Lotsa love,

Suzanne

The Troubles

         Tooling through the bucolic countryside of Northern Ireland, it’s tough for an outsider to imagine “The Troubles” that have shaken this part of the Emerald Isle until recently. Copper beech trees splay their dark purple leaves across rolling farmland dotted with black-faced sheep. The peaty, fiddle-filled pubs brim with friendly men in tweed caps and wide-bosomed women serving champ and foamy Guinness. Kind of like the way my marriage was going until recently.

From the outside, all was verdant and peaceful-tender enough. My husband and I hosted dinner parties at which we’d make jokes and smile at each other. We didn’t smash dishes or use four-letter words. We even had sex once in a while. But last summer, I strolled through Ireland without a wedding band, so during my travels I understood this contradiction. County Fermanagh seemed so pastoral, what with all the lace-making and pint-pouring and cow-milking. But what appears to be wholesome and serene is only a few calendar pages away from the days of car bombs and gun-running and Bloody Sundays.

My trip to Northern Ireland was a welcome relief from my American life, where I am right smack in the middle of a divorce. Most of my travel companions had been through it, and understood when I slunk off to brood.  And I could sink into the culture of another place-a place where divorce wasn’t even legal a few years ago, by the way-and get lost in a foreign world. Each night, I settled under the downy comforter in my small room tucked into the West Wing of Crom Castle, listening to the skeltering rain outside, and reading stories about The Long War, the Famine, Ulsters, the IRA, a history of conflict going back hundreds of years. “The Troubles,” as everyone in Ireland calls them, refers to a 30-year stretch of violence that ended only a short time ago with the signing of the Belfast Agreement of 1998.

A brief history: 400 years ago British settlers (mostly Protestants) confiscated land owned by native Catholics in Northern Ireland creating the Plantation of Ulster. The Brits banned the locals from owning land; they slashed political rights, and punished those who wouldn’t conform to the Anglican Church. Not surprisingly, the Catholics didn’t care for the shoddy treatment, and over time a nationalist movement grew. The Protestants, a minority in Catholic-dominated Ireland, tended to support continuing rule from Britain. Although the situation has become much more complicated and tangled over time, those are the roots of the problem. Fundamental differences in power, in beliefs. Irreconcilable differences, you might call them.

Another brief history: My husband and I got married a decade ago. I had a couple of babies, gained forty pounds. He got depressed and played computer games late into the night. I watched my infant son poke Lincoln Logs into a slot in a box and I cried from sheer boredom. We stopped talking about much other than our children, we stopped having sex. Everyone’s got issues, I thought. So I just numbed out to our troubles. Kind of like when your Honda is making weird revving noises and you fear the solution is the brand new tranny you can’t afford, so you just close the garage gently and pray it heals itself.

In Ireland in the late 1960’s, things heated up. What began as a strategy of nonviolence got corrupted in misunderstanding. Both sides mistrusted the other; hardline unionists didn’t like the soft, civil disobedience approach, and others thought the tactics were simply a front for the IRA. Protestant loyalists attacked civil rights demonstrators. Uprisings escalated, troops were sent in. And so it continued, each side throwing punches. The IRA sprouted an aggressive, militant wing known as the Provos. One Bloody Friday in 1972, 22 bombs exploded in Belfast.

My husband and I were on vacation in Oregon with my in-laws. In bed one night, I badgered him with Big Questions: What would you do if you had six months left to live? Do you believe in an afterlife? Then, “On a scale of one to ten, where are you on the Marriage Happiness Scale?” 

He paused. “I don’t want to play this game.”

I elbowed him. “C’mon. Ten means you’re madly in love with me and one means you’re ready to walk out the door.” I grinned in the darkness, waiting for the eight, or maybe nine.

Silence.

“Honey?”

              He sighed. “Four.”

“Four??”

“You wanted to know.”

“But four!?!?”

“Okay, six.” He rolled over.

“My God!”

“It’s your game, Suzanne.”

“Yeah, but that’s what you say when you’re done with a marriage! You can’t just drop a bomb like that!!”

I huffed and puffed, and the next morning I blew out of my in-laws’ house and spent two solid hours sobbing and kicking at discarded sandcastles and staring out at the too-cold and not-at-all Pacific ocean. Four!

The British locked people up without trials. Prisoners died in hunger strikes. Ceasefires were called, then broken; paramilitaries on both sides imported arms.  Bombs went off. Grenades were launched. More atrocities against civilians. Sinn Fein (the political arm of the IRA) predicted that the war would last another twenty years. Each new flare-up reinforced the old mistrust of both sides. Each new attempt to soothe and hammer out agreements was infiltrated with the remembrance of past hurts. More cease fires. More broken agreements.  More polarization, more antagonism. President Clinton intervened to get both sides together again and talks began anew.

My husband and I started to see a therapist. We practiced hugging. We used I statements to express our feelings. (Instead of “You cretin-why didn’t you take out the recycling?” I was trained to say, “I feel frustrated when you don’t do what we agreed.” We made lists and charts of who would take the trash out and who would pick up groceries. We went out on “dates” without the kids. We did all the right things, and our marriage looked better from the outside. At Christmas, he gave me a groovy pair of white boots.  “He’s a keeper,” my mom told me. But when the party was over, I was seething with some unformed black cloud of anger, and resentful that once again, I had bought and wrapped all our children’s gifts, planned the menu, cooked all day, and entertained the kids for hours while he took a nap.

We continued therapy, but didn’t discuss the big stuff: sex, money, power. I was too scared to admit that my husband and I were deeply, fundamentally different. Like we were coming from different religions. We couldn’t talk about what mattered.  We couldn’t enjoy each other’s company. Little hurts brought up the larger, unresolved issues. We became trapped behind huge walls of resentment.

Our sex-life was as evasive as a four-leaf clover. I started to dread weekends-what on earth would we talk about? I spent my birthday in Mexico without him. He started seeing a woman, “just a friend,” and doing things with her I’d begged him for years to do with me:. tThe ballet, museums, skiing. I fumed. Retaliated. Polarization deepened. The night before he moved out, we sat at the kitchen table and I poured us two shot glasses of tequila. We drank and talked. “It’s time,” he said, “I’ve known for eight years we shouldn’t be married.” I swallowed and felt the burn.

With the signing of the Belfast Agreement (often called the Good Friday Agreement) the Troubles came to an end, politically speaking. But a few months later, a bomb went off in Omagh that killed 29 civilians, and it was the single worst incident during Tthe Troubles.  “After that, people decided they just had had enough,” Maureen, a Belfast native, tells me one night at Crom Castle. One of her best friends lost her legs in that explosion. It was a combination of the talks, the politics, and the cease fires, she told me, but ultimately, that inner shift had to take hold deep inside of people, so that they could move on and find a new way to get along. In Northern Ireland, the last decade has been relatively quiet. Mostly, people are on good behavior.

But I have not always chosen to be on my good behavior.  On the shortest night of the year in Fermanagh, I squatted in front of an enormous bonfire and sipped a stranger’s moonshine. Villagers clad in straw leaped across open flames, saying prayers of sacrifice and thanks. “It’s our way to give back,” the caller said into the blurry-sounding bullhorn. “To remember where we’ve come from.” I remembered. Remembered what my husband said on our wedding day, and how he looked in the middle of the night holding our babies over his freckeled shoulder. I remembered how hard we’d fought and cried and tried. Perched on the loose rocks of the cairn, I watched people performing an ancient ritual: of sacrifice, giving thanks, drinking up, letting go.

My husband and I split up a year ago. People who know us say, “It’s so great the way you’re handling all this-both of you are being grown up about it.” And for the most part, they’re right. Our divorce is “amicable,” a term reserved, I’ve noticed, for notably unfriendly situations. These days, we both spend a lot of time and money on lawyers and divorce coaches and child specialists. We slog through parenting plans and house appraisals, and our high-priced helpers hold our hands as we wade through the swamp of emotional and financial issues, everything from deciding how “new people” will be introduced into our children’s lives to who will pay for college.

Ireland’s troubles have reshaped its people. Underground ripples of violence, extortion, mistrust and fear still quake through the pastoral landscape from time to time. Not a single person I talked with in County Fermanagh is unscarred-all have stories to tell of uncles who’ve been maimed or a neighbor who lost their daughter or a school that was closed for two whole decades because keeping it open was simply inviting disaster. None of the people I spoke with openly took sides. Everyone just shook their heads and called it a shame. One town elder I talked with at that bonfire on the shortest night of the year said, “Too bad such civilized people couldn’t find a way to work it out.”

It is too bad when nice people can’t work it out. And sometimes partition is the answer, even if it’s painful. In Ireland, for the moment, no one is getting their legs blown off. The Orangemen still hold their parades in July and it royally ticks off the Unionists. The IRA still throws a below the belt punch now and then and everyone holds their breath. But the school in Fermanagh has been reopened. You can drive back and forth across the border and scarcely know it. Ireland has been the scene of an economic miracle:  the green tiger.

My soon-to-be ex-husband and I are trudging through a collaborative divorce, structuring Parenting Agreements, attempting to find a fair path through the jungle of finances. We are trying to move forward-without car bombs, without hunger strikes. I want to haul out a grenade launcher sometimes, like when he forgets to buy the kids a birthday present or allows them to watch The Twilight Zone while he naps. I don’t, though, because I know we have to peacefully coexist.

 But when I sit around a table full of lawyers and we carve up our children’s schedule, pore over Excel spreadsheets crammed with proposed budgets, hammer out the specifics of who gets to be with the kids Christmas Eve 2012, it fills me with a deep despair.  Every slight, every unpleasantness unearths old hurts. Every document signed is an acknowledgement of pain and failure unresolved. These days, I understand why people say that a divorce is one of the hardest things you can go through.  No, it isn’t getting your legs blown off. It isn’t famine or torture. It isn’t a war, but it is a long, protracted battle with someone you once loved. These days I understand more about how that flammable combination of loss, pain, and failure can drive nice people to do things that seem barbaric from the outside.

My trip to Ireland is a pleasant, fuzzy memory now. Back home in Berkeley, I’m settling into my divorced life. My ex-husband comes over to take the kids to school some mornings. I mostly smile and hold my tongue, even when I don’t feel like it, because the cease fire is in effect. Our lawyers are on deck, the kids are watching. It’s an uneasy peace.  But even though we occasionally joke with each other, or laugh about a New Yorker cartoon, I’m different toward him, hardened. Like the buildings dotting County Fermanagh, so tricked out with steel walls and gun turrets they look like fortresses. “Do they still need those?” I asked Maureen on my last day in Northern Ireland, as we sped by a police station nearly buried in razor wire, concrete barriers, and steel. She didn’t say yes or no. She, like every single other person who talked with me about The Troubles, just shrugged in a sad way, having developed their own armor against the pain.

Holding hands with my six- and eight-year-old, her work struck a different nerve. We took in the larger-than-life canvas depicting two images of Kahlo, complete with hearts, veins, and bloody wedding dress.

 Why does she look so sad? and Look, you can see inside her heart, my kids said.  I read to them from the program and when I got to the part where Kahlo described The Two Fridas as a response to the heartbreak over her divorce, I had to pause.

“Go on, Mommy,” my daughter said. “Keep going.” But I couldn’t, not for a couple of moments. My own divorce will be finalized this month. Now I understand first-hand how heartache could prompt 49 square feet of canvas devoted to the anguish of change.

I haven’t written much since my marriage fell apart. I let freelance work dribble away, the stream of publications nearly dried up.  A manuscript about my love affair with Mexico has been tucked into a file drawer for nearly two years. But over the past month or so, I’ve felt the little sputter of a spark inside, that tiny flame of creativity re-igniting.

Kahlo suffered immeasurably, and painted her way through a rich but agonizing life. Taking a lesson from her, it seems the least I can do is to use my own small anguish to fuel that precious flame.“Go on… keep going.”

It’s no 7′X7′ masterpiece, but blogs are hanging one’s words out there for the world to see. My small attempt at art, I suppose, heart exposed, wearing my virtual bloodied wedding dress.

I promise– the posts will be cheerier sometimes. Stay tuned.

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/past%20issues/brev24/lafetra_nine.htm

Every year my altar is different, and every year I wonder what it will hold in the future. What losses lie ahead?

To read the essay, click here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/28/CMJDS7SIG.DTL

Catch and Release

She always noticed her father’s hands; the blunt, short nails, the left thumbnail deeply ridged, the pale hairs sprouting from the back, lying down like complacent soldiers. “No, Erica. Not like that.” He had taken the fishing rod from her. “Use a blood knot instead. It’s stronger.”

“You wind it through five times on each side, then poke each end through the hole here.” Her father twisted the filament of fishing line. “They go through opposite sides, Erica, never together. Got it?”

She squinted, watching over his shoulder, trying to remember the sequence, but she could hardly see the tiny fringe of the caddis fly’s man-made wings. She couldn’t remember if a clinch knot curled round to the right or left or how to tie the leader, no matter how many times her father had shown her.

He held the barb tightly between his fingers, whipping the tippet through the tiny eye of the hook. Erica watched while he tied her fly on; his own rod had been at the ready for twenty minutes, propped against the curling bark of a cottonwood a few feet away, on the bank of Hat Creek. “Now, you seat it, remember?” he said, and closed his lips along the length of the line, as if he were sealing an envelope. He tugged on both sides of the filament, and the knot, wet with his saliva, seemed to seal itself shut.

A cold, autumn wind swooshed through her hair, rustled the cupped leaves of the madrone at her back. Erica wished she had brought a warmer sweater. She jammed her hands down into the back pockets of her jeans, and stretched backward, arching her neck, taking in the slice of bright blue sky, perfect as a new, sharpened crayon. A red tailed hawk sailed across the open space, bisecting the clump of land she and her father stood on, in the basin between two sleeping volcanoes at the northern boundary of California.

It had been his idea of course, and of course, she had complied. Everyone did what her father asked of them. Even if it was three days of flyfishing, even if she preferred the privacy of an afternoon with an ipod, even if the two of them had little to say to each other. What could they talk about, really? She would be seventeen in a few weeks, and he was practically an old man.

She looked away from the sky, from a tangled wisp of cloud that drifted above them, back to her father. He was digging in his battered tacklebox, crouched on a bed of crushed bark, leaves, pine needles. He wore the red and black Pendleton that he had owned since before she was born. Erica had seen a photograph at her grandma’s house after the funeral, of her parents when they were young at Big Bear Lake, and her dad was wearing that same scratchy shirt. He was smirking, a twisted, arrogant smile, two fingers linked through the gills of an enormous wide mouth bass. In the picture her mother’s hair was stiff and poufy, and she seemed out of place on the dock, in heels and a pale pink dress. Erica had seen her reflection then, in that picture from the past; saw her own face pinched and pale, framed in a black mourning dress.

Even after her mother had died, the summer of Erica’s freshman year, her dad didn’t spend much time at home. When she needed to find him, she called work, and his secretary would tell Erica that he was in a meeting in Fresno, or at a distributor’s in Tucson that week.

“Well, young lady, are you ready?” her dad asked, in a voice that was over jovial, booming. A squirrel skittered on a tree branch overhead.

“Sure, dad.”  She picked up her pole, No, not pole, dummy, rod. C’mon. Get it right!

            “You wanna go upstream, or down?” she asked him. For the past two days they had mostly fished apart, even though this was supposed to be a trip about togetherness.

When he had suggested the flyfishing trip, he’d promised they’d have fun together. For a moment, she had imagined stories by a campfire, or holding up trophy fish, grinning in front of a camera. But it was late September, and she was just settling in to being a senior. She would miss the big game against Piedmont, and SATs were only a couple of weeks away. But she knew she didn’t have a choice, not really. He was her family.

Fishing was his love, he had told her once. On what would have been her mother’s birthday last year he had gone to Idaho, alone, to fish for cutthroat. It’s how he coped, he told her. He could get away from his troubles, work out his problems while he fished, he had said.

 “Why don’t we both go upstream today?” he said, pointing toward a tiny trail next to the stream. “I scouted a nice little spot yesterday. I bet it’s just loaded with trout.”  Erica felt her stomach tingle. Mostly, she had spent the weekend perched on sunny boulders, reading her rolled up copy of In Cold Blood that was sandwiched in her backpack between the clandestine Camel cigarettes and her cell phone. If he were around, she’d actually have to fish, to practice what her father had drilled into her: to pull the line, finger by finger, to try and trick a trout into believing what was dead was alive.

“Well, uh, okay,” she said. “But my casts are still all over the place. I wouldn’t want to hook you, Dad,” she tried.

“Nah, I saw you yesterday morning. You were great. Let’s go.” He strode down the gentle slope. Erica followed behind, and watched the way his coat angled down over his shoulders, noticed that without his hat on, she could see the crown of his scalp through his graying hair. She stumbled then, on the smooth edge of a chunk of rock submerged in the dirt. Her ankle made a quick jerk, a flash of hot. She sucked in her breath, kept walking. He didn’t turn around.

She kept up, and struggled over the boulders, through scratchy stretches of brush, past tanoaks and the gleaming red chokecherries, the hands of orange maple. If she made it in to Dartmouth, she would be surrounded with leaves like that. And men in thick, flax colored sweaters, crowded hallways. She would be away. No more empty dining room table or explanations of why he couldn’t make closing night of her play. No clipped text messages: Flight cancelled—home tomorrow. Use AMX for dinner. Dont forget your homework. Dad.

This is mostly how they communicated, or how they failed to. Blocky letters on backlit screens, stunted messages after a corporate beep.

“There it is, Erica,” her dad said, pointing upstream to a bend in the river darkened by shade. At least it wasn’t windy there, she thought. Maybe she’d be warmer. They hiked under the canopy of leaves, the fiery autumn colors not yet bright. He led her to a smooth, flat boulder, and surveyed the water. “Let’s switch to a dry,” he said, bending down and flipping open the metal tabs on the tackle box. “I’m putting on a #14 Elk Caddis.”

Erica craned her neck, and saw that the clouds had come in from the north, and hung gray and heavy. “It’s pretty here, Dad,” she said. “Want some dried apricots?” She sat down cross-legged in one motion on the cold rock.

But her dad didn’t answer. He hooked the fly in the small patch of foam on the front of his fishing vest. From one of the pockets he pulled out a tiny pair of clippers. He nipped the old fly from the leader, then in a quick flick of his fingers, tied the new fly on. Erica nibbled the sweet, chewy fruit. Her dad walked across the expanse of boulder, angled himself upstream.

She thought about the stories that her dad told about his fishing trips, about the time that he and a guy from work had waded for four hours in Deep Creek until it had gotten dark. During a cast, he had caught his own ear, and they’d had to hike out and find the nearest emergency room.

Erica lifted another apricot from the sack and examined it. Soft and pale orange, it was just the thickness and shape of an ear. She bit down.

She watched the dark water, saw the sudden glimmer of sun glinting off the riffles. “Guess you’ll be in college this time next year” her dad said, casting overhead.

“Mmm hmm.” She chewed the sticky fruit.

            “It’s going to be pretty quiet at home,” he said. She heard the tiny plup of a splash, and turned to see ripples on the dark eddy, ringing their way out toward the shoreline.

            “Well, you’re at work so much” she said, swallowing, and hugging her knees, “It’s not like it’ll be much different.” The sun disappeared again behind a bank of clouds.

“But it is different, Erica.” She heard his line whizzing overhead. “It’s different knowing someone’s under the same roof with you. Maybe you don’t talk much, or have dinner together a lot, or even have much to say to each other.” He let the line sail out, and land near the edge of a mossy rock. “But it’s another kind of lonely when that person’s gone.”

            He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were on the line, the delicate, nearly invisible strand that draped the distance between him and the dark water. He started to reel in for another cast.

His reel clicked and her back warmed as the sun emerged. She squinted up at her dad, his face shadowed against the mottled autumn sky. She smelled the earthy scent of the wet riverbank, the smell of change.

She watched her father rock the rod back and forth, the cork handle gripped in his right hand. His arm pivoted only at the shoulder, the orange line hissing in an S over his head, a perfect fluid motion. He pulled out slack in his left hand, gradually making the cast bigger by letting out more and more line. Erica watched his rhythmic motions, saw him let the line finally sail out in front of him, and land gently, perfectly, on top of the riffles in the water. He let the current take the fly, and it caught in a tiny eddy, swirling in the dark pool, nearly hidden by an overhanging alder. The line trailed downstream for a moment, and then he whisked it up and over head again, the swaying, swinging motion back and forth singing like a lullaby. He was graceful, her father, Erica realized.

            She watched as he aimed, his eye on the fly, and started another cast. With a rush, the line tumbled out of the reel, whizzing through the guides, the steel circles, ever smaller. The fly landed, hardly making a ripple, in precisely the same spot.

She had stopped chewing. He did this five more times, and with each cast, Erica felt herself increasingly mesmerized. She had never seen him like this, flowing and graceful, tuned in to the direction of the wind, the slant of the sun.

On the seventh cast, the fly resting effortlessly on the surface of the pool, she watched her father’s face, his mouth slightly open, eyes fixed, shoulders relaxed, one slender stripe of line in his left hand. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he fingered the line, pulling it in ever so slowly. He closed his mouth, one eyebrow rose. Slowly slowly……

A bolt of mercury flashed at the surface. It splashed, disappeared. Then the tip of her dad’s rod arched toward the water, the line dragging downstream. “Got it!” Her dad gave the rod a quick jerk. Erica sucked in her breath—the fish was on the line. Her dad swiveled his head to look back at her. Erica popped up, ran to his side.

“Wow, Dad!” she said, clapping her hands together, a school girl. “Look at that!” The trout flashed just a few inches below the surface.

“It’s a big one,” he grinned. “Here, you bring it in.” He held the butt of the rod tightly, locked the reel, and edged next to her. She stood rooted to the rock, unsure of what to do. She was afraid she’d lose the fish, afraid it would all be for nothing. “Hold it tight, now. Give it a little room to run,” he said, never taking his eyes from the V in the water where the line cut it.

“You’ve got it, gentle now,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. He watched the water, she watched him, and started to turn the reel with a quickening clicking sound. “Oh, man…” she said, and leaned back a little. A cold wind ruffled the water, and she smelled the rain coming. She could feel the pull on the line, the weight of the fish as it dove deeper, and the tension wane when it rested. Then, the force again, when it fought against the hook.

Erica let out a whoop when the fish came to the surface again, she could see it was bigger than her boot. Her father trotted to get the net. “It’s huge, Dad!” she blurted out, before it raced away again.

“Just hang on,” he said, then grabbed the rod with one hand, standing directly behind her. “Bring it in.” And she did, one click at a time, until she could see the tired trout, a silver treasure just below the surface.

“OK, now lift!” She brought the rod up high with both arms above her head. The rainbow trout dripped and twisted on the end of the line. Her dad leaned out over the rock, and with the net, scooped up the dangling fish.

He set it down on the rock, it’s pale pink stripe framed by the green crisscross of the net. Erica watched the gills panting. “That’s a 13 incher!” he said, clapping her shoulder. “Not so big, but what a fighter.”

She suddenly felt a stab of pity for the beautiful, shining fish, now trapped, unable to breathe. A fat raindrop hit Erica’s nose, then another. She peered up at the dark sky.

Her dad gripped the trout across its freckled glossy center, tilted his face toward the fish’s.  In one swift movement, he pushed with his thumb on the tiny hook, which cupped the trout’s bony jagged lip, and for a moment, the fish was untethered, held back from freedom only by her father’s hand.

“Say adios,” he said, and Erica wasn’t sure whom he was talking to.

Then, her father gently placed the rainbow trout back into the river. It flashed for less than a second, then disappeared, not to the black of the pool where it had been snared, but quickly down the riffles of the rapids, down stream, out of sight. Her father lifted his hand to shield his eyes, following the path the fish took. Rain spattered harder into the stream, pockmarking the surface.

Erica stood on the rock, not knowing what to say. She felt a rush of warmth for her father, but did not know where to begin.

Then she spotted a dot of red, a thickening sphere of blood on her father’s thumb. “Hey Dad, you cut yourself,” she said, and unzipped her backpack, groping for a tissue.

“Mmm,” he said, still squinting downstream.

“Here you go,” she said, waving a Kleenex at him like a flag of surrender. But he just wiped the rain from his face with his sleeve. He walked back to his flat spot on the rock, picked up his rod, and began again.

Erica stared down at the boulder, at two ragged drops of blood. Her father’s blood, rich with iron like her own, stood erect and unmoving, the surface tension keeping it from running. It stood at attention, stark and red on the slab of cold granite for a moment longer. And then, the rain of autumn washed the blood into the stream, where it blended and dissipated, becoming part of all that flowed by.

Erica stood on the clean, wet rock, then turned to join her father.

 http://www.latinobookfestival.com/home/index.htm