Diaries

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 4

My mother’s brother, Fr. Ed Hogan, a Catholic priest, invited me to travel with him to Ireland in the winter of my eighteenth year. He would lead a retreat near Nenagh, County Tipperary, where some of our relations lived, and research further our Hogan family genealogy. On the chilly night when we boarded the plane at JFK, I thought of my father and mother who’d never been before to our ancestral homeland. I thought of our old pastor, Father Quinn and his roses and the Irish nuns and their long-gone wimples. I thought of my thick-brogued grandmother who refused to speak about her native country. I thought of my long-lost pen pal Mary O’Connor from Northern Ireland. All of them I’d packed into my Samsonite suitcase as if we were sailing to the moon. When I landed in Ireland, my relations in firm embrace looked at me and said, “Welcome Home.” I understood “welcome”– but “home?!” Home was 6000 miles away –30 miles from Hollywood, 10 miles from Disneyland, five yards from the old leprechaun tree in my backyard…or was it? (More on the audio diary.)

Reflections and Momentos from My 1970s Ireland Journal 

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 3

Such search for identity–identity being code for how we belong to the world–contravenes the logical matriculations of our conscious days. Virginia Woolf writes of time’s superficial “orderly and military progress” and how deep below resonates “a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.” My leprechaun tree in the backyard, my “half-finished sight,” kept me running between garden and house to announce new life–to proclaim that I was part of something larger than myself, something mysterious and beautiful.

These first images of childhood reveal themselves as soulful harbingers within thin spaces. These thin spaces–a Celtic notion that denotes the place of connection between the local material world and the liminal, eternal one–represent a pivot in how we belong to the world, in how the ground of the world opens to us, starting in childhood. The philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, calls psyche’s early landscape the first time wherein the revelation of images hold for us–in eternal fashion–intense, psychological values. Such images return us to a “cosmic memory” which is our earliest memory of belonging to the world. We don’t outgrow the connection to this fecund place that seems outside of time. It weaves the fabric of our being.

As I came of age, I sensed at a deeper level that my Irish inheritance had everything to do with that leprechaun tree, and of how I belonged to the world.  (More on the audio.)

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 3

 

My Irish-Born Grandmother, Molly, with my father, Joe (seated), my Uncle Jack and Aunt Irene. My father would never speak of his childhood. And the same goes with my grandmother. 

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County: Part 2

That faraway and even dreamier place called Ireland was iconified within the lush surroundings of our local church, St. Hedwigs, in Los Alamitos. The parish lawns were textured like moist linen and lined by endless rows of roses…Sister Mary Ita, my fourth grade teacher, told me about her niece named Mary O’Connor, who lived in County Limavady in Northern Ireland. She arranged for Mary and me to become pen pals. I prized Mary’s letters filled with lovely Irish penmanship that arrived in the blue, tissue-thin envelopes marked aero mail. We were Irish girls living on opposite sides of the world! Such are the early images of an Irish-American childhood–and the rumblings of a quest for identity–as launched in suburban Southern California…I pictured Mary in a wet country perhaps not far from all the bombs in Belfast. (This was the late 1960s.) How do I tell her about our trips to Disneyland or our backyard pool parties complete with piñata…Prosperous California tipped to the future. We could settle upon nothing for nothing could settle for long. (More by listening in!)

Ireland, 2014

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Under the Shade of the “Leprechaun” Tree

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

I grew up on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, not far from those celebrated spindles of the collective imagination: Hollywood and Disneyland.  But by the age of six, the center of my imaginal world revolved around another dazzling spectacle–the apricot tree in my backyard and its spring blooms. In April, I’d gaze up to the branches of this beloved tree, waiting for the arrival of the minuscule green buds. Once spotting them, I’d run into our house and yelp: “The leprechauns are coming!” For me, something magical was simmering, a mystical transubstantiation. The budding “leprechauns” were tricksters, evoking my deep connection to the place I knew my ancestors came from, that fabled island called Ireland…..

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

A Leprechaun Tree Grows in Orange County

Dog and God and Dog Gone

Dog and God and Dog Gone

I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal perhaps since my teenage years, but only lately do I call it as such. There is such power in honoring moments with loved ones, watching the morning birds at their feeders, smelling the wild air of the ocean and rubbing the belly of a puppy dog. Regardless of their advancing age, my dogs have always been puppies.

Puppy boys, to be specific.

Ten years ago, when realizing my husband and I were not going to be parents to humans, we decided the best way to deepen the love in our house was to invite in puppy dogs. How quickly Roscoe and Yamhill, brother springer-labs from the town of Yamhill, Oregon, became inseparable from each other and us! One was white with black spots; the other black with white spots. One was goofy and sang while the other more serious and strong-willed.

Aside from enjoying acres and miles from all our outings, I have been struck with the spirit of soul so alive in their eyes. The nudge of a paw saying it is time to get off the computer. The kiss on the leg to say it is time for a cuddle. Dogs circling the front door even before we insert the key. How the roar of their love spoke as they traveled with us loving each molecule of being.

Last July, we said goodbye to Sir Roscoe after his adventurous life of ten years. This week we said goodbye to Sweet Yamhill. The brothers are now home with each other. But oh how our home feels empty and silent as if a grand chorus has exited forever stage right.

These dogs made a mother out of me. I organized much of my work, home, and travel life around them, writing at my desk, the dogs nestled by my feet and if I/we were away, me checking social media to watch their wilderness romps at day camp. (Thank you, Erica!)

The author and Franciscan Richard Rohr dedicates his book “The Universal Christ” to his dog, Venus, who he “had to release to God” as he began this latest work (which has received blurbs from Bono, Melinda Gates, et al). How can a noted theologian and priest dedicate his great work about divine consciousness… to a dog?

From every star-lit pore in my body, I completely understand.

Sending gratitude to the dog-gone, godly dog paw prints alight in the heavens. Perhaps Roscoe and Yamhill are not so far from Venus?

Love to you forever, my puppy boys.

Dresses from the Motherlines

Growing up in sunny Southern California, we learned to look to the future, to the next wave. But as a kid I ached for stories from my past.

I spent afternoons paging through the Conlon Family Album, studying old photographs. My mother’s handwriting upon black pages.

My favorite photos were—the dresses. Dresses that belonged to my Nana, Ana Julia—Dresses adorning my mother, Mary, a bathing beauty, before she married and had children.

I loved the craft of those dresses, how they draped upon those womanly bodies, the dancing threads beholding bonds connecting mother and daughter.

Few actual stories got handed down from my Motherlines. Although my mother did tell me that Nana once sewed for her a gorgeous suit that fit like none other.

Our sewing machine sat in our family room forever.

It had been a gift from Nana to my mother upon her wedding engagement in 1949.  Then Nana’s sewing machine came west when my parents moved from New York to Los Angeles.

Nana’s sewing machine got passed down me to after my mother died in the year 2000.

I had grown up watching it—that machine looked like a metal battleship waiting for action.

Then I started making my own dresses starting age 12. Working with fabric, my body came alive in unique fashions. Each dress yelped with the possibility about living the life of a creative woman.

Reminding me of the dresses that came before, the secret bonds, the quiet remainders of the Motherlines.

“When I Skate It Just Feels Free”

Peggy Fleming Figure Skating

Peggy Fleming

I was spellbound watching the grace of skater Peggy Fleming in the 1968 Olympics. I was eight years old. It was the first time I saw a woman float, dance, leap, twirl, turn, dance, spin on actual ice. Our family grew up in Southern California playing baseball and basketball but ice-skating (watching it!) opened me up to a whole new world of what the human body in lyrical, technical self-expression could experience. This New York Times article jumped out…check out the photos. It’s like watching the ’68 Olympics, all over again. xoxo

From The New York Times:
‘When I Skate It Just Feels Free’

Sending Cello Love

Sending Cello Love

My Cello with Cozy Dog

I’ve been taking cello lessons off and on for about nine years. I consider myself a ripe beginner. Growing up, I played the piano. That was my go-to instrument. Sitting in our corner living room, the light streaming in, I played lots of Neil Young, CSNY, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Cat Stevens, Stevie Wonder, a few classical pieces, and lots of free-floating improv. In my 40s, though, I was ready to embark upon a new musical adventure. I’d seen a band play in Ireland a decade earlier, struck by the woman on stage and the bold sound she produced with her cello. I told myself someday I’d learn that instrument.

During my cello lesson today, my teacher asked in what direction do I send my music when I play. In what corner of the room do the waves emanating from my C, G, D and A strings land? I sat baffled. When I play, I told him, it’s just me and my cello. I think not about context!  I’m just trying to get things right, the fingering position, the bow hold, the bow stroke, playing the correct notes. I never thought about sending out waves of music.  That sounds so “out there” and when I play, I am so “in here” trying to master the damn thing. In fact, I could draw a metaphorical box around myself as I practice this beguiling instrument. Cozy, but confining?

I’ll never touch the stratosphere of Yo-Yo Ma; my natural ability and confidence level remain multiple light years away. Still I appreciate the wisdom in the words of my teacher. Rather than focus on my lack of proficiency and my goal “to arrive” musically, I  ponder the possibility of sending music out into surrounding space as an offering of my passion and grace, as an invitation to the dance, inimical to the Bach minuet I’m learning. Imagine circles, not sharp angles. Imagine ripple effects. Imagine emotion.

Learning the cello is a metaphor for my heartstrings, too. To what corner of the room, or world, can I send bold waves of love? Far from heavenly skies of stellar perfection, what bold sound can I produce that resonates with another aspiring creative soul out there? Music is the yearning to connect with the intimacy and mystery that resides within us all.

And so it is: another day of practice. May it be so, boldly.

 

 

 

 

Gunshots, Grief, Grace: Write the Beginning Poem

 

Write a beginning poem.

That is the only way to start what might become an advanced poem—not that advanced poems even exist at all!

Poems are beginning.

Poems are swimmers in the sea, angling one direction, subject to big swells, the pull of the current—and there you are feeling coldness of the salt water coating you, the pink horizon nudging you closer, making you feel hungry for lunch. Perhaps a tuna fish sandwich?

I have one poem called “The Corner Fiddler.” I’ve been working on it for ages, since I first traveled to Ireland—where my people come from. Sometimes I take my beginning poem out of the drawer, wondering which way it will go next. I try to be patient. Poems operate on their own time frames.

I get quiet, listen to sounds of the letters, how vowels and consonants sway together like wind rustling through trees.

“The Corner Fiddler” goes like this:

A gray ocean wave, a blue chord crash off

Ancient cliffs in County Clare. How go their

Songs as you wander down a small

Road at night, listening to the fiddler and

Firefly lanterns flickering, thinking you might

Like to hum a tune to yourself: a melody that rises and falls

Like the paper-white gulls circling above.

Poems have been my refuge long before I knew what the word therapy meant. As a young person, I’d walk the streets of my Southern California neighborhood and observe the scene —inspect the world around me, noticing how words, like fairies, would land upon my tongue, feeling as if they had wings, asking to fly, sounds hoping to be uttered by me. Honestly!

Then I’d bicycle over to my friend Joanne’s, who’d just moved to California from New York. We’d sit together on the cool, cement, front stoop chatting about what teens chat about. When day became night, I’d look up to darkness, and wham—it was as if I had fallen into a trance—as I’d begin reciting poetry to the moon, riffing, wild poetry off the cuff. I felt a little crazy, but it calmed my heart.

When I reflect upon that time now, I realize the poems started showing up soon after the murder that shook my family.

Spoiler Alert Warning: If you haven’t yet read my memoir, FBI Girl, you may want to come back to this diary entry later after you’ve read this coming-of-age story. Otherwise, here it goes:

My dearest uncle, a Catholic priest who served the disenfranchised in a rough part of Queens, New York, was shot in the heart and murdered in his rectory on Mother’s Day. I was 13-years-old. My father, a special agent for the FBI, took a midnight flight to New York. When eventually he arrived back home, my father never uttered a word about the murder, the loss of his brother, the trauma to the soul. He stuffed it inside. I have no doubt that the repressed grief eventually killed my father way before his time.

Fathers and daughters have special relationships, and I could not ignore my father’s stony silence. So I decided to put onto the page the emotion he could not express—life’s amazing beauty always in struggle with life’s inexplicable agony. At a young age, I learned all about paradox. Perhaps you did too—you know—some event in your life that marks the before period and the after period.

A few weeks ago, in my hometown in Oregon, I joined the March for Our Lives demonstration in unity with the Stoneman Douglas High School students of Parkland, Florida, and with each step thought of all the young people whose lives have been shattered by gunshots.

There are two things I can attest to: your life is never the same once you’ve witnessed the effects of murder. You don’t outgrow the grief. Grief fertilizes your heart so that you may grow a force field of compassion; a connection to your real self; and a determination to better this world in your own unique way.

But how to get there when your heart still hurts?

Consider writing your own beginning poem.

Find a blank page or a blank screen to hold your words that are wilder than the wild swells around you.

Let the words rise and fall. Let them roll off our tongue.

Read your poem out loud. Read it to a friend. Feel how you feel.

Put the poem down and imagine setting it free.

Close your eyes and listen, as the words come back singing to you:

A gray ocean wave, a blue chord crash off

Ancient cliffs in County Clare. How go their

Songs as you wander down a small

Road at night, listening to the fiddler and

Firefly lanterns flickering, thinking you might

Like to hum a tune to yourself: a melody that rises and falls

Like the paper-white gulls circling above.

Start your beginning poem now—it may help grief transform into grace.

The beginning poem never ends.

It is always life giving back to you.

Maura Diaries: The Power of a Clumsy Hello

A fertile revolution challenging the status quo carved the social landscape of the 1960s. The events that had us riveted to the TV mirrored another one experienced in my childhood home, albeit one with a quieter face. In 1966, My youngest brother was born with what was called Mongoloidism. Mental retardation wasn’t cause for marches on the street. It was hush-hush news.

The scientific explanation for Down syndrome echoes as a fait accompli: A genetic abnormality occurs in mitosis with an additional 21st chromosome, and this accounts for an array of intellectual and developmental challenges. As a kid that meant little, beguiled as I was by the poem my mother had placed next to my brother’s crib: A meeting was held far from the earth. It’s time again for another birth, said the angels to God above. This child will need much love.

I was in the second grade when Joe was born. My parents didn’t learn of his diagnosis for months—after all these babies had long been sent to institutions and forgotten. But it was the ‘60s; the times were changing; Joe came home to be with us—two brothers and two sisters. Still, I noticed how my father, a special agent for the FBI, started smoking more cigarettes at night as my mother shed tears in the privacy of our living room. My emotions went underground until my teacher, a concerned nun, phoned home one night. She asked my mother why I had become so sad.

Her phone call instigated what became the first, of many, Official Conlon Family Meetings, presided over by my mother. We had reached the switchback going from Life Before Joe to Life With Joe: My brother’s birth was considered by many a “tragedy.” Our mission, if we chose to accept it, was to discover what the tragedy masked with instinct as our only guide.

I don’t want to romanticize the landscape of “intellectual disability.” Such often-called “accidents of nature” can cause heartbreak. The boy you envisioned as a quarterback can’t tie his shoelaces until age ten. The girl who might become a rock star instead boards the bus for special school. Opportunities have widened for people like Joe. Still, these children are paradigm busters. You don’t hear about them in wedding vows. And mothers and fathers who do devote their lives to raising them worry about what will happen when parents are gone.

All I know is that back then, I was Joe’s sister. Sister of Joe, S-O-J, the sister who helped him brush his teeth and get into his PJs; who took him trick-or-treating; who cheered when he ran, very slowly, in track and field at the Special Olympics. Voted Most Quiet in the eighth grade, I was the “pathologically shy” girl and he the “severely retarded” boy. We were a team.

I learned to understand Joe by following his eyes and lips, interpreting his one-syllable, often indecipherable utterances using intuition, pantomime and, later, sign language. I discovered he could remember words if I sang him songs, so I’d play the piano and sing Sunshine on My Shoulders or It’s a Small World then pause. He’d reach for the missing word as if it were a star from the sky.

Plagued by my own shyness, I watched as Joe scattered joy. After school he’d stand on our corner sidewalk and wave HELLO! to every passing car. The drivers, coming home from work, might crack a smile, some rolling down their window and waving hi back to the Down syndrome boy. Joe approached people in restaurants, the super market, ballparks, and church, extending his eager handshake and uttering his clumsy hello. Nobody was a stranger.

My father the special agent was a gravely quiet and sometimes cynical man, but he fell in love with my brother—you might say he became obsessed with Joe—taking him for ice cream cones, or to the local playground so Joe could drive his motorized go cart. After biting into his sandwich one day, my father quipped that normal people were really the retarded ones. Perhaps his work in the shadowy underworld shaped his sentiment. But I could decipher my father’s words, too: Joe annihilated the walls we “normals” spent our lives constructing. Joe connected us to our hearts and taught us how to live in the moment.

After all these years, my parents long gone, Joe and I, still sing songs together even though we live 1000 miles apart. I call him on the phone and ask:

“Joe, ready?”

“Yeah sure!”
Okay! “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me…”
“—Happy!”

Even as our present day landscape reflects so many social clashes and the ever-pervasive fear of the other, I am grateful for the lesson I learned from Joe: that despite our vulnerabilities, or maybe because of them, the world needs us, you know, we so-called normal ones, to scatter joy, to reach out, and maybe offer our own version of a clumsy, hello.

Maura and brother Joe