Pleasant Places

Anna Maria Island is a long sand bar nestling on the west coast of Florida.  It is a paradise of white beaches, shell-selling shops, quirky restaurants and coffee houses.  Endless sun and endless coffee.  Apart from one spectacular electric storm with fabulous rain we have had two blissful weeks of rest and relaxation in the sweltering heat. 

We deserve it.  We have put up with each other for 35 years. On 19 July we celebrated our anniversary with a free trolley bus ride to the northern end of the island and a quiet meal at the Waterfront restaurant.  The speciality there is fried green tomatoes, pronounced with a southern drawl on the second syllable.  Yum!  The server was English but he avoids words like potato and tomato because they betray him as a blow-in.  Cool air circulated around us, so much so that I had to go outside to warm up between courses.

The man had the fillet or the filet, of course.  His starter was a work of art – a stacked Caprese salad.  The Americans go in for stacking, especially pancakes. How can one person eat a whole pile of pancakes?  This was a vine-ripe tomato, sliced and layered with huge basil leaves, incredible Mozzarella di Bufala made in Sarasota with imported Italian curd, no less, topped with capers, homemade balsamic vinaigrette and extra virgin olive oil.  For effect it was skewered to the plate with a robust length of rosemary.  The scent was delicious and there was enough to share.

I suppose that’s what we have been doing for 35 years. Sharing. Did we know what we were getting into when we were 22?  Of course not! We were young and once we had finished university getting married was the next thing.  We have always been thankful that we waited for marriage.  We belong to each other, exclusively.  Body and soul.

In our early years of parenting there was one rule that our children remember well.  Mum and dad’s bed was for mum and dad – only mum and dad.  We decided this before we were married – advice given to us by a sage counsellor.  Our children knew that even when they were ailing, a sojourn in the marital bed would be brief and that they would be returned to their own bed before daylight.  We enjoyed the Christmas morning family romp in our bed as well as anybody, but the children recognised that there was always a special place between the man and me where they could not go.

In recent years our nest has emptied and filled briefly and then emptied again.  With three daughters married in four years the fledglings have definitely flown.  Still they return with alarming regularity, spouses and now grandchildren in tow.  There is no question of downsizing just yet – where would everyone sleep at Christmas? In between high days and holidays, however, a silence has descended.  Sometimes we pause to listen to the space.  It is the calm after the storm of raising a family.

A neighbour told me recently that the man and I would have to learn how to talk to each other again.  It is not an easy transition back to just the two of us.  We have grown familiar with each other’s ways.  What once seemed endearing can now be irritating.  For instance, in spite of the fact that he is left-handed he insists on setting his glass to the right of his plate and then draging his sleeve through his dinner. Annoying or what?

Soon people like us will be exhibits in fun parks or zoos.  Here sits an old married couple – a species that is almost extinct. So why then am I still married? Because there is no one in this world who makes me feel safer and more loved than the man who shares my bed.  35 years ago he pledged to love me no matter what and he has been faithful to that promise.  It has not been easy to love me – I can be morose and unpredictable, but he has been steady as a rock and is one of the most generous and romantic people I know.  I love you.

Together we have weathered life’s challenges: the deaths of four wonderful parents and three unborn babies; loss of employment; change of careers; building a house; moving continents; raising four children; studying for post graduate degrees; several horrible burglaries, two of which took place when we were in the house.  On and on it goes.  Life’s vagaries with lots of love and laughter thrown in.

Our family is our greatest joy.  The love we have for our daughters and son has expanded to include three sons-in law and two delicious grandchildren.  Two more are on the way and we are delighted and excited. 

This weekend we will separate for four weeks. The man will don his bass guitar and go on tour here in the States with Robin Mark and I will return to NI briefly, before flying south to Port Elizabeth to be with my daughter at the birth of her first baby.  Joy upon joy.

But first a pause.  None of this would have been possible if a skinny boy had not gently pulled my hair before I got out of the car and kissed me passionately when I was just 17.  It’s strange to think that no one else has kissed me since.  Have I missed out?  No.  His kisses still thrill.

So a heartfelt thank you to the man for meaning it when he promised to love and cherish to the end.  This week we toasted to 30 more years – with champagne, his favourite.   I feel that I have earned the right to pass on some words of wisdom to my children, and anyone else's children, in the early years of marriage:
·        It’s much harder to connect, really connect, with another human being than it should be.
·        Selfishness gets in the way.
·        Learn to listen.
·        Love well.

Love is not for the faint-hearted.  There is only ONE way to love well:  Decide to be patient and kind. Don’t be jealous, boastful or rude.  Get over yourself and choose not to take offence easily.  Forgive quickly and do not keep a mental list of past mistakes.  Do not be pleased when something goes wrong, but get excited about what is good and true.  If you have someone to love always protect him, trust him, hope for the best and never, never give up. (1 Cor 13)

On our wedding day my father read a verse from Psalm 16.  It has been our watchword ever since:
‘The boundary lines have fallen for us in pleasant places, surely we have a delightful inheritance.  We have set the Lord always before us; because he is at our right hand, we shall not be shaken.’  Amen to that!

First Day

Mary

I am standing in the garden
My feet damp on the grass
Waiting, watching, hoping
That my love will pass

But he is dead and in the dark
The cloths enfold his face
And I am here and all alone
Longing for his embrace

The mist mingles with my tears
My sobs echo and fade
There is a quiet in this place
But I am unafraid

I do not see him when he comes
I only hear my name
Whispered with love stronger than death
And I can live again

Easter Sunday

My Father's House by Bethany Dawson

Have you ever looked into the pages of a book and glimpsed your own reflection? Of course she denies it’s me, but there I am, peering out from between the lines once in a while. In one chapter I’m licking my finger and lifting crumbs from the table; in another place I am stepping across the room to wipe the top of the record player, unable to resist the lure of dust.

In My Father’s House, as the Hanright siblings gather in the old farmhouse to clear their collected memories, they enter a room referred to as Narnia. In our house, one of the ones in which my daughter Bethany grew up, there is a small room above the return which can only be accessed through a door at the back of the wardrobe. At the time we built that part of the house the children were immersed in the chronicles, so Narnia was an obvious name. It is a treasure trove filled with boxes of books, toys, old clothes and things we might need some day. It’s in the book, and we love that it is because it grounds the novel in our shared family experience.
 

The similarity, however, ends there. That is the wonder of this debut novel. Bethany is able to get inside the head of a middling aged man, accurately portray the heartache of an alcoholic’s family and take the reader right to the bedside of the dying, without having been present herself at the deaths of her grandparents. How can this my child become someone else entirely inside her own head, and when I read, inside mine?

Since the publication of the novel earlier this year, I have been unable to put into words what I feel about this birthing – a kind of grandchild. Not mine in any sense and yet the result of something born in me – a child with a talent. I am amazed and delighted.

The members of the Hanright family come alive in all their raw ordinariness. Nothing spectacular happens and yet we recognise every character trait and flaw. When I listen to obituaries on the radio, or when someone’s death makes the news, it always strikes me that no one bad ever dies: ‘everyone loved them’, ‘they were the life and soul’, ‘so kind and popular’, ‘always a smile on their face’, ‘would do anything for anyone’. We believe that we ought not to speak ill of the dead, but the deathbed scene in this novel is refreshing in its harsh reality. Sometimes death doesn’t fix things.

The characters in this novel are so real in their vulnerability. Robbie the prodigal returns home, where he finds some resolution for his childhood hurts and disappointments. His troubled marriage is all the more convincing because it happens off stage. The sisters are beautifully drawn through the accuracy of observation: Wendy’s jumper ‘hung asymmetrically from her armpits’ and she ‘was striking the potato with the peeler as if it might produce a spark.’ After so many years of silence and reproach between them, the dance of the siblings round each other is nervous and exploratory. The reader is squeezed into the kitchen or the bedroom with them, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. We want to leave them to it and yet we are drawn into their fumbling attempts to connect and make sense of their past because there are damaged and broken relationships in all our journeys. We need to know whether love or judgment wins out in the end.

The language flows with musical excellence, lilting with familiar Ulsterisms: 'give the kitchen a going over'; 'I've never heard the like of this'; 'dusk snuck in and settled in the corners'.  I love the eyes that 'committed to being blue after years of watery indecision' and the cowslips 'openly flirting in yellow skirts'.

