Diaries

The Race is Now

Race.

I’ll start with my brother, Joe Jr.

He was born with Down syndrome and in his youth, participated in the Special Olympics. Track and Field.

At the starting line, all the kids in bright colors jumped up and down in glee.

With the whistle, they were off and running. Yes, running in their own unique, slower and delighted kind of way. Including my brother Joe Jr. with his big grin.

Applause and cheers from the stands, smell of grass sweet, and then around the third minute, one racer tripped and fell. The crowd gasped. I imagined the other racers were feeling adrenaline, given that with one competitor down, each had a greater chance for victory.

But what happened is this: when the runner ahead saw that his competitor had fallen, he moaned what sounded like: “Man down.” All runners turned. When they saw their buddy on the track, fallen and rubbing his knee, they each stopped. They reversed direction, made their way back to the fallen competitor, helped him back up.

I can’t remember if the race continued.

Tears welled up in my eyes. Oh these retarded ones, that’s what Joe Jr was called when he was born. Retarded. Mongoloid. How my face would burn bright in embarrassment when I heard these words from my classmates. “You have no idea the love you’re missing out on!” I wanted to scream.  But didn’t. Too shy. Too withdrawn. Feeling way too much.

How do we stand for the other after they’ve fallen and need a hand? So many distractions these days, who can focus, let alone shed a tear?

Other thoughts on race:

When I was 13 years of age, my uncle, an activist priest, was murdered. The intruder entered his rectory in Queens, NY to steal money after Mother’s Day Mass then shot my uncle in the heart. My uncle never locked his rectory door. This always worried his brother, my father, a special agent for the FBI, the agency headed by J. Edgar Hoover snooping in on Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life. 

King’s dream for social justice inspired my NYC priest uncle. Perhaps the same with my father, but his job demanded silent obedience to the boss. My father adored Joe Jr. He knew the reality of disenfranchisement as witness to his son’s being relegated as outside the “normal” status quo. Those Special Olympians who stopped their race and helped the fallen one, yes, we have much to learn from them, the word “race” to be updated with new meaning. 

The man who killed my uncle, Father John Conlon, was released from jail last year. He was one of New York’s longest serving prisoners, serving 50 years of a life sentence. Was he a Black man or a White man? Yes. One of the two. But we didn’t talk Race after this loss. Rumor is this young man knew my uncle and that’s why he shot him, fearing he’d be identified. 

My uncle’s closest friend, Father O’Brien–who I met in New York decades later, after the publication of FBI Girl—recited the eulogy at my uncle’s packed funeral mass in 1973, attended by Mayor John Lindsay and other dignitaries. I have the recording on cassette tape, listened to all those years later. My eyes welled up hearing Father O’Brien say that my uncle forgave his killer even before his soul reached Heaven.

I fathom forgiveness, when someone breaks your heart, when someone takes a life. 

For me, it was easier in the past to push emotion down. 

I had my own dream the other night. Members of a cult were chasing after me, trying to recruit me. Strongmen ready to take me down.  I escaped them all with my cunning then drove my vehicle right into the walls of my childhood Catholic Church in Los Alamitos, California, proclaiming: “This is the church of my origin.”

But there’s no turning back to that. Religion and race are both words asking for recall and updates regarding truth and compassion, especially regarding the invitation for strong women to speak wise voices into the tired void: 

Resist the cult of the status quo. 

Help the one who has fallen. 

Start with the one who’s been silenced inside. That’s what I tell myself. And if your heart’s been broken, may tears well up and soften it with green rains that soak the thirsty hills.  

The time is ripe.

The race is now.

(Written on January 15, in remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr.)

This Sea Season

by Maura A. Conlon

Her body could wait no longer.

That’s how it happens, how a woman

Leaves for the hills or the sea, when the

One she loves is lured by quicksand, 

The quest for heroics, needing to be

a lauded one.

But far below his crown ascendant shimmered 

the sweetest red rose,

Perhaps you can smell it, the

one—in another lifetime—he might

Have draped along her smooth thigh 

at night,

Peering into her eyes, 

Trusting, finally, his own tidal song, how

She’d stood at the water’s edge, all along.

Waiting.

–September swirls, and the sunset sea bathes her body.

A seal alights, creates ripples, slithers into the

Ocean whose tides deepen to rose red.

She unloosens her skin’s threads, 

Weaves a blessing upon the green linen land,

Which blesses her in return, no second thought, 

no hesitation, at all.

This is love, she whispers: the wink of surrender,

The pulse of the wild current,

Holding her flesh in ecstasy, this sea season.

In Transport

by Maura A. Conlon

Her studio glows like Grand Central Station

in the middle of a plaza

in the middle of some Ocean

in the middle of the world

Astronomers come by for coffee, unfurl their charts

Metro bus drivers pull up seeking change for a $20

while composers and candle makers wire light with

music as they sit atop the dark.

Wild blue wind stirs jagged palm fronds

as fashion designers circle Matisse-like pillows

and speak of new lines of tartan skirts pleated

just above the knees.

At the end of the day which never ends

Ireland hums a tidal tune–no war songs or tales of blood–

only the mountain of a woman rising from the depths,

stringing her mane of seaweed hair around bows and decks of

ships that follow, in transport

to her studio

in the middle of a plaza

in the middle of some Ocean,

in the middle of your world.

My Chat with Vince Scully, Bard of the L.A. Dodgers

My Chat with Dodger Bard Vince Scully

Vince Scully was a bard, a storyteller, a conduit beaming out to many the athletic prowess dancing upon the green fields below him. My parents had moved from NYC to Los Angeles in the 1950s, the same time the Brooklyn Dodgers made themselves similar transplants. An eager journalist, I called Dodger Stadium one day to inquire if Mr. Scully might be available for an interview to be published in Orange Coast Magazine. Honoring this conversation with him in the Dodgers press box from nearly 40 years ago. Rest in the green fields of peace, Mr. Scully.

Read the article here

A Blessing for This Spring Day

Images tap into the root of our soul, the place of our longing, where we remember how we belong to a force of love greater than what can be uttered upon our tongue. A simple bow to the light that sustains us, to the flow that reminds how each step we take with our hearts illuminated creates new hopeful patterns within the dance of life.

Love, Maura

Place of Love & Love of Place

Our family has loved and lived close to the ocean for generations. Here, sitting, are my great grandmother, originally from Germany, with her daughter, my Nana, and then her daughter, my mother, Mary (maybe age 18 then) all upon the sands of the Atlantic Ocean. Along side stands Uncle Mike. Breezy Point, NY was our family’s ocean place for decades. Family and friends enjoyed the beach bungalow on Oceanside Avenue from1933 to just a few years ago when it was time to let it go.  “All you need in Breezy Point is your bathing suit,”my Nana once said.

When my parents left New York and moved to California in the 1950s, they found new beaches to love. Here I am as an infant, reveling upon the sands of Mission Bay, San Diego with my mother back in the early 1960s. I still remember the fabric of that bathing suit.

The decades have passed, yet recently some of our family members (my brother, Mike and my niece, Megan) took my youngest brother Joe, who has Down syndrome, out for a boat ride on Mission Bay. Grabbing the wheel, his face lit up as the evening sun spread its golden hue upon us. Calm thrill is the emotion here.

Grateful for places of love and love of places that sustain when the rest of life can feel off-kilter.

And a sweet nod to our sea friends. Thank you, ocean, for beholding our awe.

On Race and Love: Let Us Find New Eyes

Eulogy for Father John Conlon

When I was a teenager, I used to sit in my corner bedroom in our house in Southern California and talk into my tape recorder, sharing musings, thoughts about life, questions about human nature. So much had happened in our family’s life by the time I was 13-years-old. In May of 1973, my father’s brother, a socially progressive Catholic priest, was murdered in his rectory in Queens, New York. My uncle, you could say, was a “white man.” The person who killed him you could call an “African-American man.” We just didn’t think that way, then. This was a terrible loss. The heart punctured.  My father, an FBI agent, who had lost his brother, could say nothing about it. The tragedy ran too deep. The priest at St. Bonaventure in Queens, my uncle’s best friend, who said the homily during that funeral mass, proclaimed that the murderer was forgiven the moment my uncle’s spirit arrived to heaven.

Compassion. Forgiveness. Love. We are all brothers and sisters.

All these decades later, this is the sentiment and hope that remain within me. How can we despite the color of our skins look at one another in the eye as brothers and sisters on this same Earth together? This is a lesson I learned so many decades ago. And it is a conversation I know we all are eager to share in today.

May it be so.

 

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 7

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

I recall a conversation with Irish-born journalist and author, Claire Dunne, who tells me how in 17th-century Ireland, when the old Gaelic order began to crumble, that “war on harpists and their instruments peaked when Queen Elizabeth I edicted death on them.” She notes how Cromwell from England destroyed their harps, and how people were forced to hide their musical instruments in the bogs…I realized how hiding one’s harp is synonymous with hiding one’s soul. The great waiting ends when one doesn’t have to hide anymore. In years to come, I would tell my own story, write my memoir (published as “FBI Girl”), where I expose the journey of learning to belong to the world amid all the silence.

I dream that from the ancient Irish bogs emerged an apricot tree on the other side of the world– in Los Alamitos, California, to be specific–beckoning a young girl with an Irish name to prance around its trunk and proclaim the “leprechauns” are coming! The philosopher Bachelard writes of loving things “intimately, for themselves, with the slowness of the feminine, that is what leads us to the labyrinth of the intimate nature of things.” With the slowness of the feminine…that is how I discovered an intimacy with cosmos which is my Irishness. I notice the sky and her belongings, the water and her reflections. I see into a self who dances and have found the mirror of my people.

Maura Conlon McIvor

Maura Conlon-McIvor

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 6

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Ireland, 1987

Taunted by the secrecy and silence within the trauma, I returned to Ireland after I graduated from college and visited my Great Aunt Johanna on the ancestral farm. I decided to surprise her with no advance warning of my arrival. When she answered the door, her shock collapsed into flitting anger: “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were coming, I would have killed a goose?!” We settled in for tea and sandwiches. My great aunt examined the photographs I’d brought from California, inquiring how close our family lived to Hollywood. Then, before I could pull out my notebook with the carefully crafted questions I’d hoped to ask, questions about our ancestors, the farm, and their traditions, Aunt Johanna blurted with visceral concern: “And who do you think it was that killed J.R.?”  Dallas, the wildly popular, 1980s American television show had come to Mullagh, Ireland. And she wanted to know everything. I realized then I’d have to find the buried stories elsewhere. I started reading the Irish authors, James Joyce, WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde…looking for clues into that forlorn condition of “waiting.” Or as Seamus Deane writes, that “specifically Irish form of nostalgia…This nostalgia was consistently directed toward a past that was so deeply buried that it was not recoverable except for sentiment.” Yes, that sentiment. The faraway look in my grandmother’s eyes and in my father’s eyes, that sentiment courting me in the quest for my own identity. (more on the Audio Diary.)

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County, Part 5

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Back in the United States, the old conversation remained: “Don’t you dare ask me about that damned country, do you hear?” My Irish grandmother, who’d worked in New York as a seamstress, said this holding a needle, but it may as well have been a knife. I tried to understand the source of her pathos–that she had to leave Ireland or that she had no desire to ever return. Perhaps it was the Irish koan, the double bind–damned if you stay and damned if you go–that led to this waiting station disconnected from story or place. In alchemical terms, the base metals underlying this waiting station remain untouched, the soul’s prima materia not worked, the pain not metabolized. The resulting trauma of exile, of not knowing how one belonged to the world, manifested in the great waiting–but waiting for what? If place has vanished and with it story, what happen’s to one’s narrative? It waits underground, in darkness, praying for re-emergence, for a spot of soil to nudge so life can begin anew…Rebecca Solnit writes, “Trauma is inherited as silence, a silence it may take generations to hear.” It would be the next generation, my generation, who would say enough to the secrecy…enough to the wait. We would dig past the genealogical charts and venture down into psyche’s bogs. We would sniff for the stories long buried, the poems etched on skeletons. We would re-claim the thin spaces. Life would begin anew.

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

The Burren