When the road comes up to meet you…

Papa lifts his granddaughter up to sign the Shankhill Road Peace Wall in Belfast, Ireland 2019.

It was not so long ago, the senseless war of bloody steps took this road and others to split Catholics and Protestants. I tried to imagine what it was like to grow up here as we took the black cab tour through the streets of Belfast, past the gates which still lock at 6:00pm each night for twelve hours. Bitterness between neighbors remains and a few restaurants and businesses are still segregated for Catholic or Protestant only. In 1993 when the IRA bombings happened during the continuuing Northern Ireland Troubles, I was traveling for business and remembered seeing news reports of graphic loss of innocent lives and injuries. I cannot imagine having lived through those times. Being there, listening to history, twenty-six years later brought tears to my eyes. Yet to walk and ride these streets decades later, is certainly not the same as first hand experience.

I recently heard different perspectives about life during those times from two Dubliners who grew up in Belfast in the midst of it all, during the riots of August 1969. Five days across Northern Ireland with almost two thousand families evacuated and more than a hundred homes destroyed, there were hundreds of injuries and eight killed. One woman said she was an eleven year old Catholic in 1969 and does not feel negative effects as an adult. She lived in a better part of town and as the years went by she remembers it feeling like a normal routine to pass through checkpoints and have your backpack checked. The other perspective was also from the eyes of an eleven year old girl that year and she said she shakes just thinking of Shankhill Road, an area of Belfast she has yet to return to. Her experience was in the thick of it, her father was one of the clergy trying to broker peace and was involved with a church on Shankhill. Now in her fifties, she has been to visit friends and relatives outside of Belfast but she cannot go near Shankhill as she trembles. Her experience left her terrorized she said and burned bad memories in her mind. Yet a good memory she told of sharing a room for a time with her grandmother where pictures hung over the beds, one of the Queen, another of Princess Diana. When she brought her fiance to visit family outside the neighborhood years later, they welcomed him, politely, but she knew they didn’t like her marrying a Catholic of all things!

HEAVEN

The waters above and below meet at the point of separation, where parts split smooth as clouds dissipate into vapor. The space called heaven hovers but there is no desire to leave earth just now, just yet. Blue creaks of summer exit stormy tides, as each breath soars through time without hinges, moves closer to heaven, to savor each bite on earth, to taste life at the palate of a newborn meal in the midst of latter days.

STORY

Words, like wood before it’s chopped, are raw, barkless white, like a Huskie groomed on Christmas Eve. They follow a course of winding steps, deep to shallow as they climb, building one on top of the other, they stretch as bent knees push like springs to make it up, up, up. A mechanical journey at first, with all the formulas and preset calculations, the cornering angles like a protractor keep them on the path. The compass pointing due north, lays them all out, until finely cut in time, as against the grain of tree rings, the circumferential flow of a thread like a whirling river, it’s a spine with its own mind. That’s story. And characters enter and exit as doors open and close.