I have a spiritual teacher named Nikki Walton. She releases a meditation each morning.
"Say the word I," she asked listeners. "Now say "I" without actually saying "I". Stay feeling the "I" that doesn't pronounce itself."
She says that this is the feeling of god, or the universe, or the goddess, or the creator, inside of a person. It is the radiant feeling of saying "I" when we don't.
I chanced upon the core of my being in Boston earlier in June. My material surroundings so resembled my essence that I thought to write upon the subject here. A series of miracles ensued and I was hard-pressed not to believe that a creative intelligence was masterminding the spectacle of life on earth.
The last memory I have of being part of Boston was not wanting to leave it. I loved being young Melanie there. I lived in Peabody, Massachusetts, with my mother, father, brother, and something else. The something else doesn't have a name, but I associated with a few things: The Boston Common, a certain quality of adult personalities, swan boats on a pond, Make Way For Ducklings, Dunkin Donuts, and the way I pronounced words.
It was the dawn of kindergarten when we moved to Bainbridge Island. I was nearly put into speech class when the teachers figured out that it wasn't a speech impediment I had, but a Boston area accent. The Pacific Northwest of the United States, where we'd moved, is where newscasters with regional inflections turn to seek out an accent-less way of annunciating words for public broadcast.
My way of pronouncing language went away, but something remained. I remember driving away from the house on Jennifer Lane, Peabody, Mass, watching the neighborhood recede from out the back windshield of a Ford Explorer. I saw the neighbors waving us goodbye. I felt an aching in my soul. I loved this place. The love is still with me.
Would I have transformed into such a fantastic hippie had I grown up in Massachusetts? By high school on Bainbridge Island, I favored being stoned and listening to the Grateful Dead over going to class. I would skip to hide and listen to their music alone in dark recesses. Their back catalog is imprinted in my consciousness. Maybe I was trying to manufacture something big enough to replace that old childhood longing, something to soothe the ache of early experiences of impermanence.
It was 2004 or 2007. Could have been both or either. I took the portable radio into the street at night. I set up a chair and looked at the stars, listening to the Red Sox baseball team win The World Series. I loved the Red Sox. I had fond feelings for Fenway Park. I told no one. I loved the Green Monster the way northwestern children love Sasquatch. My love for all of this was secret. It is weird to tell about it now. I held my love cards close to the chest then because I didn't want anything to come between me and these waves of sound expressing Bostonian victory.
Being an American is being suspended between a longing for what one doesn't have yet, and a longing for what one is leaving behind. That's my experience.
My family in Seattle, especially my paternal grandfather and his siblings, stressed a great sense of "being from" in tandem with our family name. Curran. We're Irish. We are from County Donegal, from a small place outside Letterkenny called Glenswilly. And that is that.
Any other ancestries in my life were obscured by this story. It was a tale told and re-told. There was a highway of green leading us back to Ireland. When I asked my father why we went to Mass each Sunday, why I was enrolled in CCD, why - I was told it was for tradition. He wanted us to grow up with that unbroken thread back to Ireland, with a structure for worshiping god.
An identity was formed. I am an Irish-American Dead Head Closeted Red Sox Fan with a Buried Boston Accent.
About a fortnight ago, I traveled to Boston from my home in New York City. Through a series of encounters and intuitive actions, I'd fallen in with a cohort of Irish Studies scholars and was invited to give a presentation at a symposium put on by Boston University and University College Dublin. The symposium was called "New Modalities of Irishness: Race, Identity and Inequality."
I settled into my lodgings and wandered about Back Bay. I met a stream of strangers who offered me questions and commentary.
"Is that a gun?" (It was a fiddle.)
"How much you pay?" (For rent in New York City)
"Are you Catholic?" (By default, I said, by design.)
and,
"God Bless You, You're a Peabody Girl" (pronounced like I used to, guhl.)
When a woman uttered these last words to me, a comfort from my earliest memories engulfed me like honey. My lodgings were, in fact, abutting Fenway Park. An elevator was Red Sox themed. The symposium was a decadence of ideas. We explored notions of an Irishness which can be switched on and off, can be signaled, can be invoked, can be deployed to achieve certain social aims.
I returned from that event with a sweet sense of belonging. It was as though my ancestors were right there with me, partying, especially my Grandpa Pete. It was as though they had gotten together on the other side and woven this sequence of events into being. For once, I'd been open enough to follow their signs and let go of my own will. Things got weirder as the night progressed.
I considered an early retirement to my chambers, but opted for a final spin around the block instead. 'Twas then I met with strange company (see, there, I just deployed a written Irishness). So many dreads on white people. So many drug rugs. It was like a - wait a minute -
A quick google confirmed my suspicions. The Grateful Dead were playing Fenway Park this night.
I stole away, down to the outskirts of the stadium. I, ticketless, perched on a picnic table within earshot of the music as it spilled over what I like to imagine was the Green Monster itself. I felt the presence of my monstah, and I relaxed. There were two young deadhead ladies before me. One was stretching herself like a cat, perched on safety orange plastic road barricade, while the other sister spun. The spinner dancers are a long running Grateful Deadian subgroup. As I watched them, I swore they carried the spirit, the very spirit I had sought while hiding in my family's house, tripping out, listening to this very song.
One More Saturday Night poured out of Fenway Park and into this little side strip of Shakedown Street. The dancing lady sung along in flying harmony to the music, quite like Donna used to do in the old concert recordings.
I've never been to a Grateful Dead show, (I know they are called The Dead and Company now, but like an old neighborhood kid calls the East Village the Lower East Side, I will die on this hill) and I likely never will. This is the band's last and final tour. I have no real means of getting to any of the remaining shows.
But. But I swear that the thing I was seeking in all those stoned high school moments listening to the recordings actually incorporated into me that Saturday Night as I watched the young ladies sing and dance and stretch. As I listened to a song that has been played over and over and over again to audiences who were hungry too, I felt a formless things land, as I sat on that picnic table, stone cold sober.
To soak up sound in the city where I became verbal. To bask in the afterglow of deadhead decades at my favorite baseball stadium - my regrets to the Seattle Kingdom. To have a day spent meditating on what remains of an ancestral Irish homeland in me while eating lobster rolls. I have been an unruly lady and I have been a calm lady. On that night I was not myself, but rather, I was myself experiencing the "I" - unspoken aloud but uttered with all fibers of my flesh.
The gods conspired to show me the core of me, all around me, unfolding like a play dedicated in memory of my deepest childhood and American longings, to be part of something, and to know that something as the water in which I swim.
I am an Irish-American Dead Head Closeted Red Sox Fan with a Buried Boston Accent
in Writing