Most powerful of all is this novel’s sense of place. The farm and its environs are drawn in such detail that we can smell the mud and mould and taste the staleness of the air and the relationships which came to grief in the house. Up the road, the city waits, ‘Belfast looked more like itself when it was wet.’ Bethany has pulled together the threads of her own places to recreate believable spaces where weeds grow, a cow needs milking and people rediscover themselves and each other. We are there with the characters as they exist in real time, making real decisions and feeling real feelings. There is no jarring happy ending but the reader is left with some sense of redemption and a hope that the future might be better than the past. Larkscroft lingers in the memory long after the closing page.

Robbie mentions the phenomenon of the second novel falling short of the first. We await the next offering in the firm belief that no such thing will be true of this gifted author.

I am the proudest of mothers and commend and thank my lovely daughter for taking me on a journey into all our yesterdays.

The Place

The fledglings who have been lodging with us off and on for the past year have flown and we have an empty nest again.

I vividly recall sitting down with the man before we went to live in darkest Africa so many years ago and contemplating the fact that if we embarked on this great adventure we may well lose our children (then aged 7-13) to the wonders of travel and international living.  One daughter returned to live in Africa for several years, before and after marriage, and now, following a year in Ghana, Maria and Willem have made a more permanent move to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. We bid them adieu and bon voyage with heavy hearts. 

 

An international marriage will mean for them, us and his family a lifetime of teary goodbyes. However, I am totally convinced that it will also enrich all our lives.  They arrived safely this week and already we have had a tour of the house where they’re going to live and met the puppy they’ve bought. We are sharing the adventure with them via the wonders of Skype and we are all richer for it.

 

But still the house is eerily quiet and yesterday I held my daughter’s shirt to my face to breathe in her smell and her nearness.  They are gone and we are sad.

 

This week we went for a final visit to our favourite place, Mount Stewart. 

For Maria
As we pulled on our boots and prepared to leave
The heavens opened
Rain drops splashed and jumped
On the patio
Solace for my pain

We went anyway
Driving alongside the troubled sea
The wind tugged at my eyes in the car park
But deep in the wilds of the woods
Calm

Sun steamed the wet as we walked
And reminisced
And hugged the white stag of our
Memories
Narnia and the promise of
Adventures new

You picked an acer leaf
Red and smooth
To put in a book
To mark the place, you said

The Peace of Wild Things

On Sunday past, we gathered in a house of worship with friends and family to celebrate the gift of our grandson, and along with his parents and the other grandparents we dedicated him to God.  We stood together, all gazing at this wonderful little boy, now aged 11 months, who has brought us such delight.

Finlay George

 

And there’s that pain again - the bitter-sweet mixture of joy and terror when we take on the responsibility of caring for a tiny tot who has absolutely no sense that the world is not always kind.  He smiles his way into each day with an expectation that he will be protected and loved and cherished and safe.  And we pledge to pray for him and always believe the best for him.

 

Except that we cannot guarantee a single thing.  Our hold on life is as fragile as his and as we get older we realise that faith is no protection against illness and heartache and death.  Good friends have recently lost a sister and her husband in a road accident in Kenya.  They were on a mission trip from New Zealand, where they lived.  They leave behind 10 adult and teenage children, all of whom took part in their parents’ funeral – lovely young lives blighted by tragedy and yet still speaking faith.  Amazing grace!

 

So where to go with the fear that threatens to steal all our todays?

 

On Sunday everyone came back here for eats and laughter and presents.  The house was filled with babies and energy and life.  We talked about the future and all the tomorrows that we plan to live together as families.  A happy day!

 

As dusk fell and the last car left, I drew back the curtains at the rear of the house and saw sudden movement in the garden.  It was an animal – too big for a dog or a fox.  We switched off the lights and watched in total wonder as an adult wild stag, antlers aloft, sauntered across the grass.  Soon it was followed by another, and another until five stags began to gambol and chase up and down the bank, round the greenhouse and through the trees.  They stayed for ages and in spite of the fact that they were doing damage, we left them to their party.  They were still there in the morning and posed for a photo shoot before jumping the fence into the field behind.

 

And what has that to do with fear?  Everything.  It’s only in the place of wonder that fear melts into faith and we are reminded that all our loves are eternal in the worship of our Creator God.  I am comforted in my fear that He knows and I can find peace.

 

Wild things

 

 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(Wendell Berry)

 

You're welcome!

I’ve been in the Sunshine State where we were holidaying along the Florida Keys. We were thankful for the daily electric storms and heavy downpours to relieve the high temperatures and blazing sun. I enjoy relaxing as well as the next person but it was also an opportunity to do some research and extend my education.

Sunset off Key West

We spent a day in Key West, the furthest point of the great United States of America. The sunset from Mallory Square was spectacular. We gazed out at the ocean as it turned a vermillion red. Next stop Cuba. For several years Key West was the home of the author Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline. We went on a guided tour of the house which still contains Pauline's ridiculous chandeliers imported from Europe. We stood in the upstairs loft of the annexe where he penned many of his greatest works. Hemingway was a man's man who loved to fish and hunt and watch bullfighting when he lived in Spain. He spent hours on the seas between Florida and Cuba. This week I read To Have and Have Not, which relates episodes of derring do as boat owner Harry Morgan sells his services to the highest bidders needing a charter from Cuba to Florida and then kills them in cold blood on the high seas. In one memorable scene, Hemingway describes the fish circling the boat to enjoy an unexpected feast of 'ropey carmine clots and threads' leaking into the water after a frenzy of shooting on board.

 

Truth is often stranger than fiction and on a beach in Islamorada I met a man who lived through a Hemingway-like nightmare when his family fled from Cuba in 1980. Following an economic downturn and a run on the Peruvian embassy by people eager to leave the country, Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave could go as long as they could arrange their own passage. Cubans who had relatives in the US hurriedly begged them to charter boats and send them to Meriel Bay where thousands of desperate men, women and children waited in tents and other makeshift accommodation to make their escape before Castro changed his mind. Among them was three-year-old Dennis Fernandez (the age his son is now) who remembers being bundled onto a craft which was not the one his aunt in Miami had paid for and sent, but who cared! In the melee it only mattered that you got a place on board a boat - any boat.

The craft designed to hold about 50 people was dangerously overloaded. Dennis remembers that it was very dark and cold. They were on a shrimping vessel. The women and children were inside and the men were on the outside clutching on to the long arms which reached down into the water. Dennis recalls that at first there were many men sitting there and then after each huge wave there were a few less and then even fewer. He could see five men, then he could see three men, and then one... A terrifying experience for a little boy. The boat in front started to take on water and was sinking. Struggling passengers scrambled aboard the boat containing Dennis, his parents and his baby sister. In order to cope with the influx of more passengers everyone was instructed to throw luggage overboard. Dennis's mother arrived in Key West with both of her children safe but without the address of the relatives who were to vouch for them. They ended up in a refugee centre outside New York until her sister was able to claim them.

The next day Dennis introduced me to his mother who came to the US with nothing at the age of 30 and who has just retired as a medical officer at a cancer hospital and managed to put her daughter through law school and help her son to get started in the real estate business. She told me that when she arrived in Miami in 1980 she shaved off her long black hair and offered it as a thank offering to the life-size statue of Santa Barbara which still stands in her sister's garden.

It is estimated that between April and the end of October 1980 125,000 Cubans fled from Castro.  The 'Merielitos' as they became known were initially welcomed with open arms by Jimmy Carter's government but tensions were heightened when it was discovered that Castro had opened the prisons and mental institutions and basically transported all his undesirables, along with the genuine refugees, to the US.  In October of 1980 the flow of desperate Cubans was brought to an end.

From Key Largo to Key West, in every restaurant and shop there rings out the cry, 'You're welcome!' In this country which prides itself on freedom, for many this welcome was a matter of life and death. For millions of people from every nation in the world this has been the land of opportunity - the place to live out the American Dream. Coming from a part of the world where being miserable is our national sport, it was fun to soak up the US welcoming spirit as well as the sun.

We still couldn’t work out, however, when it's such a multi-cultural society, how everybody's granny was Irish!