music that will compromise what Dawe calls “the fate of genuine artistic endeavor.” Not surprising then that Morrison has delivered more than a few blunt responses to interviewers who have not been paying attention, reminiscent of Bob Dylan in that famous 1965 press conference in San Francisco. When asked if he thought of himself as a protest singer or a rock and roll singer, young Dylan replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” Case closed.

Similarly, any attempt to pigeon-hole Van Morrison is a fool’s errand. Hip to this, Dawe probes to determine the source of the songs, where the lyrics come from. And, Morrison tells him.

Morrison now in his seventies is the consummate performer, a recording artist still on the road honing his craft, doing what he refers to as “earning my living” as he has done since beginning his musical apprenticeship in the early 1960s. Already as gruff as John Lee Hooker, he seemed much older, having written “Gloria” when he was a teenager, playing in the city’s clubs, Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club on Great Victoria Street and at The Maritime.

Asserting himself with all boldness, he served his time in Belfast until 1967 when he “ran out of space” and left for New York. “I worked my way from my Belfast to New York and didn’t even know I was there because it was work,” Morrison once remarked in a 1987 interview. A year later, he would record Astral Weeks. Dawe clarifies that contrary to what many music critics have described as a breakthrough record for Morrison, Astral Weeks is a compilation of work – a vision – that he had begun sketching in Belfast. Considered together, its songs mark a poetic shift, presenting another mode – another mood – for the singer. Most resonant and relevant for Dawe is its centerpiece composition, “Madame George,” a farewell not only to Morrison’s youth, but also to a way of life in a city still unblemished by bombs and bullets and unnecessary bloodshed. For young Gerry Dawe, it is a farewell to a place where curiosity and creativity had flourished, where he and his friends “did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape.” As Dawe describes it, “’Madame George’ is a portrait of a society about to withdraw from public view at the same time as the voice which describes it is also leaving the scene.” The reality is that fifty years ago, Astral Weeks may not even have been on the radar in Northern Ireland, its people more intent on what was happening in Derry in 1968. For some, it would take thirty years to fully absorb the blow that Astral Weeks was their Paradise Lost – it was Seamus Heaney’s “music of what happens.” This poignant goodbye to Belfast may indeed prompt readers to indulge in fantasies about another world that might have been.

What if the storm never came?

With the insight of a local, Dawe meanders through space and time, from the attic of his house in North Belfast overlooking the city’s amber lights below to streets and characters and urban rituals now familiar to a global audience – to Cyprus Avenue and Fitzroy, to the lower Falls and Orangefield, to Hyndford Street and the Beechie River and out to the Castlereagh Hills. There’s Madame George, and Sam and Van cleaning windows before breaking for tea and Paris buns and lemonade in the corner shop; there’s “the soldier boy older now with hat on, drinking wine”; there’s the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, and, in “Boffyflow and Spike,” which Dawe reads aloud while Morrison accompanies him on guitar, there is a sense of wonder: “wee Alfie at the Castle picture house; pastie suppers at Davy’s Chipper, gravy rings, barmbracks, wagon wheels, snowballs. A Sense of Wonder.” Going back to a time “when the world made more sense,” as Morrison proclaims in his 1991 Hymns to the Silence, it would be reductive to characterize In Another World as a sentimental trip to a place where the grass is always greener. Nonetheless, it is a journey of nostalgia, and it is worth noting, as Dawe has pointed out previously, the etymology of the word: “Nostalgia is about the pain of home, -nostos – home, and algia – pain.” In Another World is a more nuanced imperative to get on with the show, summed up in the title track of Morrison’s 2003 album, “What’s Wrong with this Picture” – “Don’t you understand I left all that jive behind?”

His journey from “the home place” in pre-Troubles Belfast to a space where he could pursue artistic life on his own terms is not one that can be packaged in the myth of modern celebrity culture. As Dawe describes it, Morrison’s work inhabits a space that “has continuously moved in and out of his audience’s expectations,” the artist a wily critic of the crassness and commercialization of a music business that “thrives on and exploits disclosure” of the private persona behind a typically recalcitrant public self. Morrison leaves no doubt about this, once stating that “music is spiritual, the music business isn’t.”

His spiritual journey began in a childhood home that was full of music. His father, a shipyard worker and an avid record collector, was the key influence, with an enormous collection of rare American blues and jazz vinyl. As Morrison himself acknowledges, “There was probably only ten big collectors of blues and jazz in Belfast and my father was one of them.” Fitting then, that at the age of nine, Morrison was already a fan of Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Solomon Burke. Orangefield Boys School was no match for the education he received from his father’s astonishing collection of jazz and Wild West books or from the movies of the day. His years at school were not helpful. A self-described freak, Morrison explains that

“There was no school for people like me . . . either we didn’t have the bread to go to the sort of school where we could sit down and do our own thing or that type of school didn’t exist.”

Thus, he was never taught about the Irish writers or any literary traditions. It was through other often solitary means that he discovered Dickens, Kerouac, Yeats, Blake, Kavanagh, Joyce, Heaney, and his own distinctive voice as an Irish writer. Unlike Dawe, a poet, literary critic and former Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Van Morrison brings no academic credentials to his craft. He brings to it what he tells Sean O’Hagan in 2008, an exploration of the themes of “all Irish writing . . . Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things . . . Often it’s about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness… It’s the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn’t answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.” Or more succinctly,

There are two stories in music – leaving and going home.

Now in his early seventies, having released his 40th album, The Prophet Speaks, Morrison describes himself as a “work in progress.” His second album of 2018, it is a collaboration with jazz multi-instrumentalist Joey DeFrancesco and marks a return to the blues and jazz that inspired him as a young musician in Belfast, a journey back to “the old way, the jazz way.” Previewing it from the Europa Hotel in Belfast, Morrison says “It goes back to Into The Mystic and various things I’ve written so it’s new and old; there’s a thread which is ongoing.” Still a journeyman, honing his craft, Morrison reiterates his commitment to the labor as inseparable from the homing instinct that is a powerful motif in his work, explaining in a statement to Rolling Stone, “It was important for me to get back to recording new music as well as doing some of the blues material that has inspired me from the be- ginning. Writing songs and making music is what I do, and working with great musicians makes it all the more enjoyable.”

Morrison shares the cover of the record with the ventriloquist dummy from Educating Archie, evoking the radio program from his childhood. Apt, this tribute to a time and a place Dawe captures as one where “people really did get on with it; and get it on,” the kind of stoic yet soulful quality Seamus Heaney summed up as “keeping going.” Journeying back, it is a tribute to radio, a wireless portal into another world – a free world – in “the days before rock n roll.” As Dawe reflects,

“radio was our way into the wider world. At first it was the big old woolen-faced box in the corner and then the moveable transistor which was carried around like an iPhone . . . the radio was a great connector; it made a younger generation feel that even while you might have been up in the back bedroom on your own, you knew there were thousands like you ‘listening in’ and that conversations were had about whose new single was just out, or an album. Or simply playing back music from before.”

Dawe’s final chapter of this particular journey In Another World opens with lines from the late Mose Allison, a genre-defying artist revered by Morrison, who once referred to himself as “the man without a category” in a world eager to place him in one. Closing the book on Van Morrison’s Belfast, it is through Allison’s lens that Dawe ponders the only question that continues to matter. This world is another world once more: