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My brother Peter was the king of the so-called Irish goodbye. At the celebration of his life, I looked around at the crowd of adults, children, neighbors, friends, family and said to one of those who’d known him well, “If Pete were here, he’d arrive late and leave early.”
I both hated and admired how he did it. We’d be at a family gathering or, in high school, a party somewhere. One minute, he’d be making me laugh. The next I’d turn to tell him something and he’d be gone. No fuss, no long farewells. If I looked out the window in time, I might see the taillights of whatever vehicle he was driving blinking in the distance.
When he died two years ago, he did the same thing. He just slipped away one Sunday night. When we woke up Monday morning, he was gone. His absence has taken on the bulk of presence. I feel it every day. I felt it acutely as I read Beth Ann Fennelly ’s new memoir The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs.
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I had no idea what I would find when I opened this slim book. Beth Ann Fennelly was new to me. The concept of micro-memoirs – small flashes of nonfiction – was new to me. But the stories themselves struck so many familiar chords that I often felt that Fennelly was talking to, or about, me. Here is one that made me laugh out loud with recognition (veterans of domestic dishwasher wars will relate):
Married Love: Missing Him
“Come home from your trip, my tidy lover:
even the illicit pleasure of stacking my plate aslant in the washer isn’t a pleasure forever.” - Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs.
Throughout, Fennelly’s sister appears in the book, not as a presence but an absence. She too died one ordinary night, no warning, just gone. These stories read like an unfinished conversation. They read like fingers probing the edges of a wound that is only partially healed. They brought back the morning we learned that Peter had died and the echoes of all the conversations I’ve had with him in my head since.
Fennelly’s mother has dementia, another kind of departure, one that produces its own special brand of pain and dark humor. Fennelly startled me with this one:
Some of the longer pieces in the book are themselves made up of small but complete “chapters” so that in the space of a few pages I felt as if I’d read a rich and surprising novel. My favorite: “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body.” Here, Fennelly explains how she came to be among the “Oxford 12,” a group of residents from Oxford, MI who posed nude for artist Robert Townsend in what he has called The Oxford Series. The resulting portrait was seven feet tall and showed every freckle, scar, wrinkle, pouch, and bunion acquired by Fennelly’s body over the course of fifty years. She takes us from the accidental meeting that led to the painting to the experience of seeing her body as it is and appreciating it more deeply than she had before. There are laughs, uncomfortable moments along the way but its true value does not lie there. Reading Fennelly’s essay invited me to look at my own body as it is now, consider what it has done for me all these years, how it has changed, and how very wonderful it feels to regard my naked body with respect and empathy instead of criticism.
Question: have you ever posed nude for a painter, sculptor, or photographer or any other kind of artist? How did it change you or how you regard yourself? If you were invited now to pose, how would you respond?
Fennelly’s subjects are the stuff of an ordinary life lived by a woman who loves, hurts, laughs. She knows how to convey an entire spectrum of feeling in plain words, artfully arranged. The stories are sometimes uneven or a bit raw - as if telling them is still a bit difficult. The wit and insight throughout reflect a quick mind, a rich sense of humor, and an open heart. I fell so easily into conversation with this book that I could not stop reading it until I had finished it. I don’t recommend this. I’m sure I missed some of the pleasure that comes with savoring each entry and stepping back to consider the arrangement of the stories themselves. I will be going back soon.
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Doing things that feed my soul
Two events last week reminded me of why I read, write, and may never get it right but won’t stop trying.
Big themes, young playwrights
Last week we met friends at a performance of plays written by five teenagers aged 13-17. They were selected from than 350 submissions to the Young Playwrights Contest sponsored by the Playwrights Project here in San Diego. Two plays were read by professional actors and the other three were staged and performed by professionals. This is the third time I’ve gone to one of these over the years and each time I wonder what I’ve missed by not attending more often.
This year’s plays took complex themes and explored them in innovative ways: a girl faces her parents’ divorce with the help of her future selves, a young medical student learns the hard way that people don’t need answers as much as they need company, a play set in a ladybug colony deals with prejudice and rejection, another shows how love is tested by a culture that prizes work over connection, and one explored the longing to be seen in a play full of imagination, humor, and pathos. The playwrights ask hard questions and take chances with their dialog and ideas. They inspired me to keep trying to do the same.
The condition of being human: George Saunders
George Saunders was in my backyard last Friday. He was the final interview in the 31rst Point Loma Writers Symposium By the Sea and I went to listen. I wish I could share it with you but that will have to wait until the video is ready. Here are some notes I took that continue to roll around in my head:
The condition of being human and alive: life is a walk on the edge of an abyss and the abyss doesn’t care if you fall into it.
When writing about life and being human, he is still striving to get the mix right.
At some point he realized that good and evil can’t be separated – they are on the same team. When it comes to humility, charity, evil, – we operate on a spectrum. There are no absolutes.
There is a difference between writing to make a point you are already sure of and writing as a process of discovery, relationship – a call and response with the story itself or an adventure to take together
Watch or listen: here are some past interviews with R.F. Kuang, Paulette Giles, Mitch Albom, Anne Lamott, and many many more big famous writers and thinkers from the past 31 years of the Symposium.
It’s one thing to talk about books from a critical standpoint. It’s quite another to consider how a book affects us personally. I get to read these as they come in. I’m learning that these interviews are tiny windows into significant relationships, whether they are fleeting encounters or ones that last for the rest of our lives.
Last Saturday, Beth Ann Fennelly showed the battered copy of Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense that she’s had for decades and what it still means to her.
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Ciao for now!
Gratefully yours,
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…wherever it is, she was there
Sandra De Helen doesn’t know where she took this picture in 2005. It is some beach, somewhere, snapped with her Minolta while traveling. A moment of peace saved by an old camera to return to again and again.
Photo by Sandra De Helen
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
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In 1967, as a novice reporter for the Gloucester, MA, Daily Times,I posed nude for a life drawing class in neighboring Rockport. I sat sideways on a chair while seven or eight student artists, all women, mostly in their 60’s or 70’s, worked diligently at creating likenesses of my form. They did (it seemed to me) surprisingly well. I wrote mostly about them and their work, not much about the fact that as the hour went on I became progressively more chilly and less embarrassed. I regret to report that the experience did not change my life.
Your reflection on Peter and the “Irish goodbye” carries a quiet ache that feels very true to life. The image of him slipping out of rooms, leaving only the fading blink of taillights, stayed with me. Some people seem to move through the world that way lightly, without ceremony yet the space they leave behind somehow grows larger with time.
The line that lingered most for me was that his absence has taken on the bulk of presence. That feels exactly right. The people we lose don’t really leave the conversation. They take up residence in the quiet corners of our days in a memory that surfaces unexpectedly, in a laugh we wish we could share, in the reflex to turn and say something to them before remembering we can’t.
Your post felt like one of those small lanterns literature sometimes gives us a way of illuminating something tender that many people carry but struggle to name. The book may have opened the door, but it was Peter who filled the room.
In 1967, as a novice reporter for the Gloucester, MA, Daily Times,I posed nude for a life drawing class in neighboring Rockport. I sat sideways on a chair while seven or eight student artists, all women, mostly in their 60’s or 70’s, worked diligently at creating likenesses of my form. They did (it seemed to me) surprisingly well. I wrote mostly about them and their work, not much about the fact that as the hour went on I became progressively more chilly and less embarrassed. I regret to report that the experience did not change my life.
Betsy,
Your reflection on Peter and the “Irish goodbye” carries a quiet ache that feels very true to life. The image of him slipping out of rooms, leaving only the fading blink of taillights, stayed with me. Some people seem to move through the world that way lightly, without ceremony yet the space they leave behind somehow grows larger with time.
The line that lingered most for me was that his absence has taken on the bulk of presence. That feels exactly right. The people we lose don’t really leave the conversation. They take up residence in the quiet corners of our days in a memory that surfaces unexpectedly, in a laugh we wish we could share, in the reflex to turn and say something to them before remembering we can’t.
Your post felt like one of those small lanterns literature sometimes gives us a way of illuminating something tender that many people carry but struggle to name. The book may have opened the door, but it was Peter who filled the room.
Thank you for letting us meet him that way.
Tom