Bells and Babies

I was at the dentist the other day and it struck me that his gentle talk was designed to conceal the torture he was about to inflict. I needed a replacement filling because the one he put in a fortnight ago came out with the muesli the next morning. Full of apologies, he injected my gum with a ‘Just a little scratch’ and sent me off to wait five minutes for the big freeze. Suitably benumbed, I returned to the big chair where he settled me back and said, ‘Just a little water then.’ Just a little water? He was hovering over me with a mini pneumatic drill and he thought he should warn me that the dental nurse would be squirting a jet of cold water into my mouth! Of course, that’s what I want when I’m in the dentist’s chair – reassurance, lies even, if it makes the whole experience more bearable.

We pretend all the time, making believe that things are not quite what they seem because the truth is too terrible. We’re in the throes of a very busy time: two weddings and a baby over the next few months and if another person says it sounds like a film, I shall scream. Wedding #1 is in less than a fortnight. Our darling baby girl is going to leave us and go to live with a boy and the man and I are pretending it’s all ok.

At the hen weekend we dressed her up in a big fat wedding dress and the trashy guests paraded her on the Lisburn Road. For some reason I had been instructed by the bridesmaids to come dressed as the father of the bride so I wore the man’s tux, got mistaken for a lesbian and made a speech which concluded:

It’s hard for me as her father

To lose her to another man
I hope he takes care of her as I have done
My pain no one understands

For I have loved having her at home

To brighten up my days
And I am going to miss her
In oh so many ways

For she has been my sunshine

Every day and every hour
Please raise your glasses to the bride
My beautiful sunflower!

We love her fiance (although I’m not sure about the animal print babygro he wore on his stag this weekend) and so does she, but do we really have to let her go without a struggle? We will all dress up, that’s if I can walk in the shoes I bought online, and smile for the cameras and dance till dawn but what we’re really doing is giving her away! Just like that! In one short ceremony, she will become someone else’s responsibility, for life! I’m not sure that I can bear it. I gathered all the photos of her together before the hen do and I cried for the years that have gone and can never be recovered. She is my precious girl and now she’s getting married. She can’t wait; I can.

Once it’s over the whole shebang begins again for another wedding next June. This time we’re giving our daughter away to a foreigner – a South African, no less. His mother came to stay this week to meet her future daughter-in-law and check out our mad family. She is lovely and we had a good time together but she and I both acknowledged that in the future one of is going to be apart from our children and grandchildren. We actually smiled and pretended that that’s ok too. What’s wrong with us? 

And then there were the cupcakes. Our eldest daughter and her husband invited us over for dinner and served us delicious homemade cupcakes for dessert. Each one was decorated with our names in honour of the occasion. What occasion? I could not see my name but the cake labelled ‘Gogo’ was clearly for me. Gogo? Gogo is a term used in Africa for an old grandmother!  The man’s cake said ‘Papa’. Naturally we are delighted that they’re pregnant but it’s a massive change in our roles and relationships. Their cakes said ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’, but I’m the mummy, aren’t I?

In a time of such massive fluctuation, is anything staying the same? No! Our children are children no longer and their lives and loves are blossoming and bearing fruit. We cannot hold back the tide of change but sometimes it feels like our time is over and all we can do now is cheer from the stands. How’s that for a mixed metaphor? Have I done enough to prepare her for married life? Have I been a good enough role model?

I love Stanley Kunitz’s poem The Layers where he asks,

How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

He hears a voice which instructs him to live in the layers, not the litter. The only way forward is to step over the debris of the past, embrace the changes and welcome the new people, married, in-laws and as yet unborn and allow them to enrich who I am so that I can become who they need for the future.  I don’t have to pretend it’s all easy but I can choose to say bring on the bells and babies and whatever adventures lie ahead.

I turn
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go,
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me…

No doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Pick Jesus

It amazes me that two people can part for five weeks and each travel thousands of miles in opposite directions on various safe and not-so-safe means of transport by road, air and rail and arrange to meet up at exactly 9.15am at the Meeting Point at the International Airport on a particular date and both actually arrive there! My father often used to pray for ‘journeying mercies’ and the man and I are thankful for those.

The wandering minstrel has returned intact. While on tour the band members were given all sorts of gifts and mementos, including a plectrum which says, ‘Pick Jesus’! At one gig in Portland an enthusiastic fan bounded up to him and asked, ‘Could you please sign my coconut?’ ‘How exactly,’ I asked, ‘does one sign a hairy coconut?’ With a sharpie, apparently.

When you go away for a long time you miss things. I missed my son’s graduation – LLB (Hons) from the University of Reading. We are very proud and the man flew over for the ceremony and attendant liquid celebrations at the School of Law. Our son is our baby and it’s scary to think that he’s the last to finish his primary degree. More thankfulness.

I wasn’t there to gush and coo and cry but I did write him a card quoting from an ancient prophet who attempted to define what God wants from a young man. ‘He has shown you what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’  As our warrior son heads out into the world of ethics and judgement, I am hoping that he will aim high and identify with those who need someone to speak out for justice and mercy on their behalf.

So Congratulations, my boy, and best wishes for the next stage in this legal adventure! Congrats too to his girlfriend, Connie, who is about to embark on a Master’s in International Relations. May you both make a difference.

Letting India In

It’s a couple of weeks since I returned from India and as the days go by it isn’t getting any easier to process the dirt, the smells, the colour, the industry, the poverty, the squalor, the vibrancy and the sheer press of people. The traffic is amazing and after spending two or three days thinking that I and my charges were going to perish on the roads, I began to admire the swerve and dodge of the skilled Indian drivers. It’s the cattle on the roads that take the biscuit. There they loll or lie while cars, buses, auto rickshaws and motorbikes roar round them blasting dirty fumes into their weary eyes.  I know they’re considered sacred because of their status but it doesn’t seem to me that they’re cherished at all. Surely that can’t be better for them than the lush green fields of confinement endured by our own dear fresians?

Anyway, eighteen pupils from three NI schools, Catholic and Protestant, taught in three Indian schools. We arrived in Delhi where we visited the Taj Mahal. We then travelled eight hours north by train to Dehradun and from there further north again to Mussoorie where we taught for four days in a school in Kaplani – fabulous mountain scenery shrouded in mist. On the Friday we trekked two and a half hours in torrential monsoon rain to visit a tiny two roomed school in the mountains. When we arrived soaked through we tried to teach by shouting over the rain pounding on, and in several places through, the tin roof. Our materials were sodden but we persisted with basic colouring and counting until we were forced out back into the rain to clamber up the mountainside again, accompanied by tiny tots walking home from school without coats, parents or even proper shoes. That has since been remedied because now those same children have new brollies and will also have lunch in school, thanks to Saphara.

In the second week we returned to Dehradun where we taught in a much larger school with 1100 children, the vision of Dr Reeta who gave up her work in a mission hospital to start a school for the ‘untouchables’ from the slums. It was amazing to meet the teachers and pupils. I taught some songs and rhymes to a class of seventy toddlers. The enthusiastic teacher echoed my words in her very own version of ‘The elephant goes like this and that…’ Her concluding line was, ‘But goodness of creation, what a nose!’ and why not?

I was saddened and fascinated by India – I was a teacher in charge of seventeen-year-olds and so could not wander at will and take time to explore and reflect. However, I did spend half an hour watching the world waken one morning and penned these thoughts:

I am sitting here at the window with India out and me in. Apparently it is too dangerous for me to venture out alone. Who is going to harm me – the frail frame of a woman of indeterminate age who is awakening from her sleep on the hard pavement opposite? She stirs, sits up watches the dogs scavenging in the road and then lies down again, drawing her faded sari around her tousled head.

Beside her on the narrow walkway brown and dirty white sheets are draped from the railing to the road in a kind of half tent. I wonder who lives under there. The woman sits again and turns her back to the road. No one disturbs her; no one walks on the pavement – people live on the pavement. The road is the place: motor bikes, auto rickshaws, buses, bicycles, cars, pedestrians and always, always horns blazing ‘Coming through.’

We are caught in this moment of time together, she and I. We will share this day in Dehradun; we may even breathe the same air as it blusters across the junction, swirled by the build-up of morning rush hour traffic. Now she sits lotus-like rubbing her aching bones. She lights a cigarette and waits.

Who is she and what is her name?
Who am I and what is my name?

I catch sight of mine written on a water bottle so that no one can steal it. What a privilege to have a bottle of fresh, clean water of my very own. But what is my life if I cannot even share this water with my nameless, hopeless friend?  I open the door and let India in. I take my water and my name and I cross the road to give it to my sister.

Journey with Purpose

 I have returned from my trip with Saphara to India. The charity takes teachers and teams of sixth formers from schools in both sectors here to teach in schools for the poorest of the poor there. Fifty-four young people are going this summer to bring interactive learning and love to gorgeous little lives in the slums of Dehradun and the remote areas in Kaplani. Sitting on a train for eight hours as we travelled north I learned how to make friendship bracelets and penned a poem – all to avoid using the squat toilet!

India arrives, an assault to my senses.

She plays with my mind and my defences.

Splashes of colour and ‘rainy’ and wet,

People who smile and survive and hurt.

Literally sleeping on the job,

Driving in the care of a monkey god.

Beggars and hawkers along the way

‘Please mam sahib’ There’ll be hell to pay!

The sun rising, an Indian dawn

Waking to the orchestra of horns.

What is it to us, this India we see?

Is it nothing to you, nothing to me?

Or is it possible, one child at a time

To make of this chaos some reason, some rhyme?

Is the God of creation watching the pain

Of the child who pleads again and again,

‘Please come and help us, give us rupees’?

What can I give him? I can give me.

From a child of plenty to a child deprived

The gift of today, to change her life and mine.

Balls on the Falls

My daughter and her husband are returning soon from Africa. They have been working and travelling for the best part of two years and as we speak are tidying up loose ends and saying final farewells to the sun and space. In their journey through South Africa, the DRC, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi they have encountered all sorts in a region that has known division and prejudice as black, white, coloured and Indian vie with one another for territory and the right to belong.

Now they’re coming home to a more familiar war. Norn Iron has been in the news again, and for all the wrong reasons. The marching season madness has begun and rioters have been back on the streets, hurling stones and abuse. The Short Strand is a Catholic enclave in the predominantly Protestant East Belfast where violence has erupted in recent weeks. A ‘peace line’ separates those living at the interface but no wall is high enough to keep out hatred and bigotry.

In recent years we’ve been processing peace. Kerbstones painted in patterns of red, white and blue or green, white and gold have been neutralised and cultural images in praise of sports personalities and epic events, such as the building of Titanic (‘She was all right when she left us’) have replaced ugly paramilitary pictures on gable walls. But something sinister is happening. A recently revamped mural in East Belfast depicts a post apocalyptic background with a single masked gunman clasping a weapon. This in response to a West Belfast mural unveiled in May to mark the 30^th anniversary of hunger striker, Bobby Sands’ death, with three masked IRA gunmen firing over a coffin. At that time emblazoned across a wall on a Protestant street, in a horrible attempt at humour, were the words, ‘We will never forget you Billy Sands.’

Slogans and symbols are so significant. Another new edifice will greet the happy campers on their return. Sam will be working at the Royal on Belfast’s Broadway where a 37.5 metre construction now towers on the horizon visible from both sides of the community. ‘RISE’ is the creation of Nottingham artist, Wolfgang Butress, and consists of an enormous globe crafted in silver and white steel with another suspended inside, symbolising the sun rising on a new era of peace and harmony. The sculpture has already been affectionately dubbed ‘The Balls on the Falls’ and will rest on a bed of reeds which speak of our natural heritage. Perhaps it’s too soon and we’re really just bog men all, incapable of moving forward and making peace with our neighbour. The murals and the sculpture have been completed just in time for the Twelfth. I wonder how long it will be before some hooded idiot will scale the sphere and hang a flag there to claim it as their own?

I’m off to India tomorrow, where whole people groups are deemed ‘untouchable’. I’m taking six pupils from the school where I teach to join with pupils from two other schools: Catholic and Protestant young people working together to prepare and teach English lessons in three schools. We will wear Indian clothes and attempt to absorb a new culture. We will talk about the privilege of education, the pain of poverty and the challenge of making a difference.

Gandhi said: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ and in response to the question: ‘What can you do to promote world peace?’ Mother Teresa replied: ‘Go home and love your family.’

Loving the person next to us is something we can all do. Welcome home, Beth and Sam. See you when I get back!

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was locked in a tower at Trinity College, Dublin. There she was forced to draw blood from the others imprisoned there with her to store in vials and mingle with nameless orange liquids. She wore a white coat and slid her slender fingers into long gloves under a wide hood. There she sat for hours, longing for love and rescue.

Her sister was far away, crafting words and clay under a rainbow sky. She had begun to climb to new heights and often scaled cliff sides in the care of a handsome guide. He was swift as a mountain goat and as secure as he skipped from rock to rock. His feet were sure and his heart was strong, strong as the Drakensberg which he loved.

One day he saw an image of loveliness – a likeness of the sister locked in the tower far away in a land of wet and green. She too saw an image of a torso rippling under the African sky. ‘Mmm’ she drooled. Across thousands of miles a message flew to the lovely Irish colleen from the bronzed god. ‘Since we’re going to be married, maybe I should introduce myself.’

Weeks later he donned a woolly jumper and flew to the cold north where he galloped across the cobble stones at Trinity and rescued the beautiful maiden from a lifetime staring into a long, dark tunnel of graphs and data. They darted to Howth where they began to dream dreams together.

Off to the mountains of Milan, leaving a precious circle of diamonds and gold concealed in a dark corner until the day when he could ask for blessing and dare to declare his eternal love. Six months exactly to the day when they met, he knelt by the sea in that secret place of tears and hopes to promise to be ever true.

They have said goodbye for the last time. He is now far away, on a motorbike in the desert, but soon he will return to woo the lady he has won and prepare for the day when they will dance in the Morrison Room and watch the summer solstice sun set across the green as they begin a new life together.

Congratulations, Maria and Willem! We couldn’t be happier and we can’t wait for the big day.

 ‘From a far off land I summon a man to fulfil my purpose.’

Two daughters getting married! We had a quick whip round one night and collected 7p. Brian Houston has promised to double it.

Attitude and Apostrophes

I have an unhealthy fascination with signs. I always want to photograph the more amusing ones and especially those with faulty punctuation. I have been known to lick my finger and correct signs scribbled on blackboards outside shops, restaurants or market stalls.

Opposite the hospital in Dundonald, Belfast there is a large hoarding advertising a chip shop. In foot high neon letters of yellow and blue it declares that the Golden Chip promises ‘Frying at it’s best’. Already on my computer screen the little green line has appeared under the errant apostrophe. Why would someone not check this before commissioning the sign maker?

I used this in an English lesson once and my class challenged me to go in and tell them that there was a mistake on their advertising sign. I did, and was sorry. The young girl behind the counter looked as if she didn’t care about punctuation – she didn’t. To make matters worse, she had the same logo with the same mistake emblazoned on her tee-shirt. I asked her whether anyone had ever mentioned the mistake on the sign to her and she looked at me blankly. Bravely I persisted and carefully explained that the word ‘its’ only has an apostrophe when it means ‘it is’. Again, nothing. I had started so I had to finish. With less and less conviction I muttered that I knew it wasn’t her fault and that whoever had ordered the sign in the first place was to blame. By this time she was looking at me as if I was speaking in Swahili. I might as well have been. Grammar is another language which, like Maths, pupils nowadays are convinced they will never need. Yet what right had I to make her feel bad? I was finally silenced by her icy, unforgiving stare and I mumbled sheepishly, ‘Fish supper, please’. She spoke only once: ‘Salt and vinegar with them chips, love?’

I am sorry to say that I have not learnt my lesson. I attended a church conference recently where the arty and creative had the opportunity to present their efforts in the foyer. In the corner a string quartet was playing softly. One lady had displayed a vast array of vegetables in symmetrical formation, like a child’s nature table at harvest time. Upstairs the same lady had constructed what looked like a wedding cake entirely from fresh flowers. Someone else was making pink smoothies and serving them in miniature communion glasses!

A man who works in the music industry had lovingly traced the history of musical influences through the years and his title was emblazoned across the top and repeated several times below: ‘The evolution of contemporary music and it’s impact on Western thought and culture.’ Oh dear! There it was again – that intrusive apostrophe. Did I walk away, commending my friend for his effort, dedication and commitment to inform and educate? No, I didn’t. I stepped forward and gently and arrogantly covered the apostrophe with my thumb. He saw. I’ll know that there is a God who can change my wretched human heart when I resist the urge to fix things and people.

Today on a notice board outside a church I read: ‘Have you got an attitude? Try a beatitude!’ How about: 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they know when to shut up'?

Speaking of being quiet, here’s a photo my husband took in the little boys’ room in a US church. Only in America!