Boston Pops St. Patricks Day concert 2026

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh, to all my friends and family wherever you are.

— Roxanne, Robbie & Mouse

The essay below brought to mind one of my courses in my PhD where the central question was “What does it mean to be Human in this age of advanced technology?” One of the required readings was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We were allowed to view the 1994 Kenneth Branagh film instead of reading the book, if we preferred… upon reflection, I think that was a clever, sneaky way to bring another element of critique into the classroom discussion.

From: Chapters Bookstore <support@chaptersbookstore.com>
Date: March 7, 2026 at 8:30:31 AM GMT
To: Roxanne O’Connell
Subject: You’ve been picturing the wrong monster for 200 years

Hi Roxanne

Here is the thing about Frankenstein: he’s not the monster. Frankenstein is the name of the scientist. In Mary Shelley’s novel, the being he creates is never given a name, and that one detail is the quickest way to understand what we keep getting wrong about this book. Frankenstein is not simply a horror story about a stitched-up brute. It is an early, genre-shaping work of science fiction: a novel about invention without responsibility, loneliness with consequences and what we owe to anything we bring into the world

If you have seen the new Frankenstein film with Jacob Elordi as the Creature, you might feel that familiar satisfaction of recognition: lightning, stitches, shadowy corridors, a name shouted in terror. We love a myth we can spot from across the room.

But Frankenstein is one of those novels that has been adapted so often it has started to wear its adaptations like a mask. Mary Shelley’s Creature has been repeatedly re-created into somebody else’s idea of him, most famously as a mute brute, when on the page he is something far more unnerving: articulate, observant, desperate, capable of tenderness and terrible rage. Although her story has been simplified into a gothic anecdote, the truth is sharper, stranger and more modern than that, waiting to be found again at Chapters Bookstore.

Frankenstein Is Not a Horror Story. It Is a Warning About Responsibility.(the one Mary Shelley actually wrote)

Every generation thinks it has discovered Frankenstein. Right now, it is having another moment, helped along by a new screen adaptation (and by the simple fact that we are living through an era obsessed with invention, ethics, and what happens when you build something you cannot love back into compliance).

But the original novel is still being misunderstood in the same way it has been misunderstood since the early stage versions: flattened into “a horror story about a monster”. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is frightening, yes. It contains death, pursuit, and dread. Yet the thing it does best is not horror. It is a moral, psychological, and deeply modern argument about loneliness, responsibility, and what we owe to anything we bring into the world.

If you have only met Frankenstein through film, you have probably absorbed a silent, lumbering Creature. The book gives you something far more unsettling: a being who can speak, reason, read, plead, and condemn.

A quick reset: Frankenstein is not a horror story

Shelley’s novel is structured like a set of nested confessions. It begins with Robert Walton, chasing glory into the Arctic, writing home about ambition and isolation:

“I have no friend, Margaret… I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

That is the first emotional note of the book: not terror, but yearning. Then Walton finds Victor Frankenstein, wrecked and half-mad, and Victor tells his story as a warning, not a boast.

The best known warning line is blunt, almost contemporary in its clarity:

“Learn from me… how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge…”

This is not “science is evil”. It is “knowledge without responsibility is a disaster”.

Victor is not punished because he is curious. He is punished because he is careless with the consequences of his curiosity. He wants creation, not obligation. He wants the thrill of invention, not the slow, human labour of care.

Frankenstein Is Not About Playing God. It Is About Power, Exclusion and Responsibility

Yes, there is the obvious scandal: a man makes life. A man refuses limits. A man trespasses. But the book’s deeper controversies are social, political and, frankly, personal.

Shelley is writing in the long shadow of revolution and reaction, when “progress” is both promise and threat. The novel is haunted by questions about class and exclusion: who gets to belong, who gets to be seen as human, whose suffering is considered meaningful. The Creature learns language, reads widely, studies people and then discovers that knowledge does not grant him entry.

That is the quiet cruelty at the centre of the novel, and it is why it is so hard to reduce it to a simple morality tale. Frankenstein is not just “science is dangerous”. It is also “people are dangerous”, especially when they decide someone is unworthy of empathy.

And then there is the feminist sting that the horror versions often miss. Shelley’s book is full of creation, pregnancy, birth and death, but women have almost no agency within it. Life is made without women, and the result is catastrophic.

This is why Frankenstein never reads like a clever parlour exercise. It reads like a young woman writing from inside a life where creation and loss were not metaphors, but facts.

Mary Shelley at 18: The Radical Mind Behind Frankenstein

Mary Shelley begins writing Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus at 18, during that famously rain-soaked summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron’s circle turn boredom into a ghost-story challenge.

Mary Shelley did not arrive as a decorative gothic muse. She arrived pre-loaded with radicalism, intellect and scandal. She was the daughter of two famous thinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist philosopher, and William Godwin, the political philosopher and journalist. Her mother died 11 days after giving birth, which meant Mary grew up with a kind of absence that became a presence: a dead mother whose ideas were alive in the house and whose name was both inspiration and weight.

Godwin’s home was an informal salon of writers and thinkers, so Mary’s childhood was steeped in argument, books, visiting brilliance and the sense that ideas mattered enough to burn your life down for them. It also came with domestic fracture. Godwin remarried when Mary was four, and Mary did not get along with her stepmother. She was a bright, intense girl growing up in a home where intellect was abundant, but comfort was not guaranteed.

Then she did the very thing polite society pretends women never do: she chose desire, and chaos, and left. In 1814, Mary eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was still married at the time. They travelled through Europe with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont in tow, and they returned to England into financial stress, public judgement and a steady accrual of grief.

If Frankenstein is haunted by abandonment and the catastrophic consequences of neglect, that is not an abstract theme for Mary. The losses in her life come in hard succession: a baby daughter who died within days, a later daughter (Clara Everina) who died in infancy, and her young son William who died of malaria in Italy. Only one child, Percy Florence, survived into adulthood.

And the “haunted summer” is followed quickly by real hauntings. In 1816, Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay died by suicide, and Percy’s first wife Harriet also died by suicide. Mary and Percy married shortly after. It is a line in a biography, but it is also the emotional weather system behind the book: guilt, secrecy, judgement, grief and the feeling that the world will punish you for living outside its rules.

Percy died in 1822, and Mary returned to England, still young, still a writer, now carrying his legacy as well as her own. She spent years editing and publicising his work while continuing to write, which is the kind of labour that rarely gets romanticised but absolutely shapes literary history.

(And if you want one final gothic detail, because she would probably approve of the drama: legend has it she kept a relic of Percy after his death, his heart, tucked away in her writing desk. Even her grief came with a footnote that sounds like fiction.)

Frankenstein and the Birth of Science Fiction

People will confidently tell you that H.G. Wells wrote the first science fiction novel. Wells is foundational, of course, and The Time Machine (1895) is one of the great early pillars of the genre. But it comes long after Shelley who published Frankenstein in 1818.

That is not just “early”. That is genre-forming.

Science fiction is not just rockets. It is the moment a story asks: if we can do this, should we? It is about consequences, ethics, unintended outcomes, the collision between human ambition and human limitation

She takes the old myth of Prometheus, fuses it with the era’s scientific fascination (galvanism, anatomy, electricity, the new prestige of experimental knowledge), and creates a story about human beings engineering life and then refusing the ethical consequences. Her central idea is chillingly modern: creation without care, innovation without responsibility, a breakthrough with no aftercare plan.

This is science fiction in its most important sense: not “cool gadgets”, but a thought experiment about what happens when technology outruns morality.

If you want a straight line from Frankenstein to now, you do not even need to strain: artificial intelligence, genetic editing, biohacking, surveillance tech. All our biggest modern arguments are, at heart, Frankenstein arguments.

And yes, she was written out of that origin story in a very familiar way: her book was treated as a curiosity, her authorship was doubted, her work was swallowed by her husband’s fame, and her Creature was swallowed by adaptations that made him easier to consume.

What the films taught us to miss?

1) The Creature is not a mute brute. He is the novel’s most articulate philosopher.

In the book, the Creature reads, learns language, and develops a moral intelligence that is shaped, then warped, by rejection. When he confronts Victor, he does not simply threaten. He argues. He appeals. He names the ethical failure:

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”

That single line reframes the entire story. The Creature is not “evil”. He is a creation demanding the basic decency of being recognised as created.

2) Victor’s real sin is not “playing God”. It is refusing to parent what he made.

Victor’s ambition is not subtle:

“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”

The intoxicating language is the point. Victor is drunk on the idea of being first, of being praised, of being the source. He wants glory. Then, the moment the being lives, he recoils. The abandonment is immediate, physical, and absolute.

This is why Frankenstein still resonates. We live in a world where people launch things and then act surprised when those things have consequences.

3) The violence is not random. It is the logic of exclusion.

The Creature’s most quoted line is not a “villain speech”. It is a diagnosis of what rejection does:

“I am malicious because I am miserable.”

And the truly chilling part is how recognisable that moral chain is. He is not born a murderer. He becomes one because he is treated as less than human by every human he meets, including the one who made him.

Or as he puts it, with devastating simplicity:

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

The novel keeps asking a question that films often dodge: Who made the monster monstrous?

Frankenstein Is Not About Scientific Hubris. It Is About Abandonment

It is easy to say Frankenstein is “about scientific hubris”. It is more precise, and more uncomfortable, to say it is about refusing responsibility for what you cause.

It is also about men’s fantasies of creation without women, and the violence that fantasy contains. Victor’s project bypasses the female body entirely. The result is not triumph, but catastrophe: a world where creation happens without care, without reciprocity, without community.

Even Victor’s own emotional landscape is built around fracture and shock:

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

Shelley is not writing laboratory horror. She is writing human horror: the sudden collapse of certainty, the moment when you realise you cannot go back to who you were before.

Why we keep returning to it Frankenstein?

We argue about Frankenstein because it refuses easy moral sorting.

Victor is not purely villain, and the Creature is not purely victim. Walton is a mirror. Every layer of the book is a warning about how easily admiration becomes obsession, and how quickly neglect can turn into ruin.

And perhaps most importantly: the novel insists that the Creature is not “other”. He is made by us, and he is speaking to us.

There is a moment late in the book when the Creature stops pleading and starts promising:

“Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.”

It is a line that can be read as threat, but also as prophecy. When you abandon something you have made, when you refuse to look at it, it does not vanish. It returns. It grows teeth.

So if you are only coming back to Frankenstein now because a film reminded you it exists, good. The adaptations are part of the book’s long afterlife. But the real experience, the one that still startles, is meeting the original text and realising the “monster” has been trying to tell us the same thing for two centuries:

Creation is easy. Responsibility is the hard part.

And if you want to read it in Dublin in 2026, among shelves where old stories still feel urgent, you’ll find it at Chapters Bookstore, home to new and secondhand books on Parnell Street.

Over the course of my Annus Horribilis of medical interventions, I did let Quicken make decisions on the categories of our expenditures during the nine months I was in one form of recovery or another.1 The upshot of letting Quicken decide what I had ordered from Amazon resulted in loads of money being spent on “Arts & Crafts”!2 I know I spend a lot of money (basically my children’s inheritance) on materials to knit or quilt, but the number Quicken gave me strained credulity. Turns out, it just used the last category I had labeled and, for the months of April through November, put everything in Arts & Crafts—bird food, socks (special compression ones), gluten free necessities, etc. It took almost the whole day to match up records between Quicken, the various credit cards, emails of receipts, and Amazon order records for both me and my husband to sort it all out. My NEW New Year’s resolution now is to put IN THE NOTES in the Quicken entry just what was purchased, every month, when I get the statement. We’ll see how long that lasts.

But that leads me to why I am posting this tonight! Today, I sent out my critical documents to my accountant and now feel I am freeeeee! Free to get back to quilting and knitting and baking and, since the sun decided to come out today… gardening.

I enclose a collection of photos to show where I’m at right now, although I didn’t get a photo of the Coll Hat (Stolen Stitches) I knitted for my daughter-in-law from leftover yarn over the past few evenings because it was calming.

Hope you are all keeping warm and doing something to make you feel comforted.

It all started with a “portable” design wall kit I bought. It has collapsable poles, not unlike the tent poles for a pop-up tent (probably what some clever quilter figured out), with a flannel fabric screen. Probably could use it to show home movies as well. But it was way too small and a bit rickety. So I bought a folding Japanese screen, almost 6 ft tall and wide. That was better, but nothing I could stick pins in, and the flannel screen was still too small.

Of course, the Japanese screen was perfect for putting up in front of my standing desk wall with its various devices that result in little flashing lights (backup disk) or red lights that are always on (the electrical breakers under the desk) and the printer that needs to be shut off when someone is staying over as it does its little “wake up” routine periodically—often in the middle of the night.

You might ask, how do I know this? Well, not too long ago, a mouse got into our bedroom, perhaps because someone had left the front door open for a bit at a time when sensible mice decide that the weather is getting a little too cold and it would be best to find some other habitation for the next few months. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard some scratching. I thought maybe the cat wanted to come in so I went to open the door only to see a dark gray teeny creature climbing up the pair of jeans hanging on the back of the door. I shouted out to the man of the house that there was a mouse in the bedroom! It’s his job to take care of wildlife. He said, “Nonsense!” and I replied, “Well it’s gone into the pocket of your robe now…” That got him out of his comfy chair! The mouse, which he doubted existed at all, was now behind the storage unit under the window… a sturdy unit that was screwed into the wall and not easily removed in daylight, certainly not at 11:30 pm. The “humane mouse trap” was retrieved from the shed and set up. And Robbie suggested, it now being midnight, that we just go to bed and leave the bedroom door open so that the cat could go on sentry duty… when he felt like it. I said, “You can sleep here—if you can. I’m off to my studio.” That’s how I learned about the flashing lights under the desk and the noisy printer that would just rev up at odd times for no good reason. It took two nights to get the mouse… who has since been relocated to a nice spot a kilometer away near the river. But I determined that the annoying lights would need some screening before anyone slept in my studio again.

Back to the design wall. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent looking online and in local craft and hardware shops for the wherewithal to convert the backside of my Japanese screen into something that would work as a design wall without interfering with the integrity of it as a foldable, portable screen for when it wasn’t needed for designing and assembling a quilt. Of course, the obvious solution is to have a craftsman (I have one in mind) who builds bespoke cabinetry just make me a craft storage unit with bifold doors that open out and fold back on themselves and then slide back together. This magnificent construction would replace the IKEA shelving that is precariously tall and, again, jury-rigged to get me a deeper depth on the bottom half with a couple of drawers in it. It’s not perfect, but it was inexpensive and something I could assemble myself. It is the basis of my “Wall of Fabric”, but a bespoke cabinet would be my dream….

Eventually, I realized that all I need is a thin, light something that I could adhere to the back side of the screen panels and then cover with batting or flannel. My local hardware store “consultant” suggested 8’x 4’ 10-12mm cork board. They often get that in for the local schools. I’d never get it into my car though. My carpenter friend, Anthony, said he would collect it AND the screen and cut the cork to fit for me. I’m so lucky to have these people nearby to help me with my harebrained schemes. It still won’t be quite big enough for a large quilt but it will keep me going until I can get the Rolls Royce of craft cabinets built to my specifications. Happily, I won’t need the design board again for about a month. I have two quilt tops done and will be hand quilting and knitting until the beginning of March… I’ve signed up for Carol Feller’s latest Mystery Knit Along (MKAL) where I’m going to try to master Brioche knitting. Nothing to do with bread!

It’s starting to smell like Spring. Next weekend is Imbolc/Bríde’s Day, the first day of Spring in the Celtic calendar. It’s also Chandeleur for my heritage so crêpes are in the offing. And, I just realized how far I’ve come from the TITLE of this post… Old Photos? Yes, that’s where I started my day early this morning, so I’m going to put a little gallery of the treasures I found there while looking for something else entirely as I worked on the Robbie O’Connell Songbook… Some rabbit holes are worth pursuing, some are just a nice way to spend the time when the news all around is more than a soul can bear. I hope you stay warm and cozy wherever you are and that you look after yourself. Sending hugs and love.

* * * * * * *

The first three photos are my side of the family: My great-great grandmother Natalie DesLauriers, with her two children, Alderic and Delia (a tintype); my great grandfather Augustin Eli Vigeant’s first truck with all the boys in the neighborhood holding it up; my sister Danielle with Minou, her cat. The second three are are from my father-in-law’s old photo album: Robbie’s aunt Eileen (left) and mother (right) with Diane Hamilton in the middle; Robbie’s uncle Jimmy and aunt Alice; and finally Tom Nealon who died a little over a year ago. He was a great friend, a fantastic storyteller whose party piece was The West Clare Railway.

Quilt and/or knit daily. Sitting with my earbuds, listening to a book that engrosses me or makes me laugh out loud, while moving my hands in a creative project puts me in my Happy Place. I want to have even one hour of that a day.

I’m now approaching my 75th birthday—not for many months yet but it’s on my radar—and I realize that some things that were too specific have dropped off. The rhythm of my days changed in subtle ways as new events became more pressing—two major surgeries this past year; my son and his wife moving to Ireland and working on their house; starting the Robbie O’Connell Songbook. I think the process has changed: it has become letting what is most important to have in my life rise to the top—the cream, if you will.

In writing my Morning Pages today I found myself creating a mental image of my days as a seven petaled flower. To be honest, it started out as five petals but then I found that wasn’t enough to feel “completeness”—the feeling of contentment in having a day full of things I wanted to do. Seven is my birthdate, a magic and portentous number. So seven petals it would be. I doodled and then created this image…

I’m seeing all kinds of relationships between the different petals. Some are verbs, some are nouns, some are both (garden?) Some are very (and deliberately) vague: move, music, connection. I think to aim at doing one thing in each of these petals in the course of one day would be an awesome achievement but maybe a bit stressful, if not outright exhausting. On the other hand doing only one is far from satisfying. It would be fun to create one of those spinner dials that I could spin sometime when I’m feeling at a loose end… rudderless. Although, lately, I’ve noticed that feeling a bit rudderless is really the precursor to creating something. It’s as if, like a seedling in early spring, I’m pushing, pushing up toward the light and air, struggling with the potential for becoming something.

One would think that, approaching one’s 75th birthday, one would be comfortable and certain about things—especially how to spend one’s days. But that seems to be far from my truth. I’m listening to Joni Mitchell say: “We’ll put on the day and wear it till the night comes.” Maybe that’s what I’ll do today. That’s what goes in the center of my Life Flower.

This will be fairly short, I think, but sweet nonetheless. It’s the Winter Solstice and in another time and place, I would be sitting around my dining room table with my dearest friends celebrating the handing in of our grades for the semester. I remember the first couple of years at Roger Williams University having to get in the car to drive to the campus gatehouse to hand in the sealed and signed manilla envelope, sometimes in the rain, sleet and snow. A few short years later we were able to hand in grades online! Such was the rapid technological changes that happened in the 16 years of my career at RWU.

As I look back, the most important changes were the lasting friendships that grew into the core group of “goddesses” that would meet, often at my house but sometimes at someone else’s, at the solstices and equinoxes to celebrate the sisterhood of teaching, chairing, advising, writing and, most especially, reading. It was the stock question of the evening—“What are you reading?” As the question moved around the table, we’d get out our list making equipment (paper notebook and pencil, smartphone, etc.) and make note of things we should/could add to the growing pile on our night tables to indulge in over the winter, spring or summer breaks.

I remember one of these dinners in particular. Robbie, my husband, arrived home from one of his Celtic Christmas concerts and came into the dining room to greet us. Having done his salute to what he fondly referred to as “the coven”, he retreated to the sitting room and his chair to decompress from his labors. Later, when my friends had all gone home he asked, “You must have had a good time. What were you all laughing about?” Goodness knows… because that just seemed to be what we did all evening long.

These are the women who taught me how to be a good teacher and advisor, how to navigate the academy and how to be a good scholar. I am forever in their debt. With the exception of my children, these are the people I miss the most now that I’ve moved 3,000 miles away—I feel it most keenly at this time of the year.

So here’s to the Goddesses of RWU… some, like me, retired from teaching but not from life, and others still carrying the torch of sharing knowledge and wisdom with the next generation: June, Kate (whose birthday I MISSED this year… I’m so sorry, but you get extra hugs and kisses), Paola, Meg, Kathy, Renée, Susan, Anjali, Anne, and France.

A very blessed Winter Solstice to you all. I hope the coming of the light will bring the warmth of friends and family closer to you. Know that I hear your voices and feel your strength, even in the darkest days of winter.

‘There are mind numbing “divinations” (her word, not my invention)…’
Should be DIVIGATIONS… a word that Thirkell created to describe Mrs. Morland’s (the writer of spy thrillers) meandering and impenetrable conversation style, which often left her friends and neighbors dazed, confused, going a little mad, but still, they adored her. As hopefully, you do me.

Regarding the name of the artist/shop—this one’s on me—it’s BRIGID not Brigis. The S and the D being so close together on the keyboard, it’s a common-though-usually-fixed-by-me-before-being-sent typo.

The newsletter in question, should you be reading your email latest first is:

I woke up this morning and thought, “YES!! It wasn’t a dream. Yesterday was a day of buckets of good news!!” And I set off on the day full of energy and goodwill toward all. I made a lovely breakfast of fruity porridge (my kids know what that is), a boiled egg where the yolk is just about to get custardy, a small slice of GF toast with whiskey marmalade, and a pot of hot Barry’s Gold tea. FBOAW… favorite breakfast of all weekdays. Weekends are for the Full Irish (with GF ispíní).

Replete and still happy with the world, I decided I would try to download the last kindle copy of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels, Three Score and Ten. I then entered the Twilight Zone of seeing that the book is there for $2.99 but NOT AVAILABLE IN MY COUNTRY… Weird, all the other 28 of the 29 books were available. I know, I have them on my very old bedroom iPhone (it’s only purpose being to provide a small and discrete device where I can read a book while my husband is sleeping, and to be my alarm clock on the rare times I need it. No SIM card, has to stay plugged in, but it works for me.) I tried using the co.uk site and the fairly recent .ie (Ireland) site I hardly ever use. All the same message… “not available in my country.” SO…

I am now determined to get this book in whatever format there is because I’m halfway through the three chapter preview on the previous title and I’m committed to reading the rest.

True, Angela Thirkell is not one of the most exciting reads, nor does she come close to D. E. Stevenson, my all time favorite for really well written, cozy, heartwarming books. I’ve read them all several times… in PAPER. My all time “cheer me up with irony and wit” is still Terry Pratchett. My growing favorite for when I’m knitting or quilting, because it is so wonderfully immersive is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the DUST trilogy. I have them in hardback but I can’t knit and hold a heavy book at the same time. Besides, the lovely thing about audio books (and I’ve recently discovered libro.fm, thanks to Robert Reich) is that it’s a warm and comforting thing to be read to by a really good narrator. A bad one can ruin even the most beloved of books. HOWEVER, these books are great to get sleepy on. There are mind numbing “divigations” (her word, not my invention), a cast of characters that expand to populate a whole made up English county—everything from lords and ladies to the odd jobber and the gypsy horse whisperer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and it spans generations. I can see that her style of writing has become catching and is transparently invading this post. My friend Meg knows about this phenomenon—remember when I was reading Jane Austen and then sending emails that were eerily 19th century?

Let’s get back to my problem… I have a County Waterford library card from the Dungarvan library. It really allows me access to ANY Irish library in the public library network. The problem was… where was it? What was my code and password for the online network? I’m embarrassed to say, it has been a few years since I actually used either the physical card or the online site. The search began.

First stop was the shelf in the dresser (an Irish dresser is kind of like a New England kitchen hutch—dishes, cups, important pieces of mail, and other detritus that mysteriously finds its way into one of the drawers or shelves behind the pottery pitcher you got as a wedding present and haven’t ever used… but it’s pretty). There is a shelf where appointment letters from doctors, gift certificates from Christmas past, seed packets that need to go in the greenhouse, postcards from friends traveling through Spain/France/somewhere sunny, and a half-eaten bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut hidden so no one would finish it on me, all find a home. That was my first stop.

No luck.

BUT… what I did find was a bunch of really funny note cards. I seem to remember, sometime in January, deciding that I should send a real, handwritten note to each of my lovely RWU Goddess friends (you know who you are!)

Here’s the thing, every time I thought to sit down and do this, fountain pen at the ready, I looked at/read the card and couldn’t seem to part with it.

So I’ve scanned them all—please make sure (in good academic fashion) that the artist/writer is credited if you pass the image on. AND, if you want your own share of bovine beauty, you can go to Brigid Shelly's online shop. Her Ardmore gallery is now closed but she’s still working away at her art. The wordy cards are from Coulson Macleod. I found them in a little stationery/gift shop in Clifden, Connemara.

(I haven’t found my library card yet… still looking. But while I’m doing that, you can be reading this and enjoying some delightful notecards—see if you can tell which one is intended for YOU!)

Huge HUGS! — Rox

While I was recovering from September’s surgery, I finished two summer tops for myself—one from Carol Feller and the other from Mary Annarella. I love them both and have regretfully put them in storage until May 1, the Irish first day of summer (because June 21 is considered midsummer—maybe there’s a theme building here.) I also completed the knitted Log Cabin throw (another Carol Feller design) I started back in May. I absolutely loved this one as my “go to” snuggle-up during my recovery when I simply had to be horizontal for a bit on the couch.

In October I started (and finished) my Hudson’s Bay Blanket jacket (capot). I think I’ve mentioned the Hudson’s Bay Trading blanket before. I used the same bands of color used in the blankets I remember my grandmother had and that were recently included in the trading company’s logo. I believe I will be wearing this cardigan all through the winter. The knitting pattern is Carol Feller’s Chroi cardigan to which I added 16 row stripes of contrasting color interspersed with 14 row stripes of the main color. I put roomy front pockets on matching the stripes. The yarn is a merino/mohair aran weight so it knits up pretty quickly. What I love most is the very generous collar that you can pull right up to keep the back of the neck nice and warm.

For those worried that I was neglecting my quilting, you can rest assured that I’ve been tipping away (an Irish colloquialism) at the quilt for Owen and Liz. It’s one of the “see how many fabric scraps I can use up” quilts. I have a wall of fabric. Nearly all of my quilts started since COVID are scrap quilts. The constraint of not buying fabric for the top has really been pushing me into new horizons of creativity. And each fabric has a past, an association with other projects and people. In this one are the fabrics I used for Owen’s first quilt, made 30 years ago. It also had pieces from batiks my sister Nicki brought me from Bali, wedding quilts I made for my daughter and the other two sons, and even some dresses I made for myself and for my daughter when she was small. A real quilter doesn’t throw any fabric away.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

Lest you think that all I do is stitch day and night, I’ll bring you up to date on my other BIG project.

At the beginning of August, I became the “technical director” of the Robbie O’Connell Songbook. Robbie and I had often talked about getting a songbook together. I think the major stumbling block was the traditional idea of a songbook: a paper version of the songs with words and music. It would take a great deal of time and money, someone to write the musical notation, getting a publisher and then marketing and distribution. At least that was how we were thinking.

But then, back in January, I launched my own SubStack as a way to email friends and family updates instead of putting my musings on a website and sending out an email with a link to the latest post. All Stitched Up came into being and I’ve been very pleased with the experience (except when I totally shot myself in the foot by accidentally erasing my account.)

At the same time, Robbie was getting requests for the words to songs that were not up on HIS website—a site that had not seen much action since 2019. I admit, having just released myself from the burden of managing my own site, I wasn’t terribly enthused about taking on the task of updating and managing someone else’s—not for love nor money. But the songs were out there on YouTube, not always the best versions and none of them on an Official Artist Channel. And that’s a problem.

We hatched a plan—and the Robbie O’Connell Songbook was born. A few of my recent posts/newsletters tie in with our weekly posts of Robbie’s songs1 —one song a week published on SubStack on Sundays at noon. The YouTube recording of each song is a link in the post. We usually release the YouTube on the Friday before so we can handle any technical glitches that might show up… or make any copyedits on the post once we’ve read the preview email.

Here’s the thing… While the YouTube song book (@robbieoconnellsongsandstories) SAYS it’s the official Robbie O’Connell YouTube channel, it isn’t an OAC—an Official Artist Channel recognized as such by YouTube—yet. We are trying to work through that but it’s a numbers and algorithm challenge. Robbie’s distributor, CDBaby, no longer facilitates this process (don’t know why). It’s the proverbial Catch 22.

“How can we help?” you may be asking yourself… Here’s how:

1. Go to Robbie’s YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE (numbers). It costs nothing, you won’t even get notified of the next song video posted unless you click on the little bell.

2. If you do listen to any of the songs (we are up to #15), give them a THUMBS UP (algorithm). I’ve been told that when you get to around 1000 subscribers, the YouTube Partner Program starts to pay attention.

3. (Optional) Feel free to COMMENT! We read every one whether on SubStack or YouTube. You can comment on both platforms to your heart’s content.

It’s interesting that, while the Songbook’s SubStack is getting close to 200 subscribers, the YouTube channel has only 34 today. It appears that when you click on the video in the SubStack newsletter post it might not count as a VIEW on YouTube. I simply can’t figure that one out. But unless someone ALSO subscribes to the YouTube channel, we’re not getting any traction with the folks who can grant Robbie OAC status. And that’s kind of important in the current climate of AI and fake videos. Neither of us is looking for financial gain with this project. Robbie would just like the songs to get out there and be heard, just as any author would like their work to be read. We will be sending out a newsletter about that on the SongBook Substack in the coming week.

In the end, it’s very much like that old shampoo commercial… “and she told two friends…”

If each of you subscribe and tell two friends, and ask them to tell two friends… well, I’d have to make a spreadsheet to estimate how long it would take to make 1,000 subscribers. But I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t take long.

Here’s the photo we are starting to use in the videos… If you click on it, you’ll get the YouTube Songbook channel! I am so grateful to have you in my life. Sending you a HUG! Pass it on.

At some point, I hope, SOMETHING will stop the madness. However, so much harm has already been done that it will take decades to fix it all. It will take a congress that is steadfast and functioning, i.e., everyone is talking with and listening to each other. A gal can dream, can’t she?

It seems some good is coming from this mess. Canada is becoming more self-reliant. Europe is coming together and growing stronger. I’m sure that, eventually, our ship of state will be lifted off the reef of cowardice, greed, and incompetence and again steer us in the right direction. In the meantime, I can only hope that our life’s savings will see us through. And that the perpetrators/traitors will be brought to justice and made powerless, convicted of their crimes and maybe detained in the prisons of their own making. Seems just to me.

Yesterday, after a long day of laundry, bookkeeping and boring paper pushing, I went to SubStack to find some good—or at least comforting no matter how bleak—news (thank you , , and ). However, with the exception of the Portland Frog, much of my feed was occupied by rants and expletives. I seem to have fallen down a hellscape rabbit hole of people using the same crude words to express their opinions… words that neither help nor express much. SubStack, I thought, was a platform for expression… not for such base rhetoric. I stopped scrolling, picked up my knitting and began stitching myself back together. But this morning, I found myself rebelling against the lazy crap in that rabbit hole where “fuck” and “shit” were beating out “Care,” “Kind,” and “Love” or even “Stop” and “Help”.

For heaven’s sake, use your words, people! There are so many! Why rely on only one or two? Be clever, be direct, described your anger and disgust and BE SUBSTACK WORTHY!

I am not a prude. I am as fond of the word “fuck” as anyone. It is incredibly versatile—a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and—my favorite—an interstitial! Un-fucking-believable! But people are wearing it out and that will neutralize its usefulness.

Save the word from its inevitable decline—find other words to describe the situation. Otherwise, when you stub your toe in the darkness surrounding us, you won’t be able to call on the word to truly describe your pain and anger. It will be too mundane—a milk toast of an expletive.

Be creative, invent your own one syllable four letter word. Practice it daily for a bit. Who knows? If it catches on, as do many new terms invented by generations younger than mine or yours, it might end up in the OED and you will be noted as the quintessential wordsmith that we all know you could be!

I, myself, am struggling to find the one syllable word I could use that fits the mouth so perfectly. I may have to find something in another language—perhaps from my Quebecois heritage. My grandfather and uncles who worked in the lumber camps and on the farms were never short of some swear words. Admittedly some have more syllables but they are wonderfully colorful and have a certain cachet.

I’ll have to think about it. No matter—the search for the right swear word should take my mind off the fucking shit show going on now.

P.S.: Oddly, my SubStack feed this morning is remarkably devoid of the above mentioned expletive. Weird…

P.P.S.: Saw the word “Kind”! Made my day, .

That’s often what a growing family needs—one person to see the big picture and have deep thoughts, and another who’s minding the small details (like getting bills done on time and getting the kids to their doctor and dentist appointments) and keeping the mind on the path of making it from breakfast to bedtime. We switched those roles often, especially when I went back to work full-time. We still do.

The one verse in this song that I connect with best is the one about the Mayan village. We had gone to Cancún for our 15th anniversary. It was the first time I dared to leave the children for a whole week. Believe me, planning to spend the money on a vacation that involved going to another country when any one of your offspring could suddenly get sick and derail the whole plan was a daunting thought. And then there was the childcare issue.

The day trip to Chichen Itza was gloriously hot and sunny, the roads sometimes bumpy but the scenery strange and tropical—at least that was my recollection. The Mayan temple was impressive and I had no problem going up to the top. But I have no head for heights and came down on my bottom, sitting on each step all the way down, much to the amusement of our fellow passengers. The photos that Robbie took of me ruining my lovely white capris in my descent cannot now be found—I wonder why.

It was on our way back to Cancún that we had an unplanned magical experience. The bus had a flat tire out in the middle of the nowhere. But, of course, nowhere for some is somewhere for others. Nightfall is sudden in that part of the world. Our vehicle limped into a little village of what looked like a collection of huts and one main building in the middle with a single bare light bulb over a pool table. It was really the village shop/post office. It had a Coke machine and sold various staples. Beyond that everything was dark, lit only by the cooking fires in the huts where babies were sleeping in hammocks and mothers were stirring the pot. Above us the sky was crammed with stars—more stars than I had ever seen before. The scent of night flowers drifted over us as we walked slowly arm in arm, aware that we were in the midst of something profoundly different from anything we had ever experienced. We were suspended between the huddled home fires and the stars, every fibre of our being drinking it all in.

The modern world returned as the flat tire was fixed, the passengers re-embarked, and we made our way back to the city. I have no idea how they managed to have the right tire for a bus out there, but strange things exist in these existential liminal spaces.

We’ve just had the Harvest/Hunter’s Moon, so it’s fitting that this song is the next in the Robbie O’Connell Songbook. I love how this project is giving us a chance to revisit our life together. I hope you enjoy it too. I promise that I’ll write another post soon that will be about recent “stitches” and stories.

Robbie O'Connell Songbook

12. When the Moon is Full

Travel is both a blessing and a curse for the professional musician. If I hadn’t played music for a living, I probably never would have traveled to forty eight of the fifty US states, not to mention several countries in South America and Europe. When I was younger, I loved going to new places. Air travel wasn’t nearly as stressful then as it is now and …

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6 months ago · 1 like · Robbie O'Connell Songbook

I remember when Robbie was working on this song. It was April and Robbie had been busy touring since the end of February so we were on our way for a weekend away to celebrate our anniversary. We didn’t have much money then, but Robbie flew so much for his gigs and tours that he had the miles and a hotel discount, enough for a short break. In my mind’s eye, I see us sitting in an airport terminal gate waiting for our connecting flight, Robbie intently working on some scraps of paper and me with my head in a Dean Koontz novel, escaping from the tedium of waiting for the next part of our trip.

I confess that, as a native born US citizen, there was a great deal I didn’t know about the judicial system. I had no idea that, unlike a prison cell, when one is in a city jail holding cell, one does not have access to books, papers, television, radio… nothing to occupy one’s mind, no mental escape from the tedium of waiting for the next part of one’s life. It would have driven me mad. Joe Doherty was in that holding cell—he had not been charged or convicted of anything—for nine years.

Robbie O'Connell Songbook

8. The Winning Side

Napoleon asserted that history was a set of lies agreed upon. Likewise, justice is a set of regulations decided on by the ruling class. It is always more favorably disposed to the wealthiest and most powerful. As we can see in today’s headlines, the laws can be ignored or adjusted to suit the caprice of a different ruler and bent to his will. Justice is…

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7 months ago · 6 likes · Robbie O'Connell Songbook

Addendum:

A few years ago, when Norwegian Airlines started flying from Providence, RI to Cork, Ireland, Robbie and I started traveling back to Ireland more often—we had just bought a small cottage for when we would retire so we could be closer to his sister. On one return trip, we had the usual Duty Free things to bring back to our family… including some smoked salmon. Robbie was still asleep on the plane when I filled out the family disembarkation forms and, while I knew the bottle of whiskey for our son-in-law and the chocolate for my daughter and friends did not need to be listed, I thought the smoked salmon probably did need to be listed—so I did.

When we got through immigration, we and our bags were sent through to customs where all our bags needed to be scanned… because I had declared something on the form. Robbie, a much more seasoned traveler than I, was tired and irritated. The customs officer agreed with Robbie that the salmon could have been left off because it was bought in the Duty Free shop. As the bags came out of the scanner and he prepared to stamp our form, he looked at the passports and then up at Robbie and said, “Well, justice is a fickle thing.” Turns out he had heard Robbie perform this song with the Clancy Brothers at a music festival in Providence almost a decade before.1 It had stuck with him.

You write something, you sing something, you put it out there in the universe… you never know where it will land.

This past week has been a constant flood of memories. Last Monday, I was thinking of Labor Days gone by—how my whole family, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, in-laws and family friends, gathered together at my grandmother’s house on Grant Street to watch the annual Labor Day Parade. Grant Street, located in the middle of the French Canadian enclave of Marlborough, Massachusetts, debouched onto Main Street and, because the marching bands and the floats—many staged and decorated on flat trailers from my grandfather’s transportation company—started out one block away on Broad Street, we had front row seats and got to see all the participants at their freshest and most energetic.

A few hours later, when the last float, band and politician were waving and passing the crowd all around us, the menfolk, responsible for getting the grills fired up, melted away from the crowd still in lawn chairs at the top of the street to prepare the Cookout that was yet to come. The aunts set up the serving tables of potato, macaroni and three bean salads, baked beans, and condiments. We were a huge crowd.

My father was the eldest of six, each with their own growing families (32 grandchildren in total.) As the traffic was blocked off at both ends of the street for the duration of the parade, we had the length of it to play tag, skip rope, ride scooters or explore the big barn-like garage my great-grandfather had built for his transportation business. In a dusty corner resided the old upright piano whose keys nearly all worked, although not necessarily in tune. Three of us could play “Chopsticks” together on it easily.

Our town’s Labor Day Parade was the biggest and most elaborate of its holiday parades. Even the 4th of July’s wasn’t as big, although that always ended in fireworks at Ward Park. I think Labor Day was a bigger deal because Marlborough had been a thriving factory town as early as 1836, with a significant focus in shoes and boots. Boots for Union soldiers were made there during the Civil War and John Brown’s Bell from Harpers Ferry still hangs from a tower in the small park near the old Firehouse. It was the home of the famous Frye Boot Company, founded in 1863.

The Labor Day cookout would be the last of the summer. The following Wednesday would be Back to School day. Even now, this time of year makes me feel like I should have books under my arm and new pristine notebooks and sharpened pencils in my bag.

I wrote much of this a week ago as my mind—and heart—flooded with all the images conjured by the memory of those events in the town where I grew up. While the seeds of this post were sown on September 1st, they were set aside as I got involved in another project. Do we ever have just one project going at a time? I think not. During the intervening days between Labor Day and Owen’s birthday I began working on another video for the Robbie O’Connell Songbook, “Farewell Until Tomorrow” (scheduled to be published on September 21).

As is often the case, the mood of memory and recollection paved the way for a different approach: not just one or two images for the video but a crowd of photos— friends and family both all around us and those no longer among us. It took days and days to collect the photos and curate the ones that would work best for the song. We had more than 150 for the first pass, far too many for a recording only 3.6 minutes long. I decided to approach it like a photo album and collated a series of collages, some of a single person, others mixed and most with Robbie in the frame somewhere. It was a task both absorbing and full of emotion. The tricky part—one that is rarely involved in a paper photo album—was matching the images to the words of the songs and having the transitions happen at the right points in the music. I think I spent more time on this one video than all the rest of the twelve songs we’ve set up so far for the songbook. A labor of love, if you will.

Embrace the day.

On the evening we landed in Dingle town, one of my advisees, Caitlin Foley, handed me a photo of a white-washed house perched up on a hill and asked me if we’d be passing this house the next day on our trip out the peninsula. This house was where her grandfather had lived before he came to America in the 1950s. As there are dozens of houses like it on the coast road, I decided to ask the owner of the guest house where we were staying if she knew the house. She wasn’t entirely sure and I suggested that maybe Maura of the beehive huts in Fahan might be able to help us.

I had known Maura for some years and, whenever I was in the area or leading a group of people around that part of the country, I would stop in for a chat and a cup of tea. She was quite the character but I didn’t have her phone number or any way of getting in touch as I had all these students in tow. Our landlady got straight to work, first asking a few people in the adjoining pub if they knew whether Maura was “at home” or away visiting her children in other parts of the world. Several phone calls into the process, I said, “You’re very kind to go to all this trouble.” She looked at me, quite seriously, and pointing at Caitlin said, “Sure, isn’t she one of our own?”

This is the remarkable thing about the people of the Dingle Peninsula—the decades of emigration, especially from the Blaskets and Dunquin, haven’t weakened the ties that bind them. These ties are so strong that even those who are now an ocean away are deeply connected, as are their children and grandchildren. Their leaving was not a matter of choice or adventure in most cases, but dictated by a mosaic of factors: accelerating modernity, economic opportunity and, in the final chapter, government policy. There are many books written about Irish emigration in this period so I won’t go in to that here. This is a personal story.

At breakfast the next morning, our landlady confirmed that Maura was indeed at home and would be delighted to meet with Caitlin when we stopped at the beehive huts. I brought her up to the house while my colleague herded the rest of the students around the ancient stone buildings that were scattered around Maura’s homeplace. Maura immediately pulled out photo album after photo album, some featuring pictures of herself with various celebrities who had visited Fahan, but most that had photos of her girlhood friends and relations, including Caitlin’s grandfather. We were there for over an hour and finally, awash with cups of tea, smiles, tears and embraces, we got back on the motor coach to head over to The Great Blasket Heritage Centre. On the way out, Maura asked could I video a message to share with Caitlin’s folks back in Springfield.

On arriving at the Heritage Centre, I asked for Micheál de Mórdha, the director of the centre. I introduced him to Caitlin explained her relationships and he whisked her away to his office where he proceeded to tell her much more than she could take in, print off copies of photos, bits and pieces describing the house her grandmother lived in, the family relations—it was, frankly, a bit overwhelming, but very warm and friendly. Micheál also wanted to send a video message:

I think the most moving part of the Heritage Centre was the last room at the end where a replica of a 1950s kitchen from Springfield, Massachusetts was set up.

From the Heritage Centre we went the short distance to catch a boat that would bring us out to the Great Blasket island itself. With warnings to “watch your step,” “don’t fall off any cliff edges,” and “please don’t disturb any of the ruins or cottages—this is a heritage site,” my colleague and I left them off to explore the island. They went off in twos and threes—all except Caitlin. Up to now she could always be found in a gaggle of three or four girls, laughing and chatting. But here, on the island where her grandmother was born and reared, she took a solitary walk around the hills and fields, seeking out the schoolhouse where her great-grandfather was the teacher, where the friends of her father and mother used to live before they left for America, deep in thought and emotion. I watched from a distance but left her to wander the actual ground of her ancestors.

Exhausted from the sea air and starving from the exercise of walking the island, we took the boats back and climbed into the motor coach for the trip back to Dingle town. As Caitlin passed me on the way to her seat, she said softly, “I had no idea.”

- - - - -

Fast forward to the end of the fall semester when my advisees and I sat down to plan the program for their last semester. Caitlin arrived looking to do an independent study project. After some discussion of various possibilities, I said,”You know, you have a unique opportunity to do something few people are in the position to do,” and suggested she might want work on an ethnographic project on her own community, those who emigrated from the Great Blasket. Many have interviewed them about what life was like in Ireland but not no one to my knowledge had explored their lives here. How they adapted, what of their culture was still with them, what did they leave behind?

And that is what she did. One of her interviews was with Martin Kearney; the other was with Máiréad. She struggled with Audacity, started a few posts on BlogSpot and got the first draft done. It’s still there but, due to paradoxically ephemeral nature of the web, I’m going to recreate (and copyedit) and archive her three entries and the original transcripts along with the video clips she made but never got to process before heading off for her Master’s program. While the finished project was incomplete, the material she gathered was priceless. Well worth the journey.

Máiréad Ní Chearnaigh Uí Shé
1922 - 2025
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anam

— — — — —

Times change, programs change. I recently learned that the Augusta Heritage Program has moved out of Davis & Elkins and into Elkins downtown. It’s been years since there’s been an Irish Week. Then again, I think the Elkins Irish Week was one of the first and now there are many Irish Weeks all over. You could probably spend your whole summer doing nothing but Irish music and dance. But there’ll never be anything like the one in West Virginia.

So here’s a re-post to that recovered post in honor of the great times we had 15 years ago:

The summer is almost gone so I hope you get a chance to immerse yourself in some great music!

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I might post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion if you want. No pressure—but you should know that I no longer use FaceBook for anything except posting about new songs being added to Robbie’s Songbook. Too much junk and doomscrolling. I’d rather be knitting or quilting 😊. So try it if you want…

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Here’s the link to his FIRST POST - and for the record, the only one so far. And whenever you want to know if the planet named after the messenger of the gods is retrograde, thereby messing up anything to do with machines and communication, you can go to IsMercuryRetrograde.com… it’s kind of nice to have a minor god to blame this mess on.

I was busy going from one device to another, toggling between screens and tabs, and for some reason saw an account with my email address not correct— “@ma.com,” not “@mac.com” and my profile photo was missing as well! So I (rashly) thought I had made an error and deleted the account—Yes, I was absolutely certain—and pressed the f*cking button. Pouf! my SubStack publication, my subscriptions, my subscribers, everything… gone.

Sylvia from the “special ops” SubStack Support team confirmed my worst expectations but says she will be able to reinstate my paid subscriptions and I have screenshots of all of them so, those of you who were free subscriptions, I will get back to seeing you soon… as soon I finish this glass of wine and can deal with reconstruction. The paid ones should be back with me before HCR can publish her next Letter from an American. All be well.

On to better news and more to the point, I am currently helping my husband, Robbie (singer, songwriter, raconteur and writer) set up his own SubStack and YouTube channel. That’s really how I ended up in this mess. You would think that someone who was coding on the web back when it was gray, wall-to-wall, and images took 5 minutes to download, would KNOW better.

You can check out this migration and transition by going either to his old website or by going to his new SubStack, which, admittedly, doesn’t have much more than a promise of what’s to come at the moment, but if you are interested in following our progress, please subscribe. We’re hoping to schedule a post a week with a song for his songbook archive starting in August. Each post will have the lyrics, genre, creation date, album (if recorded on vinyl/cd), and the backstory or context. We’re excited about it and looking forward to pulling it off. He has a lot of songs—it will take a year, at least, to post them all.

When I’m not doing that, I will be working on recreating what I can of what I had, largely for me, my family and friends, especially those that I don’t see often because they/we are so far away. And… knitting and quilting and gardening. And maybe I’ll eventually get around to that book about the old gramophone records I researched back in the 2010s. Shooting myself in the foot indeed! One might even think it a little Freudian.

Thanks for hanging in there with me… if you find me again. Message me if you do.

OH! And if you kept my newsletters, forward one back to me so maybe I can recreate some of what I have lost. I’m aware that there are some people who don’t delete anything in their emails—you know who you are :)

Mariette J. Vigeant, née Bolduc — b. June 27, 1930, d. December 12, 2012

It’s funny that my last newsletter was about my Dad. Today, it’s about my Mom. She would have turned 95 today and it wouldn’t be far fetched to imagine that, had she been in good health for the ten years prior to her death, she might have made it to this day sharp minded, deeply committed to making a better world for her family and community, and eternally curious—as she was her whole life. After all, her mother lived to be over 93, and her life was not an easy one— Marie Rose lived through two world wars, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression and the heartbreaking death of stomach cancer of her youngest daughter, Lena, at the age of 28, and, two years later, the death of her granddaughter, my sister Danielle of a fire accident, age 6. These things take a toll of the body as well as the soul.

In the year before my Dad died my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. During the following ten years, while she fought the Parkinson’s with everything she could muster, she had some TIAs, and at one point suffered a debilitating stroke. I could go on about how those last two years were for all of us but I think I’d rather celebrate her life. I’m glad, in a way, that she isn’t around to see what’s going on today.

She was a special education teacher, and a contributor to the creation of Chapter 766, the Massachusetts Public Education law that “guarantees a ‘free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment’ to all school-aged children (ages 3 to 21) regardless of disability.”1 She led a group of parents to create and incorporate Greater Marlboro Programs, a support and services organization for children with special needs and their families.2 Thanks to her hard work for the community of special needs children, my sister, Camille, was able to go to school, have a job, live in her own apartment and have a fulfilling life, one she now enjoys in Port Townsend with two other sisters.

Mariette was also a gardener, an avid sailor and nature lover, and someone unafraid to take six kids (and sometimes their friends) camping for weeks in all sorts of places from Quebec to Virginia, but mostly in Brewster on Cape Cod. Oh sure, my Dad was there too, but I’m pretty sure he spent most of his time setting up the camp and carving walking sticks with our names on them. Not all of my sisters will remember these trips because the youngest were perhaps too young to know just where we were, but I remember camping on Long Island for the 1965 World’s Fair, camping near my grandmother’s family for the Montreal 1967 Expo, and a trip to Virginia where my mother captured a wolf spider in a mayonnaise jar (with holes in the cover). We watched all the baby spiders she carried around on her belly crawl around in the jar. I don’t think I slept very well that night. I do remember hiking up Mount Monadnock with my youngest sister, Nicki, literally in tow, tethered to my Dad by a rope. I remember Nicki, plunking herself down on the ground in frustration, wanting to be set free, pouting and remonstrating… to no avail. Had she been released she would have scrambled up the mountain like a monkey all the way to the top where no one would have been able to retrieve her. I was 16 then so she would have been 4 years old. My mother must have had nerves of steel.

Mariette was a wonderful grandmother and great-grandmother. Much more indulgent than either of my grandmothers, but then those women lived in different and more difficult times.

I miss her and wish she could see our lovely cottage and garden here in Ireland. I imagine she would be trying to crew on our friend Tony’s boat that goes up and down the Blackwater. How delighted she would be with it all and how happy to know that our youngest son and his wife are making a home here close by. I close this missive with a gallery of my favorite photos of my Mom, including a few from long before I was even a glint in her eye.

Around this time last year, I thought about putting together a photobook about him—photos and images of the bits of paper that I found in the family archives I brought over to Ireland when we moved. Along with the certificates, the paperwork of the first mortgage to finance the building of our family home, the monthly budget, and other ephemera, there are letters to his mother, to my mother, little poems, lists of things to do, as well as philosophical musings. There are many photos, and in most of them he is making some kind of funny face. It was a rare photo taken when he was serious.

I’m thinking about that photobook project still. It think it’s time.

During the COVID lockdowns, projects like this were a godsend—I would spend whole days in my studio sorting, scanning, arranging family photobooks to share with my sisters and children. Powerful time travel, emotional and satisfying. That kind of time doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Every once in a while you’ll hear someone remark, “The lockdown was great… no noisy big trucks and cars… you could really hear the birds!” And, yes, the reason for the lockdown was serious and tragic. But the opportunity to have a natural quiet for months on end was a balm to the soul.

Having discovered the bliss of not being busy going everywhere and doing everything other people wanted of you, I’m wondering if there’s a way to get back to that time bubble. Is this something one can do on one’s own. Is there a name for it? I mean, “lockdown” sounds so menacing.

I believe this is something I will have to ponder. In the meantime, there’s no harm in poking around in the “archives”, doing a bit of scanning… and maybe finding some photos like these: