How to be a man

Last year, I was honoured to be asked by Colum McCann to take part in the launch of his non-profit project Narrative 4 and to write 800 words on the first assignment: "How to be a man."

My take on this is below and you can read pieces from other writers and find out more about Narrative 4 here: www.narrative4.com

Last night was 86 nights. I know it’s 86 because of the row of dents in the wallpaper. The first dent is deeper because it’s in the squashy patch, under the windowsill. I always make the dent before I cover Betty’s ears, even though I know she can’t hear because they’re made of fur.

I keep thinking Mammy will see the dents when she changes the sheets, but she hasn’t changed the sheets. She changed the sheets every two weeks before, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.

The day Mrs Taylor catches me sleeping at school I don’t know I’m sleeping until I’m awake and the other girls are laughing because of the wet on my cheek and my copy. Afterwards, I have to stay back.

‘How’s everything at home, Grainne?’ It’s Monday so she’s wearing her beige jumper and brown blouse. Her breath smells cigarettey.

‘Grand.’

Lisa went on ahead to tell her Mam to wait for me and I hope they do because it’s raining.

‘How’s your Mam?’

‘Grand.’

She nods. ‘You’d miss not having a man around.’

In the car, Lisa’s making faces at her brother but I don’t join in because I’m thinking about what Mrs Taylor said. At home, I start the list:

1.      Drive the car.

2.      Fix things.

3.      Mow the grass in the summer.

4.      Make her laugh.

5.      Give her money.

6.      Put the bin out.

I think that’s everything, except for sleeping in her bed and I have my own bed. The car was taken away after his accident and nothing needs to be fixed and it’s not the summer. 

That leaves the laughing and the money and the bin.

I’m no good at jokes, I’m always forgetting, so I learn the ones in the back of Whizzer & Chips by heart.  That night, I try one.

‘How much does it cost to keep a polar bear as a pet?’

She looks at me as if I’m far away, even though I’m only on the bed.

‘We’re not getting a pet, Grainne.’

‘It’s a joke, Mammy. Guess!’

She shrugs.

‘Nothing – they live on ice!’

I laugh. She smiles and says ‘that’s funny,’ but her smile doesn’t go as far as her eyes. I try another joke in the morning, about walruses. She calls me a joker. She doesn’t laugh.

Thursday is bin night.

In the dark, the garage is scarier because you can’t see the spiders. The handles of the bin are too far apart. When Daddy lifted it, he made it easy. I imagine he’s there, giving me super powers of strength. When the bin falls over it makes a big crash, and I think Mammy will come in and give out but she doesn’t hear it.

Tonight, is night 87.

The money slides in my shoe. The pointy corners where it’s folded, catch in my sock. I didn’t want it falling out of my pocket. I imagine Mrs Taylor saying, ‘Where did you get that twenty pounds from, Grainne?’ and my face going red and everyone knowing I’m a bad girl. And I’m not really, I don’t want to be. Anyway, Lisa’s Mam still had four twenties left.

Daddy always left the money in the kitchen, behind the windmill from Holland, but I can’t put it there, so I sneak into Mammy’s room. The smell is like Daddy, but not like Daddy, and I know it’s because the laundry basket still has his socks and shirts inside. The black patent bag she’s used every day since the funeral is on the floor. Her purse has a zip and it sticks but then it’s open.

That night, tucking me in, she gets into bed with me and Betty. She’s already crying. She still has her shoes on. It’s squashy and hot.

‘I need money, Mammy. For school.’

‘Now?’

‘We’ve got swimming tomorrow. It’s £1.25.’

Swimming’s not for two weeks.

‘I’ll leave it out later, love.’

‘You might forget. Please, Mammy.’

She pushes herself up, wipes her face. The mattress goes down like a valley and then flat. I hear her in her room, opening her bag. I think I hear the zip getting stuck but I’m only imagining. When she comes back she has a pound note, two ten Ps and a five.

‘There.’ She wraps the coins in the money and puts it on the chest of drawers.

‘Thanks, Mammy.’

She kisses me on the hair. She’s stopped crying. She must have seen the twenty. It must have worked.

After she turns out the light, me and Betty lie there, listening to her on the landing, the stairs. We must have fallen asleep, because then I’m awake, and then I hear her.

I find the right place on the wall, dig my nail in.

87.

I cover Betty’s ears.

Hurry Up and Wait...

I don’t like waiting.

I don’t like waiting and I’m not very good at it. I don’t have a lot of – what’s it called again? – patience, that’s it. I don’t have a lot of patience.

People are sometimes surprised to hear that. Some people have even remarked on my patience, praised me for it. That makes me feel good, when that happens, it makes me wonder if maybe I am patient after all. But just because I can fake it, just because I can keep smiling while someone ahead of me at the Subway is swiping their Metrocard five times to get through the turnstile, doesn’t mean I’m patient. It doesn’t mean I’m smiling inside.

Patience, waiting – these are not things that you associate with living in New York. It’s the city that never sleeps after all, everyone is doing something. Diners, shops even hairdressers stay open 24 hours a day. Trains glide into the station as you jump down the final step onto the platform. The guy in the deli on the corner makes your sandwich exactly to your specifications in record time every time – and everyone else’s sandwich as well.

In a city like New York it’s easy for the little grammes of patience that you possess – that I possess – to somehow flitter away.  I notice it in little things, silly things – two people in a queue for the bathroom at Starbucks means I’ll leave and find another one. A train in ten minutes means leaving the station walking the seven blocks to the express stop.

Sometimes, over dinner, I’ll tell my partner about these little details of my day and she might laugh. She might ask why I wouldn’t just wait for the train, point out that it will take almost ten minutes to walk to the 96^th Street station anyway, so I’m not really saving time.

            She has a point, I know that. Still, I try and explain it to her: how walking to another station is doing something and doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing, better than waiting. I explain it all as best as I can, but she doesn’t really get it.

Sometimes I don’t get it either.

            Today, right now, right this minute, I am waiting. I am waiting for my publisher to send me through the final copy of my latest novel to proof read. I’ve been waiting all week, or maybe more than that. Maybe as soon as I hit the ‘send’ button and my copy edits were winging their way through cyberspace, maybe my wait began then. Right now, it’s 11am here in New York which means there’s only another hour to go in Ireland before the business day is over. And if I don’t get an e-mail with the proofs by then, the rest of my day will be pretty free and I’ll be waiting for another whole weekend.

            At this juncture, I need to point out that there is no urgency for me to receive this proof copy today. The novel publication date has been moved until June so we have more time. More time is good: more time means we will catch more things on the proof copies, fewer chances of mistakes, more time to find the exact right shout line and tweak the blurb for the back of the jacket. More time, in fact, is what I’ve wanted all along, I was asking my editor for more time last summer, last autumn, last month. And now I have it, I want it to hurry up and pass, but instead, I have to wait.

            This week – this wait – is what’s really made me think about all this, my patience or lack of it, what it’s all about. I started to see how obsessively I was checking my e-mail, skimming over mails from friends and marking them ‘unread’ while I searched for my editor’s name. Before I get out of bed, I find myself reaching for my phone, something I usually never do before I meditate. And twice this week, after yoga, still in the glow of Savasana, there I was, plucking it from my bag, pulling down the screen to refresh my inbox even though it’s past midnight in Ireland.

            On Monday, I talked to a friend about it – a fellow writer and a musician – about this waiting, this obsession. Rather than make suggestions about how to get my editor to reply quicker or fill my time, she said something else - she asked how I was feeling.  We were standing at the Subway station at 14^th Street and it was freezing. I dug my hands deep in my pockets. We didn’t have a lot of time, it was too cold to hang around. I wanted to tell her the truth, but it wasn’t sure what it was. I thought it about it and I guessed – I said it might be something like sadness, it might be something like loss.

            Under her big fur hood she smiled a nice smile. She squeezed my shoulder, hugged me. “You’re grieving,” she said. “It always happens to me when I finish something big. Have you never felt it when you’ve finished a book before?”

            I thought about her question the whole way home on the train – the express train that I’d taken rather than hang around for the local, even though it would bring me closer to home. And I thought about it waiting on the lift in my apartment building, as I checked my e-mail.

Four days later, I’m still thinking about what she asked me –writing about it now – to dig these feelings up, prise them out, so I can look at them more clearly and find out exactly what they are. And I’m remembering my other books, the process of finishing and how that rolled straight into the chaos of publication – into PR and promotions and parties. And I’m thinking that in all of that, the whirl of that, that these feelings – grief is surely too strong a word? -  got lost, got buried, got hidden. And that being hidden isn’t the same as going away.

It’s coming up to twelve o’clock. She’s not going to send the proof today. She may not send it on Monday or Tuesday either. She has other authors, other books, other deadlines after all. There are other people who are waiting. It’s not just me.

A month ago, two months, seven months ago I would have looked at this future version of myself with a free Friday afternoon in New York with envy. In August, when I spent Saturdays at the library while my partner was at the beach, in December, trudging past the Christmas lights of Bryant Park market after a day of work to begin an evening of edits, I would have given anything for a day like today. A day that I can spend doing my own thing, with real people, rather than characters I made up in my head.

What I am about to write next makes me scared that you will judge me or think I am crazy, which is exactly why I know that I must write it. The truth is that I miss them – those characters in my head. I miss their stories, their lives. I miss the timbre of their voices and the scenes we created together. I miss Rhea Farrell, my feisty seventeen year old protagonist. I miss the way she sees things around her and the things she doesn’t see yet, and that only I know she’ll see things differently in a few months, or a few chapters or a few pages.

 Maybe that’s okay, to miss her – to miss them. Maybe that’s part of it. And maybe it’s okay to feel scared too, about what might happen to them next when the book is published, about whether critics and readers and friends will like them too. Maybe that’s what this waiting is for and maybe all of it, every single bit of it, is okay.

I’m going to finish up there because it feels like the end and because I have a Friday afternoon free with not all that much to do. I’m in Starbucks and I need to use the bathroom before I leave and I’ve decided that no matter how many people are in the queue, I’m going to join it. And I’m not going to check my phone, or check my watch, I’m just going to stand there, breathing.

I’m just going to just wait.

Students and teachers

Like most of you, my life is a jigsaw of different roles and activities that sometimes fit neatly together, sometimes not.

Depending on the day, even on the time of day, I can be a novelist, a marketing consultant, a yogi, a fundraiser, a boss, a partner, a daughter, a friend.

Of all these roles, one that I am proud of and humbled by, is my role as a teacher.

Every Thursday, I teach a writing class at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, the largest soup kitchen in New York. Of the hundreds of people who come here for a meal, a handful stay on for the class. Some weeks there are fifteen or twenty in the room, some weeks we are a small core group of eight. We are from different countries, states and cities. Some of us - most in fact -  are homeless. Some are volunteers here at the soup kitchen, some come only for the workshop.

What we have in common is our love of language, of stories, of putting the right words in the right order on the right page. Each week we come together to do this, to write, to read, to listen, to teach, to learn.

Over this last year of teaching, I've learned more than I have taught. I've learned about tenacity, about hope, about the courage to overcome obstacles in life that I'd never even imagined. The week of Hurricane Sandy, we had to cancel the class because we had no power here at the church. The next day, as I was handing out sandwiches with volunteers and colleagues, three writers came by to seek me out. Each was homeless. Each had had a terrifying week, trying to find shelter from the worst storm ever to hit New York. And each came, holding out sheets for me to read. Despite the hurricane, despite the challenges of their lives, they had done the homework I had set the week before.

They had written in spite of the hurricane. They had written because of the hurricane. They had written because, like me, they have a need they can't always explain, to write.

Next Wednesday, we are having a reading in the landmark Church of the Holy Apostles. For some of the readers, this is the same place they have lunch every day. For most, this will be a rare opportunity to have their voices heard in such a public setting. For all of us, it is a day of pride and celebration.

If you are in New York you can show your support by coming along at 7pm and enjoying their work, maybe even by spending $5 on their anthology. If you're somewhere else you can show your support on our blog which showcases their work every week.

http://holyapostlessoupkitchen.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/holy-apostles-soup-kitchen-free-writers-workshop-public-reading/

Second Sight

 

The city has given way to the country. Gaudy shopfronts have become apartment buildings, bridges, hulking billboards and now, suddenly, there is only low morning sunlight, dazzling through skinny trees. As always, I am amazed at how quickly New York City can be left behind.

I had that same thought last year, on my first journey to Kripalu, a yoga retreat in the Berkshire Mountains, four hours from New York. And as the bus winds past forests and rivers, I am acutely aware of the pitfalls of making the trip a second time, how easily happy memories can morph into clawing expectations.

The end of March last year was hot, as hot as any Irish summer day. Of course, I had no sunscreen and as I explored the labyrinth in the grounds my neck and shoulders burned bright red. This year, as we disembark from the bus, snow is swirling in thick flakes and I am envious of my fellow travellers in their Timberland boots. My feet, in Converse, are already freezing and once again, it seems, I’m arriving unprepared.

We check in with military precision, receive colour coded badges based on our workshops. Kripalu runs a wide spectrum, everything from nutrition to NLP.  Once again, I am taking Elena Brower’s ‘Art of Attention’ yoga workshop. To say this workshop changed my life last year would be an exaggeration – but only just.

Snow has clogged the labyrinth, making the tiny trails invisible, so instead I tramp around the meditation garden, making my initials from my footprints in the snow. Afterwards, it’s time to check into my dorm room and get ready for the first class.

As I unpack, I’m looking forward to stretching out the imprints of the journey from my body. Ever since I started yoga, I’ve had a fondness for a Friday evening practice. My twenty something self would have been part confused, part mortified at this blatant waste of a Friday night in an ‘exercise class,’ being totally convinced, as she was, that post work pints with slurring work colleagues were the only way to ease into the weekend. The thought that I can be so utterly wrong about my sense of the future would sometimes make me nervous, but tonight it makes me smile.

The practice is gentle, opening unexpectedly with chocolates and flowers. Elena asks us to set an intention for the weekend, and as night falls on the mountains outside, she takes us through an eclectic and totally perfect sequence, all the while urging us to make space, to let go, to release ourselves from the grip of blame.

Blame was a big topic last year too, something I didn’t think applied to me. Everything in my life was fine, and even if it wasn’t, blame wasn’t my style. I was sure of that, on the Friday night when we started practice I was sure, but as the weekend wore on I started to see things a little differently. It was five months then, after my big move from Dublin to New York,  and I was still grappling with the absence of so many things that were thousands of miles away – family and friends went without saying but there were so many hundreds of smaller things too. Things that should be insignificant but weren’t insignificant at all – my car, my hairdresser, the cheese I liked, my brands of deodorant and moisturiser, my kettle - the things that for 37 years had been the basic scaffolding of my life. A life I’d given up to be with my partner in New York.

And there it was – in that sentence, I saw it, different words that spelled out the same word: blame. A life I’d given up to be with my partner in New York. As long as I said those words – to my partner, to my friends, even to myself – I’d be holding her accountable, slicing off another little sliver of blame to add to the wedge of it that threatened to grow between us.

Lights are out by 10pm in the dorm rooms and lying in my bottom bunk - after only three bumps of my head on the iron bedframe - I recall how that simple realisation changed everything. Coming home on the Sunday night, I told on myself to my partner, admitted that I had - on some level - been blaming her every time my new life didn’t hold up to my vision for it, every time I didn’t want to feel the sadness of leaving my old one. I asked her to call me on it, to help me see it when I was falling back into it. And she did, now and then, and after a time, less and less. On the edge of sleep I try to think of the last time she has had to, and I can’t remember.

Saturday morning, 7am and I’m last out of the dorm. Outside, the air is cold as a pane of glass and I jog carefully, wary of patches of ice. The intention I set last night, ‘to be more authentically myself’ seems to grow clearer, like the lines of colour in the sky that seep through the trees. Picking up speed past snowy fields and sleeping houses, being authentically myself seems like the easiest thing in the world to be.

Six years ago, before I started yoga, I don’t think I used the word ‘authentic’ very often. I knew what it meant – of course I did – but I didn’t waste time thinking about it, reflecting on it. There was too much else to do – work for one thing and in the precious free moments when not at working, a whirl of social plans with friends and acquaintances and work colleagues and family. There were always things to be bought and used and replaced and cleaned and trips to plan and go on and more work to be done to pay for it all. Who had time to navel gaze about ‘authentic selves’? Wasn’t the whole point about life that you had to just get on with it and not be caught hanging around at the starting line when everyone else was already half way through?

I don’t remember exactly when it was that the thought first sneaked under the barbed wire of busyness and into the centre stage of my consciousness. The thought that became a question, that became the only question: what if this life - the life I was living – wasn’t the one I had chosen? What if it was someone else’s life  – my mother’s maybe, or my best friend’s or some convoluted mix of things I’d seen on TV? I knew enough to know there was no ‘undo’ icon, that this was no dress rehearsal. Wasn’t it worth checking that out? Checking in? Just to be sure?

This question – I should add - was not what brought me to yoga. No, my first motivation for yoga was far simpler: I wanted to tone up, get more flexible.  I was a runner, I went to the gym, but my knees hurt and my back hurt. At thirty years old, my doctor had said it was to be expected. ‘Wear and tear,’ she said. Some people said yoga might help, and hey, who wouldn’t want a yoga body?

My body, it turned out, was not well equipped for yoga. Maybe it had been once, but the patterns of life had taken its toll and I was stiff and solid in places that I didn’t know the name for, parts of my body that before yoga, I didn’t seem to know existed. Six years on, I am less stiff, less solid but the rate of change in flexibility – in my left hip, my shoulders - has been slow and stubborn and frustrating. But was has changed, what started to change soon after I first stepped onto the mat, was the way I saw the world, the way I saw myself.

It would be much too simplistic to write here that it was yoga that made me see that I wanted to be a writer, that I am made for a non-profit rather than a corporate world, that I could finally accept at the age of 35, that I was gay. But what I do know, is that through all those transitions, those canyons of change, that showing up on the mat again and again and again has helped me and guided me in ways that I never thought possible, because it is on the mat that I am able to connect, once again, with that deepest part of myself.

Saturday morning’s practice is more vigorous, with lots of Vinyasa. Elena mixes in Kundalini and Yin yoga and by the time we are doing a ‘crea’ to a perfectly chosen soundtrack, my body is shaking from exertion.  Once again, the yoga mat has served as a petri dish of my life and in the hugging of muscle to bone, the directing of my breath into tight pockets of cells where tension lies, I have a rare opportunity to see things exactly as they are. Thoughts rise, as thoughts always do. Some of them are familiar – the things I was shocked to see when I first started to practice: my challenge with staying present, my competitive nature, my tendency to compare, to judge, to be harsh on people, especially myself. They rise and fall with my breath, I see them, I let them go.

By the time I roll up my mat every cell in my body is tingling. It has been a good practice - a great one. Unlike my first year or so when a good practice was when I made it through a whole class without being ‘corrected’ by the teacher, now a good class is where I have mostly stayed in my own head, my own body. To be able to exchange a few words with the woman next to me and realise that I was hardly aware of her presence, therein lies the victory.

After lunch we practice again and I am relieved to know that like last year, the evening class will be ‘off the mat’, a Q&A session conducted within the framework of Elena’s work with the Handel Group. We are invited to create a vision for an area of our lives where we want to focus our attention – we have 18 to choose from, covering everything from sex to spirituality.

Last year, I crafted a vision for my relationship, a place where I wanted myself and my partner to be. I didn’t read it out to the group; only a short year ago I was much too afraid to be so outspoken about my sexuality. But I listened and I refined it, and what I wrote down a year ago is not dissimilar to the relationship I have today, the relationship that has had room to blossom in so many other ways once the weeds of blame were uprooted.

This year, I choose my writing as my vision. And this year, in a candlelit studio, I read it out.

Sunday comes with the last class, as the last class always does. As a class, we have gotten to know each other a little.  A woman tells me my writing dream has inspired her. A young guy with slick backed hair and bulging muscles shyly hands me a pamphlet on a Women Writers’ Festival.

The practice is slower, preparing us for our journey – the next phase of it. Elena shares more about her own practice, her own life – tips on how to take our visions with us, in our hearts, instead of leaving them waiting for us in the woods of Kripalu until we next return.

Afterwards, I walk to the labyrinth in the hope the thaw has been enough to expose its winding paths. Where there was snow, now there is slushy mud, but I persevere, doubling back on myself to avoid the impassable parts. I am not following the right path, I know, but I am tracing a new one.

I think again about my writing vision, what I have to do to put it into practice. In the search for my authentic self, I have always been grateful to have writing as my foundation – the first  thing I knew with absolute certainty that my life needed to have a space for. In many ways, writing and yoga aren’t so different – there’s always been an indefinable physicality to the act of writing for me, words rising up from somewhere in my body. Over the weekend, Elena talked about listening and my best writing has always felt like an act of listening and not of producing at all – that all I need to do is be still, listen, and get out of my own way.

Walking back towards the main building, the hill is a patchwork of green and white. Below, the lake is hidden under a sheet of ice, but I know that it will be melting around the edges, that soon it will be water again.

At the end of my second trip to Kripalu, I hope this won’t be the last journey I will make here - I know I have so much more to find. Last year’s workshop came at the exact time it was needed, with an immediate and obvious action to be taken. The effects of this year’s will be slower, gradual, less to do with action and more to do with patience, consistency – a nudge along a path I’ve been carving out with care rather than a jerk back to the right one.

And looking down at my Converse, sliding on the slippery grass, I know the trick is to take each step with courage, with breath, with the trust that no matter what the terrain, I will always be in the right shoes.

Here Come the Brides

I have been excited about this wedding for weeks. Ridiculously so.

The night before, it is hard to find sleep. Lying in bed, I am wondering what they’re going to be wearing, if they’ll have written their own vows, if they’ll walk in together or if someone will give them away. The way I’m carrying on you’d think it was the first wedding I’d ever been to.

And, in a way, it is.

The first time I went to a wedding, I was nine and I was ridiculously excited then too. My oldest cousin was getting married and I got a new dress.  I was never that into dresses though, so I think I was more excited about the prospect of staying up late, of being one of the adults. That, and the purchase of three boxes of confetti to throw, blue on one side, pink on the other, embossed on both with a cartoon bride and groom.

If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve been to forty or so weddings since that first wedding, maybe close to fifty. Some blur into each other, some I’ll always remember, some I’ve loved and some I’ve liked and some had too many drunken uncles saying ‘you’ll be next’ too many times. But this wedding, the one I flew back from New York for, is the first time that statement might actually be true.

Because this wedding has two brides.

Waiting for them to walk down the aisle, we have our cameras and Smartphones at the ready. And our tissues. And there they are, both in white, different dresses but the same look on their faces, both radiant with love and excitement and emotion like any bride. Only they’re not like any brides. This might be the first time they’ve held hands in front of some of the people here, certainly the first time they’ve kissed. Months ago we discussed that kiss – one of the brides and I – what kind of kiss it should be, how you wouldn’t want to have the kind of kiss that would shock the aunties too much.

We’ve talked about a lot of things over the last couple of years, that bride and I, things that when I was a teenager growing up in South Dublin, I couldn’t even let myself think about, never mind talk about. Like me, she came to who she was later than some, only a little while before I did. Watching her sit there, holding hands with her lover, her best friend, her soon to be wife, I remember a freezing February night when we walked Dun Laoghaire pier in the dark. I had a toothache and the wind was biting, whipping my words away as I told her what was on my mind, that I’d met someone, that I didn’t know how to tell people. She hugged me, she said it was brilliant news and she couldn’t wait to meet her. She’s not one to give unasked for advice and the piece she gave that freezing night, I took to heart. ‘Don’t act like it’s the end of the world when you’re telling people,’ she said, ‘because it isn’t.’

She was right, of course, it wasn’t the end, only the beginning. It was the beginning of so many things – a love that has taken me to New York, to a new life, or a new version of my old life. Of digging deeper than I’d ever dug before to find a courage I didn’t know I had, to tell the people I loved, the people who thought they knew me, that there was something they didn’t know, something I’d hidden away so deep I’d hardly known it myself.

After the ceremony, there are canapés and music and before we sit down to eat, by a roaring fire, the speeches begin. As the wind throws rain at the windows, we listen to a father, a mother, two brothers and a bride speak about journeys, about courage, about the commitment to being yourself. They talk about all of those things and I reach for my tissues more than once. But mostly, they talk about love.

The people who I love, who loved me before, still love me now. Maybe they love me more, even. I think I love them more now– I think I can – now that they know fully, who I am, now that I do.

Over dinner, I try and explain it to my best friend, a friend who has known me for more than twenty years, the friend who was the first one I summoned up the courage to tell, more than four years ago now. She nods and says she can imagine how it must feel to see them get married but I don’t think she can, not really. So I ask her to picture a world where she’d been going to gay weddings for her whole life, that they were the norm and that one day that changed – that she walked into a wedding and there were a bride and groom on top of the cake. As I explain, she nods and something in her face changes and this time when she says she gets it, I know she does.

Later, when the brides throw the bouquets, I end up with one and people say ‘you’ll be next’ and I laugh because this time, it could be true and they know it too. And later still, climbing to the top of the old wooden staircase to try to get a signal to call my girlfriend, to tell her about the day and how much I love her and how I wish she could’ve been there, I know if anyone spots me I won’t need to make up an excuse about who I’m calling. That the worst that would happen is that I’d be slagged, just like anyone would be slagged, the ultimate Irish acknowledgement that things are OK, that you are one of us.

Like the new Mrs and Mrs who are downstairs on the dancefloor, holding hands and dancing in a circle of parents and aunties and sister- in-laws and friends, there is no need to hide anymore.

Not for them. Not for me.

Not for any of us.

Seven Days After Sandy

 

It’s a week since the storm. It’s a week since the storm and only now am I sitting down to write about it, to put words in a line, on a page and try and explain. In part this is because last week was busy, chaotic in a completely unstructured, routine-free way which doesn’t serve me well. In part, this is because it takes me time to process things, to see things, to feel. Today there is a need to write about it, a hunger that makes me put off all the other things that  need to be done and do this thing which needs to be done more.

We moved, my partner and I. We moved two days before the storm hit. Saturday. And before then we’d disconnected the TV, the internet, had been packing, cleaning, packing. So it was only on move day, in a chain passing boxes and bags down the stairs that we heard the warnings from our friends, my partner's sister, the removal men. Stock up, they said. Fill the bath, they said. Make sure you have water.

 
On Sunday we took their advice and on our first morning in the new place instead of unpacking we did what everyone else was doing - we queued. We queued for water, for cans of tuna fish, for batteries and a flashlight that I call a torch. The queue in Starbucks was to the door, a handwritten sign said they were closing at 2:30pm and wouldn’t be open until Wednesday. Wednesday? All Starbucks? Yes, all Starbucks. Don’t blame us, blame the weather man.

Monday morning was wet, a little wild, but nothing to write home about, certainly not for someone raised along the Irish sea. Like the New York Stock Exchange, the soup kitchen where I work was closed - for the first time in 30 years. My partner's job was closed too so  we unpacked a little, borrowed a radio from a new neighbour that turned out to be an alarm clock and not a radio at all. We braved the weather to buy a proper one, more batteries, another lighter, just in case - it was like Christmas, in a way, this last minute panic to buy as one by one everywhere shut down until even McDonalds closed. The street was silent, like their subway sisters they were in garages somewhere, waiting.

That's what we spent our night doing too sitting and waiting, cooking and baking, eating and waiting and cooking again. All the while we listened to the radio, making our own pictures instead of those on TV - a crane was swinging on 57^th Street, the front of a house on 14^th Street had blown off. There were people who wouldn’t evacuate zone A.

Night came on and the wind whipped the trees and spat rain at the window. The sky was full of strange colours – like lightning but not lightning, shades of blue and yellow and green and red. Transformers exploding, that’s what we found out later but that night, but we didn’t know as we watched them highlight the silhouette of the apartment across the street. There were Facebook updates, of course. Someone’s power was out, then someone else’s – early, it seemed, before the storm could have even taken hold. A tree fell on a friend’s boyfriend’s mother’s car, another friend had flooding – water on her street, up to the steps of her apartment building, into her hallway. Our lights flickered and stayed on. I could see the wind but I never heard it. A few miles downtown they were in darkness, streets like rivers. Nothing to be done we went to bed, slept soundly. I didn't hear rain on the window.

Tuesday was almost dry, a bright clear sky, blue with sweeps of white. Thousands were without power, half of Manhattan. We had light and gas to cook breakfast. The radio told us about houses still smouldering in Breezy point, whole blocks washed away. Outside our street was clogged with leaves, a few branches.

On the walk to midtown - 60 blocks -  branches became trees, uprooted across roads, on top of cars. There were torn and sagging awnings, a flattened bus stop sign, two lots of collapsed scaffolding. And it took an eternity, that walk, with the sidewalks full, like Grafton St at Christmas and everyone stopping to take photos of whatever signs of Sandy they could find.

Looking back on the week, Tuesday was the day, I think, when I was least aware of the  full impact. While everyone else was battling with Sandy's aftermath and those who weren’t were watching on screen, my partner and I tried to track down UPS packages, clear out the last remnants from the old apartment, clean it up for its next inhabitants. My work e-mail was down, no-one was answering their phones, no-one was calling back.

On Wednesday, I tried to get to work, waited more than an hour while six full buses sped by, blowing their horns in case we tried to climb on board.  People came and went. We chatted over the sound of chainsaws behind us in the park as crews in yellow jackets tackled fallen trees. An old man collected branches while he waited, dropped them by the sawn up logs and soon we were all doing it too.

After an hour I walked to find an open Starbucks and tons of messages from everyone at home. And it was only when I saw the photos that everyone in Ireland had already seen – the waterlogged cars, trucks floating in the Battery Park tunnel, half of the island in blackness – and I began, slowly, to understand.

On Thursday I made contact with work. My boss was OK, everyone was OK and a handful of my colleagues and volunteers had made it to the soup kitchen where a crowd were gathered. Usually we feed over a thousand, every day, but that Thursday they were running out of food. We were going to have to turn people away.

 
Putting the call out on Facebook for sandwiches was just an idea, something quick and simple that might do something, that might help tide us over for the next day, or at least for a while. I wrote the post quickly, crouched in Starbucks with everyone else who had no internet, put my contact number on the post, just in case.

Stories are told in numbers and Sandy is no different: 55 deaths, 40,000 displaced and without a home in New York City, $50 billion worth of damage. But there are other numbers that I’ll remember: 88 Facebook 'Likes', 34 'shares', 21 phone calls checking ingredients, packaging, our location. At 8:30 that evening, the buzzer in my apartment rang and there were four adults and a child carrying 18 shopping bags of sandwiches. At 10, just as my partner and I were finishing separating the peanut butter and jelly from those that needed to be refrigerated, I was beginning to panic about how I was going to get these to work and that's when the phone rang again. It was call number 20, the second last of the night and someone else who had seen the post, who wanted to help, someone who lived close by, who offered to drive me to work the next morning.

The roads were quiet that Friday morning, petrol shortages keeping people at home. Downtown the swinging traffic lights were dull and we nosed around corners, lurched across highways – my good Samaritan, my sandwiches and me.

Some of my colleagues were there already and we hugged in the cold, unloaded sandwiches together. As we set up the tables, more people arrived  - women, men, families, a priest, all showed up with sports bags and boxes and backpacks full of sandwiches – each individually wrapped, some with a chocolate inside, or a granola bar, fruit. One bag had homemade brownies inside, still warm.

At first, we worried that there wouldn’t be enough people to eat them all, that since we'd run out the day before they'd gone somewhere else. But as the morning went on, word got out and they came. They came and came until almost one o’clock, when we had handed out over three thousand sandwiches and diverted hundreds more to others who needed them by then, more than we did.

Power came back on in the soup kitchen on Friday night, like it did in much of Manhattan. I had a poetry reading in the Irish Arts Center and although the turnout wasn’t huge, it wasn’t cancelled and we were able to get the subway home. By Saturday almost all the trains were running and my partner’s sister in Long Island called to say they had power too. On Sunday when I went for a run in the park, I only saw one fallen tree, still tangled in yellow tape. And yesterday was Monday and the office was open. We had e-mail and phones and power to cook now, for the people lined up outside, some of the same people, some different, than the ones who ate sandwiches last week.

Today is election day and I got my TV working this morning but somehow the need to write about this week, to remember is more important than any coverage. I don’t know exactly what it is I want to imprint on my brain by writing this, what lesson it is I may have learned.  Generosity, kindness, faith in the human spirit – certainly these are some – but where I work I am lucky to see many of these qualities every day. No, it is something more than that, something about how a crisis strips away all those other layers, the layers that keep us separate and apart, that keep us from looking one another in the eye, from speaking the truth, the fear the contains us and contracts us and keeps us hidden.

What would happen if we could blow off these layers, not just when we are in crisis but all the time? If we could harness this openness, this energy, the need to connect and be part of something for others?

That’s what I saw in every carefully labelled sandwich last week, what I heard in every voice I spoke to on the phone – a need to be needed, to help someone else, to connect, to share. More than a need, really, a hunger, a void. Something that, at least for a while, was filled with sandwiches.

 

Journalist Peachy Deegan reviewed 'What Might Have Been Me' earlier this year and because she and her panel really liked the novel she followed it up with an interview. We covered a lot of ground - everything from my writing process to 'What Might Have Been Me'to my favourite Manhattan spots and soy chai lattes in Starbucks! Below are some extracts, full interview is avaliable at:
http://www.whomyouknow.com/2012/08/movers-and-shakers-yvonne-cassidy.html

Peachy Deegan: What is your first writing memory?
Yvonne Cassidy: When I was a little kid I used to love drawing. I remember being very small and writing a story to go alongside one of my cartoons.

How would you compare and contrast life in Ireland with life in New York and what do you love most about each?
New York City has over twice the population of Ireland so the biggest difference would be the sheer number and variety of people I encounter here every single day. That's one of the things I love most about the city - the energy and the pulse of it. Life in Dublin is slower and the thing I love most - and miss most -is being by the sea. I grew up next to the sea so it almost feels like part of my DNA.

We loved What Might Have Been Me; how much of that was autobiographical? Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! Bits and pieces were autobiographical, but not too much. There are things I have in common with Carla, the main character: I spent a summer in Montauk, Long Island, I'm from Dublin, I love New York and sadly I've experienced Alzheimer's disease in my own family. But most of it is entirely fictional - Carla stays in New York whereas I went home. Some of her biggest struggles are around the loss of her father and her relationship with her sister - I'm an only child and I'm happy to say my Dad is alive and well.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing What Might Have Been Me? I found writing about Alzheimer's disease the most challenging as it is such a sensitive subject. I wanted to be really sure I represented it correctly and that I didn't cause upset to any readers by not being 100% accurate to the experience of watching someone you love suffer from the ongoing effects of dementia.

What inspired you to write "What Might Have Been Me?" The Irish are a nation of travellers - the Irish Diaspora massively outnumbers Irish people who live in Ireland- and I've always been interested in the idea of cultural identity in that context. I wanted to write about someone Irish living here and their experience of leaving Ireland behind. Somewhere along the way this developed into the idea of someone living here illegally over a long period of time and the impact this has on the day to day things we take for granted.

How do you relate to the main character Carla? In my first novel, 'The Other Boy', the central character was male, so I knew I wanted to write about a girl this time. The funny thing is that when you write about someone of your own gender, people assume that the character is a disguised version of who you are! While my own circumstances have been very different to Carla's, I related to the sense of her being stuck and floundering while she figures out what it is she wants to do. I know I felt that as I approached 30 and a lot of people I knew seemed to take different choices and paths at that stage. Like most of us, she's not perfect - she can be selfish and at the start of the book, she's pretty immature. Over the course of the book though I've had some readers tell me that the changes in her are as pronounced as those in her mother, Collette.

When you write about a contemporary time and place, is it harder to reference certain facts knowing that in the future, your points may not be recognized by the reader? I tend not to think about it as I'm writing because it would impact my ability to tell the story if I focused on that too much. In this book, there are very contemporary references - such as Skype, for example - but in the future if it's something the reader doesn't know, I figure it could be an interesting thing for them to look up.

How to decide for a happy ending? When all the loose ends are wrapped up, do you feel the need to write a sequel? The Matthews family certainly has more stories to tell. They certainly do, but I don't think I'll be telling them - at least not for now! For me, each story is a slice of someone's life, there is no 'ending' per se, just the point we (me as a writer and the reader) decide to leave them. Where we leave the Matthews family in 'What Might Have Been Me' felt like a natural end to this stage of their journey.

Between the lines, you develop the character of Carla with a nod to her surround, and her past. Are there places you wanted your character to go, but held back, so as to tighten the storyline? Yes! There were lots of scenes which I had to edit out where I had taken Carla to other places and had her interacting with other people. As an author, once I have a character developed as strongly as I felt Carla was developed, I love to explore new settings and places. In the end though, you have to come back to the narrative and only include those which are helping you tell your story. Some of the other scenes which were cut out could end up as part of the story of another character, in another book.

Can you tell us about your upcoming novel? It's in its very early stages still, but what I can tell you is that it's a coming of age story about a young Irish girl in New York City on a quest to find out more about her dead mother.

What or who has had the most influence on your pursuit of excellence? That's a tough question. Probably my family - I was always taught to do my best and it's something I bring to everything I do. I also like to write in libraries - something about being surrounded by all those literary greats inspires me to be the best writer I can be.

What are you proudest of and why? Since 'What Might Have Been Me' was published I’ve received a lot of e-mails from readers who have enjoyed the novel. While it’s really nice to get any and all positive feedback, what makes me especially happy is the number of readers who are in the same situation as Carla, caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s. Many have told me that reading the book has helped them to feel less isolated on their journey, and, in some cases helped them to cope. To think that words I’ve written could have that kind of impact on another person makes me very proud.

What is your favorite place to be in Manhattan?
So many to choose from... it's probably the New York Public Library on 42nd street with a stop off in Bryant Park along the way.

What is your favorite shop in Manhattan?
Can I name more than one? Macy's, Brooklyn Industries, the gift shop in NYPL and Lee's Art Shop on 57th Street.

What is your favorite drink?
That’s easy - Soy Chai Lattes in Starbucks - I'm addicted!

What is your favorite Manhattan book?
My favorite novel set in New York is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ which is up there as one of my all time favorite books. My favorite non-fiction work about Manhattan is ‘Here is New York’ by E.B. White. Although it was written in the 1940s, it captures the energy and life of the city in a very real way that is still recognizable today.

What has been your best Manhattan athletic experience?
Running in Central Park - I do it at least twice a week. I also love the summer yoga in Bryant Park.

What is your favorite thing to do in Manhattan that you can do nowhere else?
Just to simply walk around and breathe in the atmosphere of the city – you can’t do that anywhere else.

If you could have dinner with any person living or passed, who would it be and why?
It would be a toss-up between Nelson Mandela and my Grandfather. Nelson Mandela for obvious reasons and my Grandfather because he died when I was nine and I’ve a lot to fill him in on!

What do you personally do or what have you done to give back to the world?
I work in Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea – the largest soup kitchen in New York and the second largest in the country. We feed 1,200 people every single weekday and spending time there is both humbling and uplifting. For me, working in that kind of environment is using the skills I have for their best use and giving back to the world.

To read the full interview check out Peachy's blog here: http://www.whomyouknow.com/2012/08/movers-and-shakers-yvonne-cassidy.html